The author’s hand and the printer’s mind. Transformations of the written word in Early Modern Europe. 9780745656014, 0745656013

Table of contents :
Preface Part I: The Past in the Present 1. Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes 2. History: Reading Time 3. History and Social Science: A Return to Braudel Part II: What is a Book? 4. The Powers of Print 5. The Author s Hand 6. Pauses and Pitches 7. Translation Part III: Texts and Meanings 8. Memory and Writing 9. Paratext and Preliminaries 10. Publishing Cervantes 11. Publishing Shakespeare 12. The Time of the Work

Citation preview

The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind

The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind

Roger Chartier Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane

polity

Copyright © Roger Chartier 2014 The right of Roger Chartier to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2014 by Polity Press Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5601-4 ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5602-1(pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St lves plc The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Contents

Preface

vi

Part I: The Past in the Present

1

1 Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes

3

2 History: Reading Time

27

3 History and Social Science: A Return to Braudel

44

Part II: What is a Book?

57

4 The Powers of Print

59

5 The Author’s Hand

73

6 Pauses and Pitches

87

7 Translation

98

Part III: Texts and Meanings

121

8 Memory and Writing

123

9 Paratext and Preliminaries

135

10 Publishing Cervantes

150

11 Publishing Shakespeare

158

12 The Time of the Work

172

Notes

181

Index

221

Preface

“Escuchar a los muertos con los ojos” [Listen to the dead with your eyes]. Quevedo’s injunction, which provided the title for my inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, seems to me to indicate not only the poet’s respect for his former masters but also the relationship that historians cultivate with the men and women of the past whose sufferings and hopes, rational decisions and extravagant dreams, freedom and constraints they strive to understand – and to help others to understand. Only the historians of very recent times, thanks to the techniques of oral inquiry, can offer a literal hearing of the words of those whose history they write. The others – all the others – have to listen to the dead with their eyes alone and recover the old words in archives in which written trace of them has been preserved. To the despair of historians, those traces, left on papyrus or stone, parchment or paper, usually record only silences: the silences of those who never wrote; the silences of those whose words, thoughts, or acts the masters of writing thought unimportant. Only in rare documents, and in spite of the betrayals introduced by the transcription of scribes, judges, or lettered men, can historians hear the words of the dead who were moved to tell of their beliefs and their deeds, recall their actions, or recount their lives. When these are absent, all that historians can do is to take up the paradoxical and redoubtable challenge of listening to mute voices. But can our relationship with the dead who inhabit the past be reduced to reading texts that they composed or that speak of them, perhaps unintentionally? In recent years, historians have become aware that they have no monopoly on representing the past, and that its presence can be communicated by relations to history infinitely

Preface  vii more powerful than their writings. The dead haunt memory – or memories. Searching for those memories does not mean “listening to the dead with one’s eyes,” but finding them, without the mediation of the written word, in the immediacy of remembrance and the search for anamnesis, or the construction of collective memory. Historians also need to admit, whether they like it or not, that the force and the energy of fables and fictions can breathe life into dead souls. That demiurgic will may be typical of all literature, before or after the historic moment at which the word began to designate what today we call “literature,” and which supposes a connection between notions of aesthetic originality and intellectual property. Even before the eighteenth century and the consecration of the writer, the literary resurrection of the dead took on a more literal meaning when certain genres reached out to the past. This happened with the inspiration of the epic, with the narrative and descriptive detail of the historical romance, or when history’s actors were temporarily reincarnated by dramatic actors on a stage. In this fashion, works of fiction – or at least certain of them – and collective or individual memory gave a presence to the past that was often stronger than the one that history books could provide. A better understanding of these competing elements is one of the prime objectives of the present book. It contains twelve essays that I have written over the last ten years. The reader will recognize questions and debates that have mobilized historians during the first decade of the century, such as the relations between morphology and history, between microhistory and global history and between the event and long time-span processes. Once historians and the non-historians who aided them in their reflection grew less obsessed than they had been by the challenge to the status of their discipline as knowledge and acknowledged the kinship between the figures and formulas of the writing of history and those governing fictional works, they were better prepared to confront more serenely the challenge launched by the plurality of representations of the past that inhabit our age. This explains the emphasis given in this book to major works of literature that, through the centuries, have worked to fashion the ways in which those who read them (or who listened to someone reading them) thought and felt, according to Marc Bloch’s expression. Works such as Don Quixote or Shakespeare’s plays were created, performed, published, and appropriated in a time that was not our own. Replacing them within their own historical settings – their historicity – is one of the aims of the present book. To do so, it attempts to identify the basic discontinuities that transformed the circulation

viii  Preface of the written word, both literary and nonliterary. The most essential of these discontinuities may not be the most obvious one. It was, as is known, a technical invention: that of printing by Gutenberg in mid-fifteenth-century Mainz. Noting its decisive importance should not allow us to forget, however, that other “revolutions” had as much if not more importance over the long term of the history of written culture in the West. One of these was the appearance, during the early centuries of the Christian era, of a new form of book, the codex, made up of folded and assembled sheets. On several occasions over the centuries, changes in the ways in which people read have been qualified as “revolutions.” Moreover, the vigorous survival of manuscript production in the age of the printing press obliges us to reevaluate the power of the printed word and situate it somewhere between utility and disquietude. Less spectacular, but perhaps more essential for our purposes, was the emergence, during the eighteenth century but with local variation, of an order of discourse founded on the individualization of writing, the originality of the literary work, and what Paul Bénichou has called le sacre de l’écrivain (the consecration of the writer). The connection between those three notions, which was decisive for the definition of literary property, reached its apex at the end of the eighteenth century with the fetishization of the autograph manuscript and an obsession with the author’s handwriting as a guarantee of the authenticity and the unity of a work dispersed in a number of publications. That new economy of the written word broke with an older order based on quite different practices: frequent collaboration between authors, reuse of content that had been used previously, familiar commonplaces, and traditional formulas, along with continual revision and continuation of works that remained open. It was within that paradigm of the writing of fiction that Shakespeare composed his plays and Cervantes wrote Don Quixote. Pointing this out is not to forget that, for both of those authors, the canonization process that turned their works into monuments began quite early. That same process, however, was long accompanied by a strong awareness of the collective dimension of all textual production (and not only theatrical works) and a weak recognition of the writer as an author. His manuscripts did not merit conservation; his works were not his property; his life experiences were not recorded in any literary biography but only in collections of anecdotes. The situation changed when the affirmation of creative originality wove together the author’s life and his works, situated works within a biographical framework and made the writer’s sufferings and moments of happiness the matrix of his writing.

Preface  ix Some readers may find it surprising that a historian would risk venturing into literature. The text that opens this collection of essays will explain that audacity. It is based on the idea that all texts – even Hamlet or Don Quixote – have a material form, a “materiality.” Whether destined for the theatre or not, they were read aloud, recited and performed, and the voices that spoke them gave them a corporeal sonority that carried them to their hearers. That sonority is out of the reach of the historian who “listens to the dead with his eyes,” however. What comes down from the past is another “body”: a typographical one. Hamlet or Don Quixote (for which no autograph manuscripts exist) offer us the materiality of their printed inscription in books (or booklets) on the pages that made them available to readers of their day. Several of the essays that follow attempt to decipher the significations constructed by the various forms of those inscriptions. Texts are linked to several kinds of materiality. That of the book, first and foremost, which gathers together or disseminates, according to whether it includes different works by an author or distributes citations from his works in collections of commonplaces. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a book did not begin with the text that it was intended to publish: it began with a series of preliminary pieces that expressed the multiple relations implied by the power of the prince, the requirements of patronage, the laws of the market and relations between the authors and their readers. The significations attributed to works depended in part on the textual “porch” that led the reader into the text itself and that guided (but did not absolutely constrain) the reading to be made of them. The materiality of the book is inseparable from that of the text, if what we understand by that term is the ways in which the text is inscribed on the page, giving the work a fixed form but also mobility and instability. The “same” work is in fact not the same when it changes its language, its text, or its punctuation. Those major changes bring us back to the first readers of works: translators who interpreted them, bringing to bear on them their own lexical, aesthetic, and cultural repertories and those of their public; correctors, who established the text to prepare it for printing, dividing the copy they had received into sections, adding punctuation and establishing the written form of words; compositors or typographers, whose habits and preferences, constraints, and errors also contributed to the materiality of the text; without forgetting the copyists who produced fair copies of the author’s manuscripts and the censors who authorized the printing of the book. In certain special cases, the chain of interventions that shaped a text did not stop at the printed pages, but

x  Preface included readers’ additions, in their own hands, to the books they owned. In the present book, the process by which works are given their particular form is analyzed on the basis of individual examples suggested by the French translators of Spanish authors, by an English actor burdened with the heavy task of interpreting the role of the prince of Denmark and by the correctors and typographers employed by the master printers of the Spanish Golden Age. It is the very complexity of the process of publication that has inspired the title of this book, which involves both the author’s hand and the printer’s mind. This perhaps unexpected chiasmus is intended to show that although every decision made in a printing shop, even the most mechanical one, implies the use of reason and understanding, literary creation always confronts an initial materiality of the text – that of the page that awaits writing. This fact justifies the attempt to create a close connection between cultural history and textual criticism. In part, it also explains the strong and repeated presence of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain in the essays that make up this book. That connection is not due uniquely to my fondness for works of the Spanish Golden Age or to studies that I have previously dedicated to Quevedo’s Buscon, to Lope de Vega’s Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo or to certain chapters of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in particular, the visit of the hidalgo to a Barcelona printshop. It is rooted in historical realities. During its Golden Age, Spain was, as Fernand Braudel wrote, a “land laughed at, belittled, feared, and admired, all at the same time.” It was a land whose language was considered the most perfect and that had produced shining examples of the most seductive literary genres of imaginative writing: the chivalric romance, picaresque autobiography, the new comedia, as well as Don Quixote, a work that fell within no established genre. If Spain captures my attention in several chapters of this book, it is also because the printers in the printshops used metaphors that make the book a human creature and God the first printer, while writers constructed their tales using the humblest and most concrete aspects of writing and publication, novelties that had arisen in a world still dominated by the spoken word, conversation (both popular and lettered) and the legacy of memory. It is the difficult encounter between the illiterate memory of Sancho Panza and the reader’s memory library that was Don Quixote that lends force to the Sierra Morena chapters of Don Quixote, read here in light of the distinctions elaborated in Paul Ricoeur’s great book. The essays that make up this book, inhabited as they are by great shadows from the past, also hope to contribute to the questions raised

Preface  xi by contemporary mutations in written culture. Digital textuality shakes up the categories and practices that were the foundation for the order of discourses and the books in the context of which the works studied here were imagined, published, and received. The questions that it raises are many: What is a “book” when it no longer is both and inseparably text and object? What are the implications for the perception of works and the comprehension of their meaning of an ability to read individual text units radically detached from the narration or the argument of which they are a part? How are we to conceive of the electronic edition of older works such as those of Shakespeare or Cervantes, given that such techniques permit us, paradoxically, to render visible the plurality and historical instability of the texts, which we normally ignore because of the choices that a printed edition imposes on us, while at the same time these techniques provide a form of inscription and reception of the written word that is completely foreign to the form and the materiality of books as they were offered to readers in the past (and, for some time to come, in the present)? Such questions are not discussed directly in the present work. Others will do that task better than I could. They are present, however, either explicitly or implicitly, in all of the essays. This may be because the digital world is already modifying the discipline of history by proposing new forms of publication, by transforming the procedures for demonstration and techniques of proof and by permitting a new, better informed, and more critical relationship between the reader and the text. Or it may be because emphasizing the categories and the practices of the written culture that we have inherited may authorize us to situate better the mutations of the contemporary age. Between apocalyptical judgments that identify those changes as the death of writing and optimistic evaluations that note reassuring continuities, another route is both possible and necessary. It relies on history, not to offer uncertain prophecies, but to reach a better understanding of the current (and perhaps durable) coexistence of differing modalities of the written word – manuscript, print, and electronic – and, above all, to note with greater rigor how and why the digital world challenges the notions that supported the definition of the work as a work, the relationship between writing and individuality and the idea of intellectual property. For an author, even a historian-author, rereading one’s own work is always a trial. The essays assembled here have been carefully reviewed in order to correct errors, avoid repetitions, and add the necessary references to works and articles that have appeared after these essays were first published. If I rewrote them today, they would

xii  Preface probably be quite different, but they remain within the basic project that placed them in a certain trajectory of research and reflection. I have always thought, and I still do think, that the historian’s labors follow two needs. He or she should propose new interpretations of clearly defined problems, but also enter into a dialogue with fellow scholars in the neighboring disciplines of philosophy, literary criticism, and the social sciences so as to be better armed to reflect on his or her own practices and the directions in which the discipline is going. It is on that condition that history can aid in the construction of a critical knowledge of the present that is our own. Full bibliographic details of each chapter are given below: 1 “Ecouter les morts avec les yeux,” inaugural lecture for the chair, “Écrit et Cultures dans l’Europe moderne,” 11 October 2007, Collège de France, Collège de France/Fayard, 2008. 2 Unpublished and corrected version of the Postface to the new edition of Roger Chartier, Au bord de la falaise. L’histoire entre certitudes et inquiétude, Paris: Albin Michel, Bibliothèque de l’Evolution de l’Humanité, 2009. 3 Unpublished lecture, “Histoire et science social: Retour à Braudel,” given in French at Iasi, Romania, in 2002. 4 Published in French as “Les pouvoirs de l’imprimé” in Ricardo Saez (ed.), L’imprimé et ses pouvoirs dans les langues romanes, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010. 5 Unpublished lecture given as Lord Weidenfeld Visiting Professor in Comparative Literature at Oxford University, May 2010. 6 Unpublished lecture given at Cambridge as Clark Lecture in May 2009. 7 The French original text of this essay was published in Spanish as “La Europa castellana durante el tiempo del Quijote,” in Antonio Feros and Juan Gelabert (eds), España en tiempos del Quijote, Madrid: Taurus Historia, 2004, pp. 129–58. 8 Published in French as “Mémoire et oubli. Lire avec Ricoeur,” in Christian Delacroix, François Dosse and Patrick Garcia (eds), Paul Ricoeur et les sciences humaines, Paris: La Découverte, 2007, pp. 231–48. 9 The French original of this essay was published in Italian as “Paratesto e preliminari. Cervantes e Avellaneda,” in Marco Santoro and Maria Gioia Tavoni (eds), I Dintorni del testo, Rome: Edizioni dell’ Ateneo, 2005, pp. 137–48. 10 Published in French as “Les auteurs n’écrivent pas les livres, pas même les leurs. Francisco Rico, auteur du Quichotte,” Agenda de la pensée contemporaine 7, Spring 2007: 13–27.

Preface  xiii 11 Published in French as “Editer Shakespeare (1623–2004),” 2004, Ecdotica 1: 7–23. 12 Published in French as “Hamlet 1676. Le temps de l’oeuvre,” in Jacques Neefs (ed.), Le temps des oeuvres. Mémoire et préfiguration, Vincennes: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2001, pp. 143–54. R. C.

Part I The Past in the Present

1 Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes

“Listen to the dead with your eyes” [Escuchar a los muertos con los ojos].1 This line of Quevedo’s comes to mind as we inaugurate a chair devoted to the roles of the written word in European cultures between the end of the Middle Ages and the present day. For the first time in the history of the Collège de France, a chair is dedicated to the study of writing practices, not in the ancient or medieval world, but in the long time span of a modern age that may be unraveling before our eyes. A course of studies of this sort would have been impossible without the works of all those who have profoundly transformed the disciplines that form the base of this new field: the history of the book, the history of texts, and the history of written culture. It is in recalling my debt to two of those scholars, no longer with us today, that I would like to begin this lesson. There are few historians whose names are attached to the invention of a discipline. Henri-Jean Martin, who died in January 2007, is one of those few. L’Apparition du livre, the book he wrote at the urging of and with Lucien Febvre, published in 1958, is justly held to be the founding work in the history of the book, or at least a new history of the book. As Febvre wrote, Martin made texts descend “from heaven to earth” by a rigorous study of the technical and legal conditions of their publication, the combined factors of their production, and the geography of their circulation. In works that followed that book, Henri-Jean Martin never stopped enlarging the questionnaire, shifting his attention to the trades and the milieus of the book, mutations in the ways in which texts were displayed on the page, and the successive modalities of readability. I was his disciple without being his student. I would have liked to be able to tell him this evening

4  The Past in the Present how much I owe to him, and also what happy memories I have of our joint intellectual pursuits. There is another absence, another voice that we need to “listen to with our eyes” – Don McKenzie’s voice. He lived between two worlds, Aotearoa, his native New Zealand, where he was an untiring defender of the rights of the Maori people, and Oxford, where he held the chair in Textual Criticism. An expert practitioner of the erudite techniques of the “new bibliography,” he taught us to go beyond its limits by showing that the meaning of a text, whether it was canonical or ordinary, depends on the forms that make it available to be read, that is, the different characteristics of the materiality of the written word. For printed objects, this meant the format of the book, the layout of the page, how the text was divided up, whether or not images were included, typographic conventions, and punctuation. In founding the “sociology of texts” on the study of their material forms, Don McKenzie did not ignore the intellectual or aesthetic significations of works. Quite the contrary. And it is within the perspective that he opened up that I shall situate a course of study that hopes never to separate the historical comprehension of writings from a morphological description of the objects that bear them. To these two bodies of works, without which this chair would never have been conceived, I must add a third: that of Armando Petrucci, who is in Pisa and unfortunately cannot be with us today. By focusing on the practices that produce or mobilize the written word and by shaking up the classic divisions – between manuscript and print, between stone and the page, between ordinary writings and literary works – his work has transformed our comprehension of written cultures that have succeeded one another over the very long time span of western history. Petrucci’s works, which are devoted to the unequal mastery of writing and the multiple possibilities offered by the “graphic culture” of an age, are a magnificent illustration of the necessary link between a scrupulous erudition and the most inventive kind of social history. What I want to stress here is his basic teaching, which is always to associate in the same analysis the roles attributed to writing, the forms and supports of writing, and ways to read. Henri-Jean Martin, Don McKenzie, and Armando Petrucci: each one of them would have been about to take or should have taken the place that I now occupy before you. Happenstance or the hazards of the intellectual life decreed otherwise. Their works, constructed in very different fields (the history of the book, material bibliography, paleography) will be present in every moment of the teaching that I shall begin today. By following in their footsteps, I will attempt to

Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes  5 understand the place that writing has held within the production of knowledge, in the exchange of emotions and sentiments, in the relations that men and women have maintained with one another, with themselves, or with the sacred. Present-day mutations, or, the challenges of digital textuality That task is perhaps urgent today, at a time in which the practices of writing have been profoundly changed. Today we face simultaneous transformations in the supports for writing, the techniques for reproducing and disseminating works, and ways of reading. That simultaneity is unheard of in the history of humanity. The invention of printing did not modify the fundamental structure of the book, which was composed – both before and after Gutenberg – of quires, leaves, and pages brought together in one object. In the early centuries of the Christian era, the codex, this new form of the book, gained popularity over the roll, but it was not accompanied by a transformation of techniques for the reproduction of texts, still carried out by handcopying. If reading went through several revolutions, which historians note and discuss, those revolutions occurred during the long-term development of the codex. Among these were the medieval conquests of silent and visual reading, the rage to read that seized the age of the Enlightenment, or, beginning in the nineteenth century, the arrival of new readers from the popular strata of society, from among women and children both in and out of school. By breaking the earlier connection between texts and objects and between discourses and their material form, the digital revolution introduced a radical revision of the gestures and the notions that we associate with the written word. Despite the inertia of a vocabulary that attempts to tame novelty by designating to it familiar words, the fragments of texts that appear on our computer screen are not pages, but singular and ephemeral compositions. Moreover, unlike its predecessors, the roll and the codex, the electronic book no longer stands out by its evident material form from other kinds of written texts. Discontinuity exists even within apparent continuities. Reading facing a screen is a dispersed, segmented reading, attached to the fragment more than to the totality of the work. Is this not, by that token, in a direct line of descent from the practices permitted and encouraged by the codex? The codex invited the reader to leaf through texts, either using the index provided or else reading à sauts et gambades, as Montaigne put it. The codex invites us to compare passages, as does a typological reading of the Bible, or to extract and copy

6  The Past in the Present citations and examples, as demanded by a humanistic compilation of commonplaces. Still, a morphological similarity should not lead us astray. The discontinuity and fragmentation of reading do not have the same meaning when they are accompanied by a perception of the textual totality contained by the written object and when the lighted screen that enables us to read fragments of writing no longer displays the limits and the coherence of the corpus from which they are extracted. Our interrogations spring from those decisive ruptures. How can we maintain the concept of literary property, defined since the eighteenth century on the basis of an identity perpetuated in works that are recognizable whatever their form of publication, in a world in which texts are mobile, malleable, open, and in which everyone about to begin writing, as Michel Foucault would have it, can “connect, pursue the phrase, lodge himself, without causing any disturbance, in its interstices”? How are we to recognize an order of discourse, which has always been an order of books or, to put it better, an order of the written word closely associating the authority of knowledge and the form of publication, when technical possibilities permit, without controls or delays, the universal circulation of opinions and knowledge, but also of errors and falsifications? How are we to preserve the ways of reading that construct signification on the basis of the coexistence of texts in one object (a book, a journal, a newspaper), whereas the new mode of conservation and transmission of writings imposes on reading an analytical and encyclopedic logic in which every text has no other context than the one derived from its placement under a certain heading? The dream of the universal library seems today to be closer to becoming a reality than it ever was, even in the Alexandria of the Ptolemies. Digital conversion of existing collections promises the constitution of a library without walls in which all the works ever published – all the writings that make up the patrimony of humanity – may be accessible. This is a magnificent ambition and, as Borges writes, “When it was proclaimed that the Library included all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness.” The second reaction may well be a question about what is implied by this violence done to texts, given to be read in forms that are no longer those in which readers of the past encountered them. It might be objected that a shift of the sort is not without precedent, and that it was in books that were no longer the rolls of their first circulation that medieval and modern readers appropriated the ancient works – or at least those among such works that they could or wanted to copy. That may well be true. But if we want to understand the significations that

Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes  7 readers gave to the texts that they appropriated, we need to protect, conserve, and understand the written objects that bore them. The “extravagant happiness” aroused by Borges’s universal library threatens to become an impotent bitterness if it comes at the price of the relegation – or worse, the destruction – of the printed objects that, through the ages, have nourished the thoughts and dreams of those who read them. The threat is not universal, and incunabula have nothing to fear, but the same is not true for humbler and more recent publications, be they periodicals or not. These questions have already been treated incessantly in innumerable discourses that attempt to conjure away, by their very abundance, the announced disappearance of the book, the written work, and reading. The marvel of some before the unheard-of promises of navigation among the archipelagos of digital texts stands opposed to a nostalgia for a world of the written word that we have supposedly already lost. But must we really choose between enthusiasm and despair? In order to situate more accurately the grandeurs et misères of the present mutations, it may be useful to call on the unique competence of the historian. Historians have never been good prophets, but at times, recalling that the present is made of layered or entangled pasts, they have been able to contribute a more lucid diagnosis of novelties that seduce or frighten their contemporaries. It is that audacious certitude that gives me courage as I stand at the brink of this course of studies. The historian’s task Lucien Febvre was imbued with a like audacity in 1933 when, in a Europe still wounded by war, he gave the inaugural lecture for the chair of “History of Modern Civilization.” His vibrant plea for a history capable of constructing problems and hypotheses was not separated from the idea that history, as with all sciences, “is not done in an ivory tower. It is done in the midst of life, and by living beings who bathe in the century.” Seventeen years later, in 1950, Fernand Braudel, who succeeded Febvre in that chair, again insisted on the responsibilities of history in a world upset and deprived of the certitudes it had painstakingly reconstituted. For Braudel, it was by distinguishing the articulated temporalities characteristic of each society that it becomes possible to understand the permanent dialogue between the longue durée and the événement or, in his words, the phenomena situated “outside the reach and the bite of time” and the “profound breaks beyond which everything changes in the life of men.”

8  The Past in the Present If I have cited these two intimidating examples, it is probably because the propositions of those two generous giants can still guide the work of a historian. But it is also in order to measure the distance that separates us from them. Our obligation is no longer to reconstruct history, as a world twice left in ruins demanded, but rather to better understand and accept that historians today no longer have a monopoly on representations of the past. The insurrections of memory and the seductions of fiction provide strong competition. That situation is not totally new, however. The ten plays written by Shakespeare that were brought together in the 1623 Folio edition under the heading “Histories” may not have conformed to Aristotelian poetics, but they clearly fashioned a history of England stronger and more “true” than the history recounted by the chronicles from which Shakespeare took his inspiration. In 1690, Furetière’s dictionary registered, in its fashion, that same proximity between true history and likely fiction when it designed history as “the narration of things or actions as they occurred, or as they might have occurred.” In our own day, the historical novel, which has profited fully from that definition, assumes the construction of imagined pasts with an energy as powerful as the one that inhabited theatrical works in the days of Shakespeare or Lope de Vega. The demands of memory, individual or collective, personally experienced or institutionalized, have also attacked the claims of historical knowledge, judged to be cold and inert by the standard of the lively relation that makes us recognize the past in the immediacy of its recollection. As Paul Ricoeur has shown in magnificent fashion, history does not have an easy task when memory takes over the representation of the past and opposes its force and authority to the “discontents of historiography,” a phrase that Ricoeur borrows from Yosef Yerushalmi. History must respect the demands of memory, which are necessary to heal infinite wounds, but, at the same time, it must reassert the specificity of the regime of knowledge that it commands. It supposes the exercise of critical analysis, the confrontation between the reasons of history’s actors and the constraints of which they are unaware, and the production of a knowledge that permits operations controlled by a scientific community. It is by marking its difference in relation to powerful discourses, fictional or memorybased, that also make present what is no longer, that history is in a position to assume its responsibility, which is to render intelligible the accumulated heritages and the founding discontinuities that have made us what we are. It is perhaps somewhat paradoxical to evoke, at the start of a course of historical studies devoted to the written word, an inaugural

Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes  9 lecture – that of Lucien Febvre – the point of which was, precisely, to liberate history from the tyranny of the texts and its exclusive connection to writing. Have we forgotten the warnings of that master when he declared war on a poor history of textuaires (the term is his)? I dearly hope not. And, first, because my aim will be always to link the study of texts, whatever they may be, with a study of the forms that confer existence on them and a study of the appropriations that invest them with meaning. Febvre laughed at historians whose “peasants, when it comes to fertile land, seemed only to plow old cartularies.” Let us not make the same mistake by forgetting that the written word is transmitted to its readers or its hearers by objects or voices, the material and practical logic of which we need to understand. That is what this chair, the title of which I must now justify, proposes to do. Writing and cultures in early modern Europe The limits of my competence – or, rather, the immense extent of my incompetence – define the geographical space of this program of research: Europe. But treating Europe, and Western Europe in particular, does not forbid comparisons with other civilizations that also have used writing and, in some cases, have known printing. There is no institution more favorable for an approach of that sort than this one, which brings together scholars that institutions tend to keep separate. Europe, then, but modern Europe. Do I dare state that the ambiguity of the term works to my advantage? In the jargon of historians, “modern” applies to a span of three centuries or more. The “modern age” goes from the fifteenth century (should we say from the discovery of America, the fall of Constantinople, or the invention of printing?) to the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the most important of which being, evidently, the French Revolution, whether we hold it to have been an end or a beginning. My teaching will be inscribed within that first modern age, which was decisive for the evolution of western societies and the study of which has never been interrupted within these walls, beginning with the creation of the chair of “History of Modern Civilization,” occupied by Lucien Febvre, then Fernand Braudel, and continuing with the teachings of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jean Delumeau, and Daniel Roche, who was the master with whom I learned the historian’s trade just as apprentices did in the old workshops. But for us, who believe we are or would like still to be “modern,” the term is also a way of designating our own times. I find that definition equally acceptable because

10  The Past in the Present it refers back to the basic project that underlies this course of studies: to identify the strata of written culture of the past in order to understand more accurately the changes that affect it in the present. Beginning in the fifteenth century and perhaps earlier, recourse to writing played an essential role in several major evolutions within western societies. The first of these was the construction of a state based on justice and finance, which supposes the creation of bureau­ cracies, the constitution of archives, and the development of adminis­ trative and diplomatic communication. It is true that those who held power mistrusted writing and that in a variety of ways they attempted to censure it and control it. But it is also true that those same people in power increasingly supported the government of territories and peoples by means of public correspondence, written registration, epigraphic inscriptions, and printed propaganda. The new demands of judiciary procedures, the management of bodies and communities, and the administration of proof thus multiplied the use and the obligations of writing. The connection between religious experience and the uses of writing constitutes another essential phenomenon. Inspired writings have left many traces: spiritual autobiographies and examinations of conscience, visions and prophecies, mystical voyages and pilgrimage narratives, prayers and conjurations. In Catholic lands (but not exclusively there), these witnesses to faith worried the ecclesiastical authorities, who attempted to contain them or, when they seemed to contravene the limits of orthodoxy, to prevent them or destroy them. The imposition of new rules of behavior, demanded by the absolutist exercise of power and diffused by instructions for the nobility or treatises of civility formulated by pedagogues or moralists, also depended on writing. A profound transformation of the structure of personality, which Norbert Elias designates as a long civilizing process, made it obligatory to control affect and master impulses, to distance the body, and to raise the level of modesty, changing precepts into behaviors, norms into habitus, and writings into practices. Finally, during the eighteenth century, correspondence, reading, and lettered conversation brought on the emergence of a public sphere that was first aesthetic, then political, and in which all authorities – the learned, the clerics, or the princes – were held up for discussion and subjected to critical examination. In What Is Enlightenment?, Kant based on the confrontation of reasoned opinions and propositions for reform that arise from the circulation of the written word the project and the promise of an enlightened society in which each individual, without distinction of estate or condition, could be in turn reader and author, scholar and critic.

Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes  11 These changes, which I have sketched only in broad lines, did not occur at the same pace throughout Europe and did not involve in equal measure the court and the city, the lettered and the popular classes, or, as would have been said in the Spanish Golden Age, the discreto and the vulgo. This may account for the dangerous imprudence that made me use, in the title of this chair, the term “cultures” (in the plural) to designate the social fragmentation by which, in quite different ways and quite unevenly, the uses of writing and the capacity to master writing skills penetrated. From among the proliferating definitions of the word “culture,” I have chosen one provisory meaning – the one that articulates symbolic productions and aesthetic experiences, removed from the urgencies of daily life, with the languages, the rituals, and the conducts, thanks to which a community lives and reflects its relationship to the world, to others, and to itself. What is a book? Circumscribed in this manner, the course of studies and research offered will be organized on the basis of a series of questions bequeathed to us by prominent predecessors. Let us begin with the simplest of them: “What is a book?” In 1796, Kant posed this question in the “Doctrine of Law,” a section of his Metaphysics of Morals. There he establishes a basic distinction between the book as opus mechanicum, as a material object that belongs to the person who acquires it, and the book as a discourse addressed to a public, which remains the property of its author and can only be put into circulation by those so designated by the author. This statement about the dual material and discursive nature of the book, mobilized to denounce pirated editions in the Germany of his day, provides a solid base for several lines of inquiry. Genealogical and retrospective inquiries will focus on the long history of metaphors for the book – not so much those that speak of the human body, nature, or destiny as a book, where Curtius said almost everything there was to say, as those that present the book as a human creature, endowed with a soul and a body. In Golden Age Spain, the metaphor was used for quite different ends: to reflect the two figures of God as printer, who put his image on the printing press so that “the copy will conform to the form that it should have” and who “wanted to be pleased by the many copies of his mysterious original,” as the lawyer Melchor de Cabrera wrote in 1675; and the figure of the printer as demiurge, who gives an appropriate corporeal form to the soul of his creature. Thus Alonso Victor de Paredes, who

12  The Past in the Present was well acquainted with the trade because he was a printer in Madrid, declared around 1680, in the first treatise about printing composed in a vernacular language: “A perfectly achieved book consists in a good doctrine, presented by the printer and the corrector in the arrangement most proper to it, is what I hold to be the soul of the book; and it is a fine impression under the press, clean and done with care, that makes me compare it to a graceful and elegant body.” Other investigations founded on Kant’s distinction will follow the history of the paradoxical concept of literary property, a notion formulated in a variety of ways during the eighteenth century. It was only when written works were detached from all particular materiality that literary compositions could be considered to be property goods. This led to the oxymoron that designates the text as an “immaterial thing.” It also led to a basic separation between the essential identity of the work and the indefinite plurality of its states, or, to use the vocabulary of material bibliography, between “substantives” and “accidentals”; between the ideal and transcendent text and the multiple forms of its publication. It also led to historical hesitations (which take us up to the present day) concerning the intellectual justifications and the criteria of definition of literary property, which supposes that a work can be recognized as always identical to itself, irrespective of the mode of its publication and transmission. It is that basis of the writers’ imprescriptible but transmissible ownership of their texts that Blackstone situated within the singularity of language and style, Diderot situated in the sentiments of the heart, and Fichte in the always unique way in which an author links ideas. What is an author? In all cases, an original and indestructible relationship is supposed to exist between a work and its author. A connection of the sort is neither universal nor unmediated, however, because if all texts have indeed been written or pronounced by someone, they are not all assigned to one proper name. This notion underlies a question that Foucault posed in 1969 and took up again in The Order of Discourse, which is “What is an author?” His response, which considers the author to be one of the devices that aim at controlling the disturbing proliferation of discourses, does not, in my opinion, exhaust the heuristic force of the question. It obliges us to resist the temptation to hold as universal, implicitly and inappropriately, categories whose formulation or use have varied enormously through history. Two lines of research can show this.

Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes  13 The first will be devoted to collaborative writing (in particular in the case of theatrical works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), and will contrast the frequency of that practice with the logic of print publication, which prefers anonymity or one sole author’s name, and with the literary and social logic that brings together in one volume the texts of a given writer, sometimes accompanied by biographical notes. This is what happened in the case of Shakespeare in the Rowe edition of 1709 or the London edition in Castilian of Cervantes by Mayans y Síscar of Don Quixote, published by Tonson in 1738. The construction of an author on the basis of gathering his works together or placing them within one binding to make a volume or a corpus stands opposed to the process of disseminating works under the form of quotations or extracts. There are many examples that illustrate that dual modality of the circulation of texts, beginning with Shakespeare. If the 1623 Folio inaugurated the canonization of the playwright, as early as 1600 extracts from The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis and from five of his plays appeared in commonplace books wholly composed of the works of authors who had written and were still writing in English rather than in Latin. In the first of these, the Bel-vedere, or, The Garden of the Muses, extracts are given without being attributed to one of the writers listed at the head of the work; in the second, titled England’s Parnassus, extracts are followed by their authors’ names. This one example demonstrates the contradictions or hesitations of a genealogy of the “author function,” as Foucault called it, as well as suggesting that the inquiry be pursued, recognizing other forms of the fragmentation of texts in the age of complete works from the esprits of the eighteenth century, who distilled texts as if they were perfumes, to the morceaux choisis that fill schoolbooks. The second line of research will focus on the conflicts concerning the name of the author and the paternity of texts at a time, before the establishment of literary property, in which stories belonged to everyone, the flourishing genre of commonplace books circulated examples ready for reuse, and plagiarism was not juridically considered a crime – unlike pirating editions, which was a crime and was defined as a violation of a bookseller’s privilege or “right in copy.” How, then, are we to understand the polemics about apocryphal continuations (I am thinking of that of Don Quixote by the unscrupulous Fernández de Avellaneda), or the complaints about usurpations of the identity of famous authors with the aim of selling works written by other hands (such as Lope de Vega’s complaint when his name was used by publishers of comedias that were not his and that he judged to be detestable), or the condemnations for stealing texts,

14  The Past in the Present theatrical works, or sermons committed to memory or, in England at least, noted down by using one or another method of stenography that had been in circulation since the late sixteenth century? Answers to such questions obviously involve articulating the principles, which differed from one historical period to another, governing the order of discourse and the equally diverse regulations and conventions that governed the order of books or, more generally, the ways in which writings were published. By doing so, we can trace the limits between what was acceptable and what was not within a historical situation in which, at first, ownership of works was not held by their author and in which originality was not the first criterion commanding their composition or their appreciation. Written culture and literature Reflecting on ways to categorize texts or on the dual nature of the book also suggests a third question that the historian raises with a degree of apprehension: that of the relations between the history of the written word and literature. Still, there is no long-term history of written cultures that can avoid the strong ties of dependency between pragmatic and practical texts of no particular quality and texts inhabited by the strange power of inspiring dreams, eliciting thoughts, and awakening desires. Must historians retreat and remain on the terrain that is most familiar to them? They have long thought so, chastened by severe calls to order addressed to a few imprudent members of their tribe. My lectures and research, however, will be animated by a similar imprudence. There are at least two reasons for this. The first springs from the impossibility of applying retrospectively the categories that, since the eighteenth century at least, have been associated with the term “literature,” which had a completely different meaning before that time. To understand works written in accordance with older definitions rather than on the basis of contemporary distinctions, to establish unexpected morphological relationships (for example, as Armando Petrucci has done between notarial records and poetic manuscripts of Trecento authors), to connect scholarly discourses or the discourse of fiction to the techniques of reading and writing that made each of these possible – these requirements all warn us against the first capital sin for a historian, which is to forget differences through time. There is a second reason for my temerity. I can blame Borges for it, since he wrote in a prologue to Macbeth: “ ‘Art happens,’ Whistler

Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes  15 declared, but the idea that we will never be done with deciphering the aesthetic mystery does not prohibit an examination of the facts that made it possible” [los hechos que le hicieron possible]. If Borges is right, each one of us can and should take part in the examination of the “facts” that give certain texts, but not all texts, a perpetual force of enchantment. Borges’s own fictions – in particular El espejo y la mascara – accompanied the definition of the present course of studies in all of its stages. As if he were creating a model both implacable and inhabited by grace, in this fiction Borges varies all of the elements that govern the writing and reception of a given text. Three times the poet Ollan returns before his conquering king to present him with an ode of praise. And three times the nature of his audience changes (the people, the learned, the sovereign alone), as does the mode of publication of the poem (read aloud, recited, murmured), the aesthetic of composition (imitation, invention, inspiration), and the relationship established between words and things, between the poet’s verse and the king’s mighty deeds, successively inscribed within the regimes of representation, ekphrasis, and the sacred. With the third poem, which consists of only one line, murmured and mysterious, the poet and his king know beauty. They have to expiate that favor forbidden to men. The poet had received a mirror in payment for his first ode, which reflected the entire literature of Ireland; then a mask for the second, which had the force of theatrical illusion. With the dagger that is the final gift from his king, he kills himself. As for the sovereign, he condemns himself to wander through the lands that had been his kingdom. Reversing the usual roles, Borges is the blind man who shows us in the poetic fulguration of the fable that the magic qualities of fiction always depend on the norms and practices of writing that inhabit them, take them over, and transmit them. It is perhaps this thought that explains the increasingly important place that literature in Castilian – either the literature of the Golden Age or, at times, that of our own day – has occupied in my work. The accidents of voyages and teaching obligations, as well as the pull of encounters and friendships have had a part in this, and a large part. There is more, however. As Erich Auerbach noted with his usual acuity, the works of the Spanish Golden Age are marked by “a constant effort of poetization and sublimation of the real” even stronger than among the Elizabethans, their contemporaries. That aesthetic “which includes the representation of daily life but does not make it an aim and goes beyond it,” has a particular effect that can be felt in very many works, which is to transform into the very matter of fiction the objects and practices of writing. The realities of writing or

16  The Past in the Present publication, the modalities of reading or listening are thus transfigured for dramatic, narrative, or poetic ends. An example. When we enter the Sierra Morena with Don Quixote, we encounter an object that the history of written culture has forgotten, the librillo de memoria, which the seventeenth-century French translation renders as tablettes. One could write on such a librillo de memoria without pen and ink, and the writing on their pages, which were covered with a thin varnished coating, could easily be wiped away and the pages used again. This is the real nature of the object abandoned by Cardenio, the young Andalusian noble who has also retreated to the same mountain solitudes, and on the pages of which Don Quixote, for lack of paper, writes a letter to Dulcinea and another letter in the form of a bill of exchange for Sancho Panza. But, one might ask, is it so important to identify the material nature of this modest object and to point out that it was not an ordinary notebook, a simple travel journal, or a diary, as recent translations have proposed? Isn’t this just antiquarian curiosity and an insignificant detail for a reader who wishes to access the “aesthetic mystery” of the work? Perhaps not. By permitting writing and erasure of that writing, the trace and its disappearance, Cardenio’s librillo is like a material metaphor for the multiple variations on the theme of memory and forgetfulness that enter obsessively into the Sierra Morena chapters. Sancho, who claims to forget even his name and cannot read or write, is nonetheless a creature of memory. Sancho the memorioso speaks only in maxims and proverbs. Don Quixote has the memory of the knights of literature whom he imitates in everything, and he constantly delves into that bookish memory to give meaning to the misadventures that overwhelm him. Standing between a memory without a book and books that are a memory, Cardenio’s librillo de memoria is a contradictory object or, as the definition in the Castilian dictionary published by the Real Academia in the early eighteenth century states, “One notes all that one does not want to confide to the fragility of the memory, and that one erases afterward so that their leaves can be used again.” On the pages of these “writing tables,” contrary to the adage, verba manent and scripta volant. Just as forgetfulness is the condition of memory, erasure is the condition of writing. Cardenio’s librillo thus stands for the deplorable or necessary fragility of all writing. In Don Quixote, the written word is always awaiting eternity, but it is never protected against loss and forgetfulness. Poems written in sand or on the trunks of trees disappear, the pages of the “writing tables” are erased, and manuscripts stop

Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes  17 short, as does the one that recounts the sallies of the errant knight, which would have been left unfinished were it not for an Arab historian and his Moorish translator. A return to Cervantes’s text suggests that, at times, the most material history of the written word offers an entry into the most canonical, most frequently commented upon works to note overlooked reasons for their magic. It is also to indicate that in my lectures, and without any pretension on my part to the dignity of a Hispanist, illustrated in the Collège de France by great examples, I hope to render audible the voices of writers who have written in the language about which the grammarian Antonio de Nebrija said in 1492 that it was the less imperfect because in it there was no gap between what is written and what is pronounced. Production of the text, instability of meaning, authority of the written word Like others and better than others, the Spanish authors of the Golden Age were aware of the processes that are the object of any history of written culture. Three of these are essential. The first is created by the plurality of the operations used in the publication of texts. Authors do not write books, not even their own books. Books, be they manuscript or printed, are always the result of multiple operations that suppose a broad variety of decisions, techniques, and skills. For example, in the case of books printed in the age of the “typographic ancien régime” between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, this process involved the production of a “fair copy” of the author’s manuscript by a professional scribe; the examination of that copy by the censors; the choices made by the bookseller/publisher as to the paper to be used, the format chosen, and the print run; the organization of the work of composition and printing in the printshop; the preparation of the copy by a copy-editor, then the composition of the text by the compositors; the reading of the proofs by the corrector; and, finally, the printing of copies that, in the era of the manual printing press, permitted new corrections during the printing process. What was happening here was thus not only the production of a book, but the production of the text itself in its material and graphic forms. It is that reality that Don Quixote encounters when he visits a printshop in Barcelona and sees “drawing off the sheets in one place, correcting the proofs in another, setting up the types in this, revising in that – in short, all the processes [la máquina] that are to be seen

18  The Past in the Present in a large printing house.” In the seventeenth century, treatises and memoirs devoted to the typographic art insisted on this division of tasks in which authors did not play the leading role. In 1619, Gonzalo de Ayala, who was himself a print corrector, stated that the corrector “must know grammar, spelling, etymologies, punctuation, and the disposition of accents.” In 1675, Melchor de Cabrera, a lawyer whom we have already met, stressed that the compositor must know how to “place question marks and exclamation marks and parentheses, because often the intention of the writers is made unclear if these elements, necessary and important for the intelligibility and the comprehension of what is written or printed are missing, since if one or the other is lacking, the meaning is changed, inverted, and transformed.” A few years later, Alonso Víctor de Parades stated that the corrector must “understand the intention of the Author in what he sends to the printing house, not only in order to introduce adequate punctuation, but also to see if the author has not committed negligences, so as to advise him of them.” The form and the layout of the printed text thus did not depend on the author, who delegated decisions about punctuation, accents, and spelling to those who prepared the copy or composed the pages. The basic historicity of a text came to it from negotiations between the order of discourse that governed its writing, its genre, and its status and the material conditions of its publication. This was true to the point that the role of the men in the printshop often did not stop there. They were also charged with casting off the copy so that books, or at least certain books, could be composed, not according to the order of the text (which would keep the composed characters in place too long and leave the workers with nothing to do), but by formes – that is, by setting type for all the pages that were to be assembled within the same wooden frame, or forme, in order to be printed on the same side of a sheet. For example, for a book published in quarto in which each quire was made up of two print sheets (as was the case for Don Quixote in 1605), one “forme” contained pages 1, 4, 13, and 16. Printing one side of a sheet could thus begin even while all the pages of the same quire had not yet been set in type. This required previous casting off of the copy-text and an accurate division of the text on the future printed pages, which was not an easy task, especially since, as Alonso Victor de Paredes so nicely put it, “no son Angeles los que cuentan” [those who do the casting off are not angels]. If the text was divided wrongly, the composition of the final page of the quire would demand adjustments that might go so far as to include, as our printer remarks scornfully, “the use of ugly procedures, which are not permitted,” by which he

Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes  19 meant the addition or deletion of words or phrases that owed nothing to the author’s desires, but everything to the compositors’ difficulty or the correctors’ decisions. As Francisco Rico has brilliantly demonstrated on the basis of some one hundred printers’ copies, examination of additions or cuts made on their pages offer spectacular examples of the textual alterations involved in the technique of composition by “formes.” Once prepared in this manner, the copy, called the original in Castillian (as if the autograph manuscript was not) was then transformed or distorted by other operations in the printshop. Compositors habitually introduced a number of errors: inverted letters or syllables, words left out, lines omitted. More than that, the same copy-text, read by different correctors or compositors, might bear noticeable variations on the printed pages in the use of pronouns, grammatical decisions, or spelling. Decidedly, authors did not write their books, even if some of them did intervene in some editions of their works and were fully aware of the effects of the material forms of their texts. Is the situation different now that books are usually printed on the basis of a text redacted and corrected by their authors on the screen of their computer? Perhaps, but that does not mean that the decisions, interventions, and mediations that distinguish publication from simple communication have disappeared in electronic “desktop publishing.” If this was the situation, who was the master of meaning? Was it the reader, “that someone who holds together in one field all the traces that constitute the written work,” as Roland Barthes puts it? In fact, mobility of meaning is the second instability that bothered or inspired the authors who accompany our investigations. In the prologue to the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Mélibea, better known under the title La Celestina, Fernando de Rojas assigns differing interpretations of the work to diversity in the ages and humors of his listeners: Some make it into a tale for travel. Others pick out witticisms and known proverbs and, taking care to praise them well, neglect what would apply to them and would be most useful to them. But those for whom all is true pleasure reject the repeatable anecdote, retain the pith of it for their profit, laugh at the jokes, and keep in their memory the pronouncements and maxims of the philosophers in order to apply them, at the right time, to their acts and plans. Thus, should ten persons in whom there are as many different humors as always is the case happen to get together to hear this comedy, can one deny that there are motifs for discussions on matters that can be understood in so many ways?

20  The Past in the Present Almost five centuries later, Borges attributes variations in the meaning of literary works to changes in ways of reading in much the same fashion: “Literature is something inexhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is inexhaustible. The book is not a closed entity: it is a relation; it is a center of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, earlier or later than it, less by the text than by the way in which it is read.” With such authorities, there is hardly any need to pursue justification of the reasons behind the widely shared project of a history of reading, or the heuristic validity of the notion of appropriation, which refers both to the intellectual and aesthetic categories of the different publics and to the gestures, habits, and conventions that regulate their relations to the written word. The third tension that runs through the history of written culture lies between the authorities, who intend to impose their control or their monopoly over the written word, and all those men, but even more women, for whom knowing how to read and write was the promise of a surer control over their destiny. Every day, for the worse and to our shame, the cruelty of our own societies toward those who are excluded from writing and toward those whom worldly misery and the brutality of the laws have left undocumented recalls the ethical and political importance of access to writing. Which is also to say, following the scholarly and critical example given by Armando Petrucci and Don McKenzie, that to study as a historian the confrontations between the power over writing established by the powerful and the power that its acquisition confers on the weaker is to oppose to the violence exerted by writing its ability to found, as Vico stated in 1725, “the faculty of the peoples to control the interpretation given by the chiefs to the law.” Whether in print or in manuscript form, the written word has long been invested with a power that is both feared and desired. The basis of that ambivalence can be read in the text of the Bible, with the dual mention of the eaten book that appears in Ezekiel 3: 3: “Son of man, [God] then said to me, feed your belly and fill your stomach with this scroll I am giving to you. I ate it, and it was as sweet as honey in my mouth.” This is echoed in Revelation 10: 10: “I took the little scroll from the angel’s hand and ate it. In my mouth it tasted as sweet as honey, but when I swallowed it my stomach turned sour.” The Book given by God is bitter, as is knowledge of sin, and sweet, as is the promise of redemption. The Bible, which contains the Book of Revelation, is itself a powerful book, one that protects and conjures, protects from ill, turns away evil spells. Throughout Christianity, it was the object of propitiatory and protective uses that did not neces-

Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes  21 sarily suppose the reading of its text, but demanded its material presence close to the body. Also throughout Christianity, the book of magic was invested with a similar charge of sacrality that gives knowledge and power to the person reading it, but that, by the same token, subjugates him. This was expressed in two ways: first, in the language of diabolical possession; then in the language of madness brought on by excessive reading. The danger of the book of magic was soon extended to all books and reading of all sorts, to the extent that reading absorbs the reader, distances him from others, and closes him within a chimerical world. The only defense for anyone wishing to remain master of the power of books without succumbing to their force is to make them his own by copying them. The written word was thus the instrument of redoubtable and feared powers. Caliban knows this well, and he thinks that Prospero’s power will be destroyed if his books are seized and burned: “Burn but his books!” But Prospero’s books are in fact only one book, the book that allows him to subject Nature and fellow creatures to his will. This demiurgic power is a terrible threat for the person exercising it, and copying is not always enough to conjure away the danger. The book must disappear, drowned at the bottom of the sea: “And deeper than did ever plummet sound/I’ll drown my book” (The Tempest, V, 1, ll. 55–6). Three centuries later, according to Borges’s imagination, it was in other depths, those of library warehouses, that had to be buried a book that, although made of sand, was nonetheless disquieting. That disquietude was accompanied, from the fifteenth century on, by the many condemnations that provided a counterpoint to celebrations of Gutenberg’s invention by stigmatizing compositors’ mistakes, correctors’ ignorance, or the dishonesty of booksellers or printers, but, even more, the profound corruption of texts by readers incapable of understanding them. In Quevedo’s El sueño del inferno, booksellers are sent to eternal damnation for having put in the hands of ignorant readers books not destined for them: “We booksellers all damn ourselves for the worthless books of others and because we sell at a low price Latin books translated into the vernacular, thanks to which dolts claim a knowledge that at one time was valuable only for the learned – with the result that today the lackey indulges in Latinizing and Horace in Castilian lies about in stables.” Raising questions regarding the authority attributed or denied to writing and about struggles over the confiscation or divulgation of its powers is perhaps not without pertinence for an understanding of the present day. The continual flow of digital textuality on the computer screen,

22  The Past in the Present in fact, renders less immediately perceptible than in the hierarchical order of the world of printed texts the unequal credibility of discourses, thus exposing less aware readers to falsifications. The credit accorded to the written word, for better or worse, and its conquests in all the domains of social experience cannot be separated from the other side of that coin, a durable nostalgia for a lost orality. Noting expressions of that nostalgia is another of the tasks of a history of written culture over the long term. The themes involved in this task are many: among others, there is the irreducible difference between the vivacity of oral exchange and the sluggishness of its written transcription. This was what induced Molière to state, regarding the various editions of his plays: “I do not advise reading this except to persons who have eyes to discover in reading all the interplay of the theater.” Another theme is the close relationship between the spoken word and pronunciation. After printers had established the unequal duration of pauses indicated by the point à queue ou virgule (comma); comma (colon); or point rond (period) in Étienne Dolet’s La punctuation de la langue française, published in 1540, that desire for orality led to a search for a way to mark a written text to show differences of intensity so as to tell the reader – for his own benefit or for that of others – to raise his voice or detach certain words. The custom of borrowing exclamation points or question marks and the use of capital letters at the start of a word were techniques that helped the reader to “accommodate” his voice, as Ronsard wrote. Grasping how mute pages were able to capture and retain something of living speech is something that this course of studies hopes to accomplish by comparing projects for the reform of spelling (of which there were many in seventeenth-century Europe), the practices of compositors and the correctors, and, in certain cases, the plays with punctuation marks demanded by the authors themselves. Principles of analysis The authority of the written word (be it affirmed or contested), mobility of meaning, the collective production of texts: these provide the background on which I would like to inscribe the more specialized motifs that will be the topics of my lectures. They will employ several principles of analysis. The first situates the construction of the meaning of texts between transgressed constraints and curbed liberties. The material forms of the written word or the cultural competences of readers will always mark the limits of comprehension. But

Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes  23 appropriation is always creative, the production of a difference, the proposition of a meaning that may be unexpected. Removed from all the perspectives, long dominant, that tied the meaning of texts uniquely to the automatic and impersonal deployment of language, an approach of the sort aims at recognizing the articulation between a difference – the difference by which all societies, in varying ways, have defined a special domain of textual productions, collective experiences, or aesthetic pleasures – and dependencies – those that inscribe literary or intellectual creations within the discourses and the practices of the social world that made them possible and intelligible. The novel connections among disciplines long foreign to one another (textual criticism, history of the book, cultural sociology) thus have a basic goal: to understand how the particular and inventive appropriations of readers, auditors, or spectators depend on a combination of the effects of meanings aimed at by the texts, uses, significations imposed by the forms of their publication, and the competences and expectations that govern the relation of each interpretive community with written culture. A second and methodological principle of analysis necessary for a task that is fundamentally (but not exclusively) a study of texts returns us to the concept of representation in the dual dimension recognized by Louis Marin: a “ ‘transitive’ dimension or transparency of the statement [énoncé] [in which] every representation represents something; and a ‘reflexive’ dimension or enunciative opacity [in which] all representation presents itself representing something.” As the years have passed and works have followed one another, the notion of representation has almost come to designate, in itself, the approach to cultural history that underlies this program of studies. This remark is pertinent, but it must not lead to misunderstandings. As I understand this notion, it is not detached from either reality or the social. It helps historians to shake off their “very meager idea of the real,” as Foucault wrote, by emphasizing the force of representations, be they interiorized or objectivized. These representations are not simply accurate or misleading images of a reality that is supposed to be exterior to them. They possess an energy of their own that persuades us that the world, or the past, is indeed what they say it is. Produced in all their difference by the fractures that run through societies, representations can, in turn, produce or reproduce other fractures. To pursue a history of written culture by giving it as a keystone the history of representations is thus to link the power of writings that make them available for reading – or hearing– with the socially differentiated mental categories that they impose and that are the matrices for classifications and judgments.

24  The Past in the Present A third principle of analysis consists in placing single works or the bodies of texts that are the object of study at the point of intersection of the two axes that organize all investigation of cultural history or cultural sociology. One is a synchronic axis that allows us to situate every written text within its time or its field and that places it in relation to other works contemporary to it that belong to different forms of experience. The other is a diachronic axis that inscribes the work within the past of the genre or the discipline. In the more exact sciences, the presence of the past usually refers to brief, on occasion very brief, time spans. The same is not true of literature or the humanities, for which the most ancient pasts are always, in some fashion, still-living presents from which new creations take inspiration or detach themselves. What contemporary novelist does not know Don Quixote? And what historian could launch a course within these walls without citing at least once the great shadow of Michelet? Neither Febvre nor Braudel failed to do so. Nor Daniel Roche. And I in turn have just done so. Pierre Bourdieu saw in that contemporaneity of successive pasts one of the innate characteristics of the fields of cultural production and consumption: “The entire history of the field is immanent in the functioning of the field, and in order to be able to respond to its objective demands, as a producer but also as a consumer, one must have a practical or theoretical mastery of that history.” That possession or its absence distinguishes the learned from the unlearned, and it contains the diverse relations that every new work maintains with the past: academic imitation, kitsch restoration, the return to the ancients, satirical irony, and aesthetic rupture. When Cervantes picked books of knightly chivalry as the targets of his parodies, but also pastoral romances (as when Don Quixote becomes the shepherd Quijotiz) and picaresque autobiographies (with the allusions to the life story redacted by the galley slave Ginés de Pasamonte), he installed within the present of his writing three genres with very different time-schemes, in contrast to which he invents a new way of writing fiction, conceiving it, as Francisco Rico writes, “not in the artificial style of literature, but in the domestic prose of life.” In this manner he – the ingenio lego, the ignorant genius – shows that the learned are not the only ones to make good use of the history of literary genres and forms. Excess and loss A contradictory fear inhabited modern Europe and still torments us. On the one hand, there is fright at the uncontrolled proliferation of

Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes  25 writings, the heaps of useless books, the disorder of discourse. On the other hand, there is fear of loss, of lack, and of forgetfulness. I plan to devote my first lectures here to that second concern. Inspired by a project somewhat in the style of Borges, they will focus on a work that has disappeared and for which we have neither the manuscript nor a printed edition. It was performed twice at the court of England in 1612 or 1613. Payment orders to the company that performed the play, the King’s Men, indicate the title of the work, Cardenio, and nothing more. Forty years later, in 1653, Humphrey Moseley, a London bookseller intent on supplying readers with the dramatic works that it had been forbidden to perform during the revolutionary times of the Civil War, when the theaters were closed, registered his rights over the work, indicating to the secretary of the Stationers’ Company, the booksellers’ and printers’ guild, the names of the two authors of the work: “The History of Cardenio, By Mr Fletcher. & Shakespeare.” The play was never printed and in the eighteenth century, like a ghost, it began to haunt the passions and imaginations of Shakespeare editors and scholars. Two payment orders, one entry in a bookseller’s register, a play that has disappeared. These are a pretty meager beginning. Still, it can permit us to formulate some of the most basic questions in a history of the written word by focusing on the mobility of works from one language to another, one genre to another, and one place to another. It was, in fact, just one year before the performances of Cardenio that the English translation of Don Quixote was printed, translated by Thomas Shelton, a Catholic, and published, in 1612, by Edward Blount, who also published John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. What is more, Fletcher and Shakespeare were neither the first nor the last to transform Cervantes’s tale into a play. In Spain, Guillén de Castro had preceded them with his comedia, Don Quijote de la Mancha; in Paris, Pichou, the author of Les Folies de Cardenio, followed their example, as did Guérin de Bouscal, who produced three plays inspired by Don Quixote. A second line of inquiry concerns the tension between the perpetuation of traditional modes of literary composition and the emergence, centered on a few authors – as is the case with Cervantes and Shakespeare, united by Cardenio – of the figure of the writer who is singular for his genius and unique in his creation. Finally, the search for Cardenio, lost somewhere between the Sierra Morena and the London theaters, is also a history of textual appropriations, of the ways in which the same texts have been read and mobilized in different cultural and social contexts (and of course by that very fact those texts ceased to be the same). This was the case with Don

26  The Past in the Present Quixote, whose protagonists appeared in aristocratic or carnival festivities by the early seventeenth century, both in Spain and in the Spanish colonies, and with Shakespeare, treated so differently in England of the Restoration and in the eighteenth century by respectful publishers and less respectful playwrights who, incidentally, might be the same persons. “Cardenio scams were the three-card trick of the literary world; the bread and butter for literary lowlife,” declares one of the characters in the contemporary novel by Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book. I hope that I will be pardoned for giving it a new setting in this institution habituated to more severe and nobler studies. “Listen to the dead with your eyes.” Several shadows have passed through my words, recalling by their presence our sadness at their absence. Without them, and others who have written nothing, I would not be standing here this evening. But now that the time has come to conclude, I recall Pierre Bourdieu’s warnings about the illusion that makes us speak in the singular of shared roads traveled. The “I” that I have imprudently used at times today, against my habit, should be understood as a “we” – the we of all the men and women, colleagues and students, with whom, over the years, I have shared courses and research projects at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, at the University of Pennsylvania, or in the many institutions of our Republic of Letters. It is with them, and with you, who do me the honor of welcoming me here, that I would like to turn to the pursuit of a task that intends to use the longue durée of the history of written culture to support the critical lucidity demanded by our uncertainties and our concerns.

2 History: Reading Time

In proposing this analysis of the challenges facing history today, I would like to pursue a line of thought begun in a book published in 1998 that attempted to respond to the question of a supposed “crisis of history” that obsessed historians at that time.1 History between narrative and knowledge Recalling the two questions posed in that text may enable us to measure more accurately the novelty of today’s questions. The first was directly connected to an emphasis on the rhetorical and narrative dimensions of history as they were formulated, with great acuity, in three founding works published between 1971 and 1975: Paul Veyne’s Comment on écrit l’histoire (1971); Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973); and Michel de Certeau’s L’Écriture de l’histoire (1975). When Veyne asserted that history “remains fundamentally an account, and what is called explanation is nothing but the way in which the narrative is arranged in a comprehensible plot,”2 and White equated “the deep structural forms of the historical imagination” with the “four basic tropes for the analysis of poetic, or figurative, language: Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecodoche, and Irony,”3 while Certeau stated that “now historical discourse claims to provide a true content (which pertains to verifiability) but in the form of a narration,”4 they forced historians to abandon their certainty that there was no gap between the past, as it really was, and the historical explanation that interpreted it.

28  The Past in the Present This challenge created a profound unease, given that history had long ignored the fact that it belongs to the category of narration and had erased the signs of its composition, claiming its qualification as knowledge. Whether history was taken as a collection of examples, in the ancient manner, or was presented as knowledge about itself, in the German historicist tradition, or proclaimed itself to be “scientific,” all it could do was refuse to think of itself as a narration and as writing. Narration had no status of its own, given that it was either subject to the dispositions and the figures of the art of rhetoric, considered as the place in which the meaning of events was deployed, or was considered to be a major obstacle to genuine knowledge.5 The challenge to epistemology of coincidence and an awareness of the gap between the past and its representation, on the one hand, and narrative constructions that aspire to take the place of that past, on the other – between what was one day and what is no more – allowed reflection on history to develop as a writing process constructed on the basis of rhetorical figures and narrative structures that it shared with fiction. This led to the major question underlying the diagnostics of a possible “crisis of history” in the 1980s and 1990s. If history as a discipline of knowledge shares its formulas with imaginative writing, is it still possible to assign to it a specific regime of knowledge? Is the “truth” that history produces different from the one produced by myth and literature? We know Hayden White’s response to this question, which he asserted on many occasions. For White, given that historical discourse is a form of “fiction-making operation,”6 the knowledge that it proposes is of the same order as the knowledge that myths and fictions give of the world or of the past. It is against that dissolution of the unique status of historical knowledge that some have forcefully reaffirmed the discipline of history’s capacity for critical knowledge, backed by techniques and operations specific to it. In his fierce resistance to the postmodernist “skeptical theses” of the “linguistic turn” or the “rhetorical turn,” Carlo Ginzburg has recalled on several occasions that in the posterity of Aristotelian rhetoric, proof and rhetoric are not antinomic, but inseparably connected, and that, since the Renaissance, history has found ways to create erudite techniques for separating the true from the false. This leads Ginzburg to a firm conclusion: recognizing the rhetorical or narrative dimensions of the writing of history in no way implies denying it the status of true knowledge, constructed on the basis of proofs and controls. At that point, “knowledge (even historical knowledge) is possible.”7

History: Reading Time  29 All attempts to create a new epistemological basis for the scientific regime proper to history, as distinguished from both the verities of fiction and the mathematical language of the natural sciences, have shared that affirmation. Various propositions have marked the search: a return to an alternative paradigm, designated by Carlo Ginzburg as “conjectural” or “evidential” because it bases knowledge on the collection and interpretation of traces rather than on a statistical treatment of data;8 the definition of a concept of objectivity that asserts the difference between admissible assertions and unacceptable ones but recognizes that a plurality of acceptable interpretations is legitimate;9 or, more recently, reflection on theoretical models and the cognitive operations that permit the establishment of generalized knowledge on the basis of case studies, microhistories, or comparative studies.10 All of these perspectives, different though they may be, are inscribed within an intention of truth that is a part and an aim of historical discourse itself. Such perspectives have calmed the worries of historians whose certitude was profoundly shaken by the exposure of the paradox inherent in their work because, as Michel de Certeau has written, “Historiography (that is, ‘history’ and ‘writing’) bears within its own name the paradox – almost an oxymoron – of a relation established between two antinomic terms, between the real and discourse.”11 Recognizing this paradox invites rethinking oppositions between history as discourse and history as knowledge that may have been too abruptly formulated. With Reinhart Koselleck,12 Certeau has surely been the historian the most attentive to the formal properties of historical discourse, classed with narratives but set off from other narratives. He has shown how the writing of history, which supposes chronological order, closure within the text and filling in the blanks, inverts the procedures of research, which begins with the present, can be endless and is ceaselessly confronted with lacunae in the documentation. He has also shown that, unlike other forms of narration, the writing of history is split and divided: We admit as historiographical discourse that can “include” its other – chronicle, archive, document – in other words, discourse that is organized in a laminated text in which one continuous half is based on another disseminated half. The former is thus allowed to state what the latter is unknowingly signifying. Through “quotations,” references, notes, and the whole mechanism of permanent references to a prime language (what Michelet called the “chronicle”), historiographical discourse is constructed as a knowledge of the other.13

30  The Past in the Present History as a divided writing thus has the triple task of summoning a past that no longer exists in a present discourse; of showing the competence of the historian, master of the sources; and of persuading the reader: “From this angle, the split structure of discourse functions like a machinery that extracts from the citation a verisimilitude of knowledge. It produces a sense of reliability.”14 Does this mean, though, that there is nothing more there than a theater of erudition that offers no assurance of the possibility that history might produce an adequate knowledge of the past? That was not Michel de Certeau’s position. In his book devoted to characterizing the specific properties of historical writing, he forcefully recalls the discipline’s dimension of knowledge. For him, history is a discourse that produces “scientific” statements that can be used to define “the possibility of conceiving an ensemble of rules allowing control of operations adapted to the production of specific objects or ends.”15 All of the words are important here: “the production of specific objects” refers to the construction of the historical object by the historian, never taking the past as an object that is already there; “operations” designates the practices proper to the historian’s trade (the definition and treatment of sources, the mobilization of specific analytic techniques, the construction of hypotheses, procedures of verification); “rules” and “controls” place history within a regime of shared knowledge defined by the criteria of proof endowed with universal validity. As with Ginzburg (and perhaps more than Ginzburg, who would tend to enroll Certeau in the camp of the skeptics), this results in the association – not the opposition – of knowledge and narration, proof and rhetoric, critical scholarship and historical writing. The historical institution In 1999, another interrogation focused on the “historical institution” itself – that is, on the effects on the practice of historians of the social milieu in which their activity takes place. As Certeau writes: Before knowing what history says of a society, we have to analyze how history functions within it. The historiographical institution is inscribed within a complex that permits only one kind of production for it and prohibits others. Such is the double function of the place. It makes possible certain researches through the fact of common conjunctures and problematics. But it makes others impossible; it excludes from discourse what is its basis at a given moment; it plays the role of a

History: Reading Time  31 censor with respect to current – social, economic, political – postulates of analysis.16

This statement could be extended, and first in terms of the history of history, to isolate, within the very long term, the successive social places within which a historical discourse was produced: the city, from Greece to the Italian Renaissance; the monastery and the glory of God; the court and service of the prince in the age of absolutism; erudite networks and learned academies of the Republic of Letters and universities beginning in the nineteenth century. Each one of these places imposes on history not only its particular objects but also specific modalities of intellectual work, forms of writing, and techniques of proof and persuasion. One good example is the contrast, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, between the history of the historiographers of the princes and the history of antiquarian scholars.17 The first of these, the history of the official historiographers, is organized in the form of a dynastic narration that lays out the history of the kings and of the nation, the one identified with the other, and that mobilizes figures of rhetoric in such a way that, as Louis Marin points out, “that which is not represented in the narrative and by the narrator is so at the narratee’s reading, in the name of the effect of the narrative.”18 The second sort of history, that of the scholars, proceeds by means of fragments, is based on scholarly research (documentary, archeological, numismatic, philological), and concentrates on human institutions and customs. Though the contrast should not be forced, because even in the age of Louis XIV there were crossovers between the king’s history and erudition, it is nonetheless the basis, up to today, for the coexistence or the competition between general histories (national or universal) and historical investigations dedicated to the study of particular objects (one territory, one institution, one society). On all occasions, the “historical institution” is organized according to hierarchies and conventions that trace the borderlines between legitimate historical objects and those that are not legitimate and that are, for that reason, excluded or censured. It is tempting to translate into Pierre Bourdieu’s vocabulary of sociology (substituting the term “historian” for that of “writer”) the determinations governing the “field” of historical production, and to hold as fundamental the competitions for which the stakes are “the monopoly of power to say authoritatively who is authorized to call himself a historian or even to say who is a historian and who has the authority to say who is a historian.”19 In a social world like that of the homo academicus,

32  The Past in the Present where membership and hierarchy are regulated by the academic titles one has obtained, that power of designation is exercised at the expense of “outsiders” (I am thinking of Philippe Ariès, long kept at the edges of the French “historical institution” because he had no university appointment), and it has durably governed the distribution of authority, the forms of the division of labors, the dignity or the marginality of topics of research and criteria for the appreciation (and depreciation) of works – what Certeau calls, not without mordant irony, “the laws of the milieu” – the word “milieu” meaning in French both a social milieu, like the academic world, and the underworld.20 Identification of these constraints, collectively incorporated and always hidden within a historical discourse that conceals the conditions of its fabrication, should be substituted for the reasons advanced, from Raymond Aron to Paul Veyne, to demonstrate, praise, or denounce the subjective nature of history, as seen in the prejudices or the curiosities of the historian. On a deeper level, the decisions that govern the writing of history refer to the practices determined by the “technical institutions” of the discipline21 that distribute, in different ways according to time and place, the hierarchy of topics, sources, and works. Still, that identification in no way implies a denial of the status of what is produced under the constraints of those determinations as knowledge. The new history of science (that of Simon Schaffer, Steven Shapin, Mario Biagioli, or Lorraine Daston) has in fact taught us that it was not contradictory to locate scientific statements within the historical conditions of their possibility (be those conditions political, rhetorical, or epistemological) and, at the same time, to consider that those statements produced operations of knowledge subjected to appropriate techniques, criteria of validation and regimes of proof. As a “scientific” discipline, history is open to a like approach – one that does not dissolve knowledge within historicity, thus closing the way to a skeptical relativism, but that also recognizes the variations in the procedures and constraints that govern the historical operation. The history of history, like the history of science, has suffered all too long from a sterile contrast between the approach of the history of ideas, attached exclusively to theories of history and to intellectual categories created by historians, and an approach defined (or stigmatized) as sociological and that is sensitive to the social spaces of the production of historical knowledge and to its instruments, its conventions, and its techniques. The historical epistemology for which Lorraine Daston argues does not pertain uniquely to the practices and the regimes of rationality of the sorts of knowledge that have held or that hold nature as their object.22 This approach also promises

History: Reading Time  33 a more subtle understanding of the knowledge than those claiming to provide an adequate representation of the past. Representations of the past: Memory and history In recent years, historians have become aware that they have no monopoly on the representation of the past, and that its presence could be supported by discourse infinitely more powerful than their own writings. Thanks to Paul Ricoeur’s great book Mémoire, histoire, oubli, the differences between history and memory stand clearly depicted.23 The first of those differences distinguishes between testimony and archive. If the first of these is inseparable from the person giving witness and supposes that what he says is admissible, the second gives access to “numerous reputedly historical events [that] were never anyone’s memories.”24 Ricoeur opposes the evidence of the testimony, the credit of which is based on the trust accorded to the witness, to the document as a trace of the past. Here the acceptance (or rejection) of the credibility of the word that testifies to the event is replaced by a critical exercise that submits traces of the past to the regime of the true and the false, the refutable and the verifiable. A second difference opposes the immediacy of reminiscence to the construction of historical explication, whether the latter is explication by regularities and causalities (unknown to the actors involved) or explication by their reasons (mobilized as explicit strategies). To test the modalities of historical comprehension, Ricoeur chooses to privilege the notion of representation for two reasons. First, representation has a dual and ambiguous status within the historiographical operation: it designates a particular class of objects, and it defines the very regime of historical statements. Second, focusing attention on representation as an object and as an operation permits a return to a reflection on the variations of scale that have characterized the historian’s work on the basis of the propositions of microhistory,25 and, more recently, on that of an interest in various forms of a return to global history. A third contrast between history and memory opposes recollection of the past and representation of the past. Here the immediate (or supposedly immediate) faithfulness of memory is compared to history’s intention of truth, founded on the treatment of documents, which are as many traces of the past, and on the models of intelligibility that construct their interpretation. And yet, Ricoeur tells us, literary form, in each of its modalities (narrative structures, rhetorical

34  The Past in the Present figures, images, and metaphors) resists what he sees as “the referential impulse of the historical narrative.”26 History’s function of représentance (which Ricoeur defines as “historical discourse’s capacity for representing the past”)27 is constantly challenged as suspect by the distance necessarily introduced between the past that is represented and the discursive forms necessary to its representation. How, at this point, can we credit historical representation of the past? Ricoeur proposes two answers to that question. The first, epistemological in nature, insists on the need for clear distinctions between the three “phases” of the historiographical operation: the establishment of documentary proof, the construction of an explanation, and casting the results in written form. His second answer is less familiar to historians. It refers to the certainty of the existence of the past as it is guaranteed by the evidence of memory. Memory, in fact, is to be considered the “womb of history, inasmuch as memory remains the guardian of the entire problem of the representative relation of the present to the past.”28 This is not an attempt to support memory against history in the fashion of certain nineteenth-century writers, but rather to show that the evidence of memory is the guarantee of the existence of a past that has been and is no more. Historical discourse finds in this an immediate and evident attestation of the referential nature of its object. However, even when memory and history are brought together in this manner, they remain incommensurable. The epistemology of truth that governs the historiographical operation and the regime of belief that rules the fidelity of memory are both irreducible, and it is impossible to declare the superiority of the one at the expense of the other. History and memory are strongly linked. Historical knowledge can help to dissipate the illusions or the misinterpretations that have long led collective memories astray. Conversely, the ceremonies of remembrance and the institutionalization of the places of memory are often the inspiration for original historical inquiries. Still, memory and history are not identical. Memory is guided by existential demands of communities for which the presence of the past in the present is an essential element for the construction of their collective being. History is inscribed within the order of a universally acceptable knowledge that is “scientific” in the meaning that Michel de Certeau gives to the term. Representations of the past: History and fiction The distinction between history and fiction seems clear and well defined if we admit that, in all of its forms (mythic, literary, meta-

History: Reading Time  35 phorical), fiction “is a discourse that ‘informs’ the ‘real’ without pretending either to represent it or to credit itself with the capacity for such representation.”29 In this sense, the real is both the object and the guarantee of the discourse of history. However, today several reasons cloud this firm distinction. The first is an emphasis on the force of the representations of the past proposed by literature. The notion of “energy,” which plays an essential role in the analytic perspective of the “New Historicism,” can be of help in an understanding of how certain literary works have shaped collective representations of the past more powerfully than the writings of the historians.30 Theater in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the novel in the nineteenth century appropriated the past by shifting historical events and personages to the domain of literary fiction and placing on the stage or on the page the fiction of situations that had been real or were presented as such. When works are inhabited by a force of their own, they acquire the ability “to produce, shape, and organize collective physical and mental experience.”31 An encounter with the past is one of those experiences. Shakespeare’s “histories” – historical plays – provide an example of this. Seven years after Shakespeare’s death, the 1623 Folio brought together for the first time thirty-six of his plays, In this publication, the category of “histories,” situated between “comedies” and “tragedies,” included ten works that treat the history of England from King John to Henry VIII in chronological order of their reigns, an arrangement that excluded other “histories” such as those of Roman heroes and Danish or Scots princes, which were placed in the category of “tragedies.” The editors of the 1623 publication thus transformed works that had not been written in chronological order by reign, but that had been among the works the most often produced and the most often published before the 1623 Folio, into a dramatic and continuous history of the English monarchy. Thus it seems certain, as Hamlet declares (Hamlet, II, 2), that actors “are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time” and that the historical plays created for spectators and readers representations of the past more vivid and stronger than the history written in the chronicles that the playwrights used. The history represented on the stages of the theaters was a recomposed history, subjected to the demands of the censors, as attested by the absence of a large part of the scene of the abdication of Richard II in the first three editions of the play. It was also a history wide open to anachronisms. In his staging of the revolt of Jack Cade and the working men of Kent in 1450 as it appears in Henry VI, Part II, Shakespeare reinterprets the event, attributing to the 1450 rebels a millenarist and egalitarian language and violent acts destructive of all

36  The Past in the Present forms of written culture and all those who incarnated that culture, which the chronicles attributed (though with a less radical slant) to the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt of Tyler and Straw. The result is an ambivalent or contradictory representation of the 1450 revolt that recapitulates the formulas and the acts of popular revolts while also presenting the carnivalesque, grotesque, and cruel figure of an impossible Golden Age of a world turned upside down without writing, without money, and without social differences.32 The history of Shakespeare’s “histories” is thus founded on a distortion of historical realities as they were reported by the chroniclers, and it offers spectators an ambiguous representation of a past inhabited by confusion, uncertainty, and contradiction. A second reason for the vacillating distinction between history and fiction lies in the fact that literature is able not only to take over the past, but also to appropriate the documents and techniques charged with manifesting the discipline of history’s status as knowledge. Among the tools of fiction that weaken history’s intention or its claim to truth by capturing its techniques of proof we need to include the “reality effect” that Roland Barthes defines as one of the chief modalities of the “referential illusion.”33 In classical aesthetics, it is the category of the vraisemblable, or verisimilitude, that assures the connection between historical narration and made-up stories because, following the definition in Furetière’s Dictionnaire (1690), history is the description or “the narration of things or actions as they occurred, or as they might have occurred.” This means that the term “history” designates both “the deliberate and connected narration of several memorable events that have come about in one or several nations, in one or several centuries,” and “the fabulous but likely narrations that are imagined by an author.” Hence the dividing line is not between history and fable, but between likely narrations (whether they refer to reality or not) and unlikely ones. Understood in this manner, history is radically separated from the critical demands of erudition and detached from reference to reality as a guarantee of its discourse. By abandoning likelihood, the fable has further strengthened its relationship with history by multiplying concrete notations intended to give fiction the weight of reality and to produce an illusion of concrete reference. In order to contrast that literary effect, which is necessary to all forms of realistic aesthetics, with history, Barthes writes that for the latter, “the having-been-there of things is a sufficient principle of speech.”34 Still, that “having been there” and the concrete reality that is the guarantee of the truth of history must be introduced into the discourse itself to lend it credit as an authentic

History: Reading Time  37 form of knowledge. That is the role, as Certeau noted, of the quotations, references, and documents that bring the past to bear in the writing of the historian and that demonstrate his authority. Hence the appropriation by certain works of fiction of techniques of proof proper to history in the aim of producing, not “reality effects” but rather the illusion of a historical discourse. We can place beside the imaginary biographies of Marcel Schwob35 or the apocryphal texts of Borges, such as they appear in the appendix, “Etcétera,” of his Historia universal de la infamia or in the “Museo” section of El Hacedor,36 Max Aub’s Jusep Torres Campalans, published in Mexico in 1958.37 In this biography of an imaginary painter, Aub makes use of all the modern techniques of accreditation of historical discourse: photographs that show the artist’s parents and the artist himself in the company of his friend Picasso; reproductions of his paintings (displayed in New York in 1962 on the occasion of the presentation of the English translation of the book); press clippings that mention him; interviews that Aub had with him and some of his contemporaries; and the Cuaderno verde that Campalans kept between 1906 and 1914. Here Aub was targeting the genres and categories dear to art criticism: the explanation of the work of an artist by his biography; the contradictory but connected notions of influence and precursor; techniques of attribution or the decipherment of secret intentions. Today, the book can be read differently. By mobilizing the “reality effects” shared by historical knowledge and literary invention, it shows the relations that tie the two together. But, by multiplying ironic warnings – in particular, the many references to Don Quixote and the epigraph, “¿Cómo puede haber verdad sin mentira?” [How can we have truth without lies?] – he reminds his readers of the gap that separates the discourse of knowledge from the fable and reality as it was from imaginary referents. In doing so, he provides an accompaniment in a parodic mode to the history of historical falsifications, which are always possible and ever more subtle but which are unmasked by critical investigation.38 There is a final reason for the seductive but dangerous proximity between history as an exercise of knowledge and fiction, whether it be literature or myth. In the contemporary world, the need to affirm or justify constructed (or reconstructed) identities – which are not all national identities – often inspires a rewriting of the past that deforms, ignores, or conceals the contributions of a tightly controlled historical knowledge.39 That shift, which is often inspired by completely legitimate demands, fully justifies epistemological reflection about the criteria of validation to be applied to the “historiographic operation”

38  The Past in the Present at one moment or another. The critical capacity of history is, in fact, not limited to impugning falsifications and impostures. It can and must subject interpretive constructions to objective criteria of validation or rejection. Assigning that function to history necessarily sends us back to questions regarding the criteria behind such a judgment. Must these relate to the internal coherence of the demonstration? Or to its compatibility with results acquired? Or to the classical rules governing the exercise of historical criticism? Furthermore, is it legitimate to postulate a plurality of regimes of historical proof supposedly required by the diversity of historical objects and methods? Or should we attempt to elaborate a theory of objectivity, establishing general criteria that will permit us to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable interpretations? These questions, which some historians hold to be useless or aporetic,40 have an essential importance. At a time when our relationship with the past is threatened by the strong temptation of imagined or imaginary histories, reflection on the conditions that permit offering a historical discourse as a representation and an explication adequate to the reality that was is essential and urgent. That reflection, which supposes as a principle a distance between critical knowledge and immediate recognition, participates in the long process of the emancipation of history from memory and from fable, even from fable that rings true. Microhistory and the global world In 2000, one of the major themes of the Nineteenth International Congress of Historical Sciences, held in Oslo, was “global history.”41 As a proposition, that theme is founded on a series of refusals: a refusal of the framework of the nation-state that, in retrospect, delimits a social and cultural entity already present before its political arrival on the scene; a refusal of monographic history’s traditional ways of focusing on a province, a region, or a city; finally, a refusal of the microhistorical approach, suspected of neglecting the broader context. If we reject those ways of writing history, how can we imagine another history on the world scale? Must this other history be a new form of comparatism, as Marc Bloch proposed in 1928 in a nowclassic communication delivered at the Sixth International Congress of Historical Sciences, also held in Oslo?42 Is that history to be understood as the identification of different spaces, in the Braudelian sense

History: Reading Time  39 of the term, that find their historical unity in their networks of relations and exchanges made independently of sovereign states? Or are we to hold that history as having to be, above all, that of contacts, encounters, acculturations, and mixtures? However we define it, that very broad-scale history poses a redoubtable question for the practices of history: how are we to reconcile moving through entire spaces and cultures with the demands that have governed historical knowledge at least since the nineteenth century and that suppose a close consultation of primary sources, a mastery of the languages in which those sources are written, and a deep knowledge of the context in which any and all historical phenomena are situated? Great examples show that the challenge can be met, but the fact that the most fervent champions of a global history often refer only to works published in one language – English – is somewhat disquieting. There is only a narrow space between rejecting world history, understood as a modern figure of the old universal history,43 and rejecting a purely morphological comparative history.44 What is important is the choice of an investigative framework capable of rendering visible the “connected histories” that have established relationships between populations, cultures, economies, and powers.45 Such a choice can privilege a sovereignty exercised over territories scattered on several continents and at the interior of which men and products circulate, along with the transmission of information, an exchange of knowledge, and an interweaving of various systems of representation. In that case, the chains of interdependence that connect individuals and communities over an extremely great distance are situated within a fragmented and discontinuous space, but governed by the same political authority.46 Another possible option consists in identifying the transmission and reuse of myths, prophecies, and objects in very different and widely separated contexts.47 That choice refers back more fundamentally to the tension between the morphological approach, which draws up an inventory of relationships that exist between different forms (aesthetic, ritual, ideological, and more) without any attestation of cultural contacts, on the one hand, and, on the other, the historical approach, which notes circulations, borrowings, and hybridizations. Carlo Ginzburg has described with great acuity – in connection with the utilization of the mortuary double in many funeral rites – the difficult if not impossible reconciliation of these two modes of comprehension.48 The first leads to a recognition of invariants, necessarily brought down to their universality, but at the risk of decontextualizing a particular element

40  The Past in the Present in relation to the symbolic system that gives it meaning and to the localized and specific customs that constitute its inherent significations. The second accounts with rigor for transmissions and appropriations, always contextualized with precision, but at the risk of weakening the identification of the universal anthropological base that makes up the être-homme, as Paul Ricoeur would say, and that makes possible the recognition of fundamental continuities that lie beyond differences and discontinuities. Breaking up spatial enclaves, a move made possible in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by discoveries, exchanges, and conquests, authorized for the first time comparison between the knowledge inherent in different cultures on a planetary scale – and not only on the part of Europeans.49 Contemporaries’ awareness of a global scale leads to a similar awareness, in their own fashion, on the part of their historians. That is why the practices possible in global history focus on exchanges between worlds far distant from one another,50 or recognize in extremely local situations the interdependence that links them to distant ones, even when the persons involved do not necessarily have a clear perception of those connections. The tight union of the global and the local has led some historians to propose the idea of the “glocal,” a term that designates with more accuracy than elegance the processes by which shared references, imposed models, texts, and goods circulating on a planetary scale are appropriated to create meaning in a specific time and place. History in the digital age Another question in our present day, and one that was less pressing ten years ago, is that of the changes that entry into the age of electronic textuality imposes on history. The problem here is no longer the classic one that tied the development of serial and quantitative history with recourse to the computer for the analysis of massive, homogeneous, repeated, and electronically transcribed data. It is that of the new ways to construct, publish, and receive historical discourse.51 Electronic textuality transforms the ways in which arguments – historical or other – are organized and the criteria that mobilize a reader to accept them or refuse them. From the historian’s viewpoint, it permits the development of demonstrations according to a logic that is no longer necessarily linear or deductive, as is the logic imposed by the inscription of a text on a page. It permits an open, broken-up and relational articulation, made possible by the multiplication of

History: Reading Time  41 hypertextual links. From the reader’s viewpoint, the validation or the rejection of an argument can henceforth be supported by the consultation of texts (but also fixed or mobile images, recorded speech, or musical compositions) that are the object of the study, on the condition, obviously, that these are accessible in digital form. When that is the case, the reader is no longer simply obliged to believe the author, but may in turn, if he or she so desires and has leisure to do so, redo all or part of the research. In the world of print, a book of history supposes a pact of mutual confidence between the historian and the reader. Notes refer to documents that the reader generally cannot read. Bibliographical references cite books that the reader, more often than not, can find only in specialized libraries. Quotations are fragments extracted by the will of the historian alone, giving the reader no opportunity to know the entire texts from which they have been taken. The three classical aids to proof in history – the footnote, the bibliographical reference, the quotation – are profoundly different in the world of digital textuality the minute the reader finds himself or herself able to read the books read by the historian and to consult directly the documents analyzed. The first uses of these new ways to produce, organize, and accredit the discourses of knowledge show the importance of the transformation of cognitive operations implied in recourse to the electronic text. A fundamental epistemological mutation profoundly changes the techniques of proof and the modalities of construction and validation of the discourses of knowledge. One example of the new possibilities that have opened up both for the consultation of a documentary corpus and even for the construction of a historical line of argument is provided by the dual publication (in print in the pages of The American Historical Review and electronically on the web site of The American Historical Association) of Robert Darnton’s article about subversive songs collected by spies of the royal police in eighteenth-century Paris cafés.52 The electronic version offers the reader what print cannot give him: a dynamic map of the places in which these songs were sung, the police reports that gathered subversive statements, and the songs themselves, recorded by the French singer Hélène Delavault, thus making it possible to hear the texts as they were heard by contemporaries. Electronic techniques establish a new relationship with the traces of the past, one that is more involved and possibly more critical than a historian’s interpretation. By permitting a new organization of historical discourse founded on the multiplication of hypertext links and the distinction between

42  The Past in the Present various levels of text (from a summary of conclusions to the publication of documents), the electronic book is one possible response – or at least it is presented as such – to the crisis of publishing in the humane sciences.53 The effects of that crisis are comparable on both sides of the Atlantic, even if the prime causes are not quite the same. In the United States, the essential fact is a drastic reduction in the acquisition of monographs by university libraries, whose budgets are devoured by subscriptions to scientific periodicals, some of which can cost as much as US$10,000–15,000 per year. This in turn leads university presses to hesitate to publish works they judge to be overly specialized: doctoral dissertations, monographic studies, works of erudition.54 In France, and probably throughout Europe, a similar reduction in production by limiting the number of titles published and rejecting overly specialized works or translations deemed too costly results, above all, in a shrinking public of readers who bought and read many books (who were not exclusively university professors) and a decline in book purchases.55 Is the solution to this problem electronic publication of books of history that the publishing houses do not want to publish or can no longer publish? Initiatives taken in this domain, such as the constitution of digital collections dedicated to the publication of new works, might make one think so.56 One question remains, however: Can this new book find or produce readers? On the one hand, the long history of reading shows forcefully that mutations in the order of practices are often slower than revolutions in technology and are always out of step with those revolutions. New reading habits did not emerge immediately after the invention of print. Similarly, the intellectual categories that we associate with the world of printed texts persist in face of the new forms of publication, even though the very notion of “book” is challenged by the dissociation of the work, in its intellectual coherence, and the material object that assured it an immediate perception and comprehension. On the other hand, we must not forget that potential readers (and authors) of electronic books are still a minority, except in the area of documentary sources. There are still great gaps between the obsessive presence of the electronic revolution in discourse and the reality of reading practices, which remain massively attached to printed objects and which only very partially exploit the possibilities offered by digitization. It would be a mistake to take the virtual for the real that is already there, even if the transformation of reading and writing practices among the younger generations deeply and rapidly challenges our order of discourse – or books.

History: Reading Time  43 The title of this essay is “History: Reading Time.” I would like to put the second term in the plural in this conclusion and recall, in fidelity to the work of Fernand Braudel, that what is particular to history, within the humane and social sciences, is its ability to distinguish between and articulate the different times that overlap in every historical moment. A comprehension of the different temporalities that make the present what it is – both heritage and rupture, invention and inertia – remains the special task of historians and their prime responsibility toward their contemporaries.

3 History and Social Science: A Return to Braudel

Why reread Braudel? First of all, although Fernand Braudel died on November 27, 1985, his work and his reflection continue to inspire historians everywhere in the world. To be sure, history as it is written today often seems to stand at a distance from the global history, cast in the long term, which he practiced in all his great books. But that very distance clearly indicates that it is always in reference to Braudel that historians pose the major questions facing the discipline today: history’s relationship with the other social sciences; the pertinence of various chronological scales of observation; the ways in which the objects of history are constructed. Moreover, returning to Braudel’s works is a way of showing that history can and must be both a rigorous knowledge, well-documented, demanding, and supposing techniques and operations unique to it, and also an accessible knowledge that provides its readers with a more lucid perception of who they are and of the world in which they live. For Braudel, the historian’s goal was not to retell the past but to enlarge knowledge of societies and men. Thus for him the real history, the history that counts, can be recognized by its capacity for rendering the past and the present more intelligible and for producing a critical knowledge liberated from myths and prejudices. The publication of the three volumes of the Écrits de Fernand Braudel offers a good opportunity to reread and discover Braudel and to return to some lectures and articles that have been forgotten and to others that were unpublished or published in relatively inaccessible publications.1 Thanks to those three volumes, we can follow the evolution of his vision of history and the long preparation of the three books that, at three different moments in his life, put their mark

History and Social Science  45 not only on the discipline of history, but more generally on the entire field of the social sciences. The first was La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, his thesis, defended in 1947, published in 1949 and rewritten for republication in 1966;2 the next, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, a trilogy published in its definitive state in 1979, eight years after the publication of a first version of its first volume;3 finally, L’Identité de la France, three volumes published a year after his death in 1986 that constitute two of the four parts he had planned for the work.4 It is the Écrits that I shall take as my guide, focusing in particular on the second volume, Les Ambitions de l’Histoire. That volume brings together the major methodological articles, sketches connected with the elaboration of each of the three great works, and an astonishing text that corresponds to three chapters of a projected work that was to have brought together the lectures that Braudel, when a prisoner in Germany, gave to his companions in captivity, first at Mainz between August and October 1941, then, under more difficult conditions, in Lübeck in 1943–4. Braudel established the text of those lectures, with the help of notes taken by some of his listeners, transcribing it by hand in a notebook and revising it as three chapters of a book, L’histoire, mesure du monde, that he never finished or published.5 Fireflies and the landscape This text is important in two ways. First, it is contemporary to the various redactions of La Méditerranée. Hence it is clear that Braudel did not formulate his vision of history as an afterthought, but rather it was already present in his mind in the 1940s in a text that bears the stamp of his masterpiece. Second, the lectures that he gave in the Oflags of Mainz and Lübeck were to leave a profound mark on the postwar Braudel. Their images and their formulas re­­ appear from one text to another. One example of this is the fine metaphor that expresses the relationship between events and deeper realities: One evening in the interior of the State of Bahia I happened to find myself suddenly in the middle of a prodigious swarm of phosphorescent fireflies. They flickered ceaselessly all around me, above and below me, innumerable, showers of them emerging from the ruts in the road and the grass at either side like as many rockets, but too short-lived to light up the landscape clearly. Events – other points of light – do

46  The Past in the Present the same. Beyond the bright flash of their sudden light, beyond their own history, all the surrounding landscape remains to be reconstituted: the road, the bush, the forest, the crumbling reddish laterite typical of Northern Brazil, the declivities of the terrain, the few vehicles that passed and the much more numerous donkey carts with their heavy loads of coal or wood, and finally the nearby houses and fields. This is what makes it necessary, you see, to get beyond the luminous fringe of events that is nothing but a first frontier and often, in itself, a mighty small history.

Braudel returned, almost word for word, to that same image of the Brazilian forest that he had encountered when he was in São Paulo between 1935 and 1937 in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France on December 1, 1950, and again five years later in a lecture given at the Collège Philosophique on the invitation of Jean Wahl.6 During his captivity in Germany, with the redaction of his thesis and with the lectures he offered to his fellow prisoners, Braudel made a definitive break with the history conventionally practiced in the 1930s, even by himself in his first major article, published by the Revue Africaine in 1928.7 From that moment on, history, for him, was “no longer the simple recital of events.”8 Social history and the longue durée By the time he reached the “decisive years of his captivity,” as Braudel himself writes in an autobiographical sketch published in 1972,9 he had already accumulated a series of striking and diverse experiences: he had been a lycée professor in Constantine, then in Algiers, between 1923 and 1932; he had conducted lengthy research in Spanish archives (beginning in 1927), then in Italian archives (after 1932) for a thesis submitted with the title, “La politique méditerranéenne de Philippe II,” and he had participated in the founding of the University of São Paulo. It was during his trip home from Brazil in 1937 that he made the most important encounter of his intellectual life when he met Lucien Febvre. On his return to Paris in that same year, he was elected directeur d’études of the IVe Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He was thirty-five. “And then the war.”10 In lectures that he gave in Germany, Braudel recognized an intellectual debt he owed three authors whom he often cited, always with affection or admiration. About the first, Henri Hauser, who had been his professor at the Sorbonne, he wrote in 1972: “Of the benignant and not very crowded Sorbonne of those days I retain only one agreeable memory: the teaching of Henri Hauser. He spoke a different

History and Social Science  47 language from the rest of our professors, that of economic and social history. Marvelously intelligent, he knew everything and showed it without ostentation.”11 In reality, in the 1950s his opinion of Hauser was not always that favorable. In 1955, in his lecture before the Collège Philosophique, Braudel declared: “I spend the better part of my time rediscovering the weaknesses of Henri Hauser. What astonished me when I was young I now see as moments of lightness and overly rapid judgments. I owe him a great deal, in particular a pleasure in formation, but I feel myself quite distant from him.” In 1959, in his article “Histoire et sociologie,” written for the Traité de sociologie edited by Georges Gurvitch, he adds, speaking of the polemics between Simiand and Hauser, that Hauser was “doubtless the most brilliant historian of his generation, but too brilliant, too subtle a dialectician, entrenched behind early successes and the ancient rules of his profession.”12 In “Histoire, mesure du monde,” the two authors whom Braudel mentions the most often are Gaston Roupnel, who was “preoccupied with opposing to historicizing history [l’histoire historisante] that surface, destiny, that depth,” and Émile-Félix Gautier, “(probably) the greatest of the geographers and the historians writing in French on the eve of the last war.”13 If the names of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch are present here, they appear among others and without particular emphasis. In the texts that date from the 1950s, Braudel reorganizes the list of references to those who had inspired him. Now that list gives preference to the founders of the Annales, to the French geographical school and, in particular, to the work of Vidal de la Blache, the author of “one of the most influential works as far as history is concerned, perhaps the most influential of all,” he declared in 1955,14 to the sociologists Simiand and Halbwachs, and to Henri Berr, about whom he said in 1972, “it is to him that one must turn if one wishes to know how did it start?”15 The prison lectures give a glimpse of what that “it” was for Braudel. In the first place, he was referring to the crisis of traditional history, which had been deeply shaken by the development of the social sciences, “our neighbors,” geography, sociology, and economics. In the 1940s, Braudel maintained the distinction between these disciplines and history. The difference lay neither in the tasks to be accomplished nor in the problems to be treated. Rather, it was rooted in a different relationship with time and in a greater methodological rigor. This inevitably led to a competition among rival goals: The social sciences accompany us, constituted yesterday but also imperialist, vigorous, straining to breathe, and working – in a more

48  The Past in the Present scientific and clearer way than we – toward the goals that they have set for themselves. More scientific than history, better articulated than it in relation to the mass of social facts, they are (another difference) deliberately centered on the actual, that is, on life, and they all work on what can be seen, measured and touched with the finger. Immense superiority!16

Even though history, as Braudel presented it to his fellow prisoners, remained under-armed, it was still able, as the efforts of Berr’s Revue de synthèse historique or Febvre and Bloch’s Annales d’histoire économique et sociale showed, to grasp social phenomena in their full density, complexity, and recurrence. Its very status had changed: History is indeed a “poor little conjectural science” when it treats individuals isolated from the group, when it is a question of events, but is a good deal less conjectural and more rational, in both its procedures and its results, when it focuses on groups and the repetition of events. Deep history, the history on which one can construct, is social history.17

Histoire profonde: the expression, borrowed from Michelet, stands opposed to the history of events (histoire événementielle or histoire historisante), which concentrates on the fireflies and not on the complex and unperceived relations established, at any given time, between societies and spaces. The Mainz and Lübeck lectures anticipated the notions or the topics of research that, after the war, were those of the Annales under Braudel’s direction and of his Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme, published in 1967. In its pages he evokes “world economies,” the history of climate, the history of distances (hence the duration of voyages) and the unification of the world “after the breakdown, in the sixteenth century, of the great barrier of the Atlantic that so long and so absurdly divided the oikoumenē in two.”18 His interrupted manuscript ends with a meditation on the tension between the progressive opening of the world, which founds the very reality of a Weltgeschichte, and retreats into fragmentation: “Oscillation between an open world and a barricaded world: is not that very oscillation the problem of the current war? What future awaits? Either a breakup of the earth into autonomous spaces, into planets (the space of greater Germany, the greater Asiatic space, the English, American, Russian spaces), or the maintenance – or the safeguard – of the unity of the world?” He concludes: “Who is there to tell us that the destiny of our own world, France, one of the islands of the West, is not being worked out today in the depths of China or some other world? All

History and Social Science  49 the countries of the universe touch and mingle in a tumultuous handto-hand combat.”19 In his great methodological articles of the 1950s and 1960s, Braudel returned to the themes of his lectures in the German prison camps, amplifying and clarifying them. His vision shifted, however, on one essential point: the proper relationship between history and the social sciences. In his most famous article, “La longue durée,” published in the Annales in 1958, he proposed a comparison among or even the unification of the various social sciences on the basis of a common set of problems founded on the categories of history, which would thus become a common language in which social facts would be inscribed within the long time span and over a variety of spaces. History was no longer to be thought of as simply one social science among others, as in his lessons in Germany; rather, it became the keystone of a new construction in which disciplinary frontiers and debates about where those frontiers lie must be abolished to the profit of a common project: On the practical level . . . I would hope that the social sciences, at least provisionally, would suspend their constant border disputes over what is or is not social science, what is or is not a structure. . . . Rather let them try to trace those lines across our research which if they exist would serve to orient some kind of collective research, and make possible the first stages of some sort of coming together. I would personally call such lines mathematization, a concentration on place, the longue durée.20

From one book to another, Braudel was to continue, on his own, to pursue the program that he outlined. The publication of the existing chapters of L’Histoire, mesure du monde permits us to grasp how Braudel formed his conception and his practice of history, and also to understand the astonishing continuity of his intellectual project, attached to a global and social history that privileges the long time span and proposes concepts for unifying knowledge about the societies of yesterday and today. Is that vision and ambition still on the agenda today? Have new ways of writing history, of defining its objects and of working with the other social sciences irremediably distanced us from Braudel’s sweeping project? That is what I intend to examine next. Historical temporalities History today can hardly claim to fulfil the federating role that Braudel assigned to it. Moreover, the very project of a possible unity

50  The Past in the Present of social science has faded, whether it is called synthetic history, as Henri Berr defined it, sociology in the style of Durkheim, or history based on the long time span. What has been challenged in the latter case is the temporal construction that supported the entire edifice of global history and, beyond it, the science of society. As Braudel put it in the article “Histoire et sociologie”: History exists at different levels, I would even go so far as to say three levels, but that would be only a manner of speaking, and simplifying things too much. .  .  . On the surface, the history of events [histoire événementielle] works itself out in the short term: it is a sort of microhistory. Halfway down, a history of conjunctures follows a broader, slower rhythm. So far that has above all been studied in its developments on the material plane, in economic cycles and intercycles. . . . Over and above the “recitatif” of the conjuncture, structural history, or the history of the longue durée, inquires into whole centuries at a time. It functions along the border between the moving and the immobile, and because of the long-standing stability of its values, it appears unchanging compared with all the histories which flow and work themselves out more swiftly, and which in the final analysis gravitate around it.21

Three questions arise regarding this model of superimposed and heterogenous durations. For one thing, are they so irreducibly different from one another? Should we not consider, as Paul Ricoeur suggests in his Temps et Récit, that “the very notion of the history of a long time-span derives from the dramatic event in the sense .  .  . of the emplotted event” and that, by that fact, Braudel’s three time periods are tightly interconnected and refer to the same temporal matrix?22 The long time span of the Mediterranean should be understood as being a large story constructed according to the narrative formulas that govern the relating of the event – a process that “is not necessarily brief and nervous, like some sort of explosion”23 – and that connects the temporalities constructed by the narration with the subjective time of the individual. In the historian’s writing, the time of the sea and the time of the king are constructed according to the same figures. On the other hand, must the “event” be enclosed within its traditional definition, which links it to the short time span, conscious decisions, and the spume of facts? In an essay about Nietzsche, Michel Foucault draws a close connection between a devastating critique of the notion of origin and a reformulation of the concept of the event. For Foucault, the brutality of the event must be situated, not among the accidents of the course of history or the choices of individuals, but rather within what appears to historians to be the

History and Social Science  51 least événementiel of occurrences: transformations in relations of domination.24 Event . . . is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of vocabulary turned against those who had once used it, a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows, the entry of a masked “other”. The forces operating in history are not controlled by a destiny or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conflicts. They do not manifest the successive forms of a primordial intention and their attraction is not that of a conclusion, for they always appear through the singular randomness of events.25

If the event, in this Nietzschean reading, remains in the grip of chance, violent and unexpected, it does not correspond to the fireflies that light up only what is closest to them: the event is the forest itself when the trees have been uprooted and a new landscape emerges. Finally, can we take temporalities as being external to individuals and as measures of the world – and of men? Pierre Bourdieu, in his Méditations pascaliennes, forcefully stresses that a relationship with time is one of the most unequally distributed social properties: “It forces one to raise the question of the economic and social conditions which make possible access to time as something so self-evident as to pass unnoticed.”26 To be master of one’s own time, to control the time of others (“the all-powerful is he who does not wait but who makes others wait”),27 to have no hold over time and, by that very fact, give oneself over to the games of chance that “offer an escape from the neglected time of a life without justification or permit breaking out of an annulled time of a life without justification or possible investment”28: these are the modalities inherent in the relation with time that express the power of the dominant and the powerlessness of the futureless weak. Varied temporalities should thus not be considered “times” in the sense of envelopes for social facts. They are the product of social constructions that assure the power of some (over the present or the future, over oneself or others) and that lead others to desperation. A touchstone to the Braudelian edifice, the architecture of the various levels of time (longue durée, conjuncture, event) perhaps needs to be redefined. Microhistory and structures The successes of microhistory as a practice have launched a serious challenge to the project of a structural history attached to long time spans and extended spaces. Microhistory was born of “the belief that

52  The Past in the Present the hope of achieving a global understanding of the social must at least temporarily be set aside.”29 It was also born of the realization that “at each scale one sees things one does not see at another scale and that each vision has its own legitimate scale.”30 It is thus totally impossible to evaluate these different ways of considering the social, and it is vain to seek the “overlook” from which they might be perceived as commensurable. Hence, in reaction to the privilege long granted to macrohistorical approaches, and standing apart from Braudelian demands, we see a narrowing of the scale of observation and an intensive analysis of dense and complex data. It would be a mistake, however, to think of the procedures of microhistory as univocal. There is, in fact, a large gap between the perspective that considers the topics of microhistory as so many laboratories permitting an in-depth analysis of the mechanisms of power characteristic of a sociopolitical structure proper to a specific time and a limited area,31 on the one hand, and, on the other, the perspective that holds those same slices of history to be a condition of access to beliefs and rites that the sources usually do not speak of or are unaware of and that refer, in their very “anomaly” (the term is Ginzburg’s), to a cultural base shared by all humanity.32 In the latter definition, there is no contradiction between a microhistorical technique for observation and a macro-anthropological description, nor between the particular localization of observable data and the very long duration of their meaning. What remains, however, is the common opposition between these two perspectives and the always depreciative meaning of the term “microhistory” in Braudel’s thought. For him, that sort of history can only be conceived as situated within the register of the event, remaining on the surface of history. Thus in his article on the longue durée, he makes an indissoluble connection between micro-analysis, the short time span, and superficial phenomena: At first sight, the past seems to consist in just this mass of diverse facts, some of which catch the eye, and some of which are dim and repeat themselves indefinitely. The very facts, that is, which go to make up the daily booty of microsociology or of sociometry (there is microhistory too). But this mass does not make up all of reality, all the depth of history on which scientific thought is free to work. Social science has almost what amounts to a horror of the event. And not without some justification, for the short time span is the most capricious and the most delusive of all.33

This judgment is far removed from a historical practice that situates within the microhistorical dimension either a close analysis of the

History and Social Science  53 conflicts, negotiations, and transactions that constitute relations of power and social relation or a perception of the most widely shared myths and rites. Still, it would be unjust to force the comparison. Even though he reacted negatively to the term, Braudel anticipated the practice of microhistory. Some of the inquiries that he directed at the Sixth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (founded in 1947 by Lucien Febvre) are not far from fitting into that category. In the lecture given before the Collège Philosophique in 1955, he presented a collective research project about the city of Chioggia in the following terms: Some of my collaborators and former students have been studying with passionate intensity, for the last four or five years and at the cost of major effort, the evolution of prices in the very small city of Chioggia, south of Venice. . . . We have available for that city not only the movement of prices, but that of salaries; we know the varying census figures, the demographic evolution, births, marriages, deaths and what illnesses people died of (thanks to autopsy reports). Thus we thought that we had before us a privileged case and that we might be able to see if there were connections among the different orders of facts, and then ask if the case had significance for the whole of Italy and would enable us to move on to a generalization that would not be too abusive. We would win or we would lose. But you can easily guess that this effort was justified in my eyes only by the hope of winning, and that the problem was not to throw light on the city of Chioggia in itself. I am not saying that we should not care about Chioggia, but we have only a very limited interest in it.34

Several of the traits of microhistory’s techniques are already present here: an intensive and comparative treatment of exceptional data; a search for “connections” between various phenomena; lesser interest in the specificity of the site under study, taken as a laboratory that permits the establishment – at least as hypotheses – of general laws. This procedure is very different, as is obvious, from the one that governed contemporary monographic descriptions aimed at revealing the singularities of various territorial areas. In contrast, the microhistorical perspective does not necessarily abandon the idea of totality. The analysis of “anomalies” (one of Ginzburg’s favorite terms) makes sense only because it gives access to the deepest anthropological bases and to the study of relations between individuals, families, communities, clientele groups, and authorities as one way to enter into the complexity of social connections. As Jacques Revel writes,

54  The Past in the Present The multiple contextualization of the microhistorians is based on very different premises. It is assumed, to begin with, that each historical actor participates to one degree or another in various processes (hence within various contexts) of different dimensions and at different levels from the most local to the most global – thus, there is no discontinuity, much less an opposition, between local history and global history. The experience of an individual, a group or an area makes it possible to apprehend some particular modulation of global history. It is both particular and unique, because what the microhistorical viewpoint offers is not an attenuated or partial or mutilated version of macrosocial realities but a different version of them.35

The gap between Braudelian structural history and the practice of microhistory can be bridged if we consider that what is essential resides in the specific cognitive effects permitted by different levels of observation. The poetics of history A final gap seems to separate Braudel’s reflection and the interrogations of historians today. Indeed, we can find little in his works concerning the writing of history. In the wake of the founding works of Paul Veyne,36 Hayden White,37 and Michel de Certeau,38 historians have become aware that their writing depends upon the narrative structures and the rhetorical figures that their works share with all representational discourse, including that of fiction. Braudel seems never to have had any great interest in the theoretical aspects of such questions, and nothing in his great articles on methodology anticipates them. This means that there is little or no reference to his works in the open discussions regarding the unstable status of a history situated between science and fiction. Braudel’s lack of interest in the writing of history is all the more surprising because he himself always paid great attention to the elegance of his expression and his prose ranks among the finest. There are several ways to interpret his reticence. Like others and before others, he understood the attention paid to the writing of history as a possible weakening of its capacity for knowledge. During the 1970s and 1980s, in fact, emphasis on the “literary” dimension of history at times led to depriving the discipline of all status as a specific form of knowledge and to assimilating the knowledge that it produced to that offered by myths or novels. For another thing, Braudel, a great writer, was a man who thought in visual terms. In the opening paragraph of his La Méditerranée:

History and Social Science  55 L’espace et l’histoire, published in 1977 with the collaboration of Filippo Corelli and Maurice Aymard, words transmit images and sounds: In this book, boats sail; the waves repeat their song; workers in vineyards descend the slopes of the Cinque Terre on the Genoese Riviera; olives are beaten down off trees in Provence and in Greece; fishermen draw in their nets on the immobile Venetian lagoon or in the canals of Djerba; carpenters construct boats that still today resemble those of yesterday. .  .  . And once again, looking at them, we find ourselves outside of time.39

And in fact the book became the basis for a series of twelve television programs made in the autumn of 1976 by Falco Quilici, who told Braudel, “I am so happy to meet a historian who thinks in images.”40 That primacy given to the image, shown on the screen or produced within the reader’s imagination, is perhaps one of the reasons for Braudel’s shift away from a reflection too exclusively focused on narrative structures or on the rhetorical tropes of writing. More fundamentally, it seems that for Braudel knowledge, a rigorous grasp of past social realities, was in itself a form of poetic experience. He ended the second chapter of his 1940s lectures with the words: Wanting to make history a “science” – a perilous enterprise, as we know – is to diminish the place of man; it is to augment our risks of error, again, as we know; some even say – although I am not sure – that it is to diminish the place of poetry. But then, what is poetry? In any event, I believe that it is not forgetting life, nor is it depriving oneself of the strong joy of understanding it, and better than usual.41

Part II What is a Book?

4 The Powers of Print

How should we think about the relations between print, understood as a technique specific to the reproduction of texts, and other forms of the publication and diffusion of the written word, manuscript copy in particular? How are we to situate the powers proper to the book in relation to those of other written objects, given that if not all books are printed, not all print objects are books? And, more fundamentally, what is a book? These are the questions that this essay will attempt to answer. The printing revolution Before continuing, we need to return to a basic opposition, inherited from Elizabeth Eisenstein, between “print culture” and “scribal culture.”1 A first reevaluation concerns the very notion of “print culture” and one of the most fundamental effects that Eisenstein assigns to the “printing revolution,” which is the dissemination of texts at a scale unheard of in the age of the manuscript. There is little debate about that fact. With Gutenberg’s invention, more texts were put into circulation and every individual reader was able to encounter a greater number of them. But what were those texts whose presence was multiplied by printing? Books, to be sure, but as D. F. McKenzie has demonstrated,2 their printing often constituted a minor, even quite minor, portion of the activities of the printshops between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The better part of what was produced consisted of tracts, pamphlets, petitions, posters and public announcements, formularies, tickets, receipts, certificates, and many

60  What is a Book? other sorts of ephemera and job printing that brought in most of the earnings of such establishments. This has important consequences for the definition of print culture and its effects. Printing multiplied objects that were unknown or unfamiliar in the age of the manuscript and made them familiar. In the cities at least, print writing took over the walls, placed reading matter in public spaces, and transformed administrative and commercial practices.3 But we also need to reformulate the opposition between “scribal culture” and “print culture” and to look more closely at the manuscript in the age of printing. After the appearance of works devoted to manuscript publication in England,4 in Spain,5 and in France,6 no one today would state that “this” (the printing press) had killed “that” (the manuscript). Many written genres (poetry anthologies, political tracts, nobiliary instructions, nouvelles à la main – newssheets – libertine and heterodox texts, musical scores, and more) were widely distributed in manuscript copies.7 The reasons for this varied: the lesser cost of manuscript copies; a desire to avoid official censorship; a preference for a limited circulation; or the malleability of the manuscript form, which permitted additions and revisions. Thus printing, at least in the first four centuries of its existence, did not cause the disappearance of either manuscript communication or manuscript publication. Moreover, manuscripts invited new uses of writing by hand, as attested by a preliminary inventory of objects that incited their buyers to fill in with their own writings spaces that printing had left blank. These spaces included: blank pages interleaved into almanacs; open spaces in formularies; commonplace books containing only printed rubrics; and wide margins and interlinear spaces in works designed to welcome readers’ notations. Many examples could be offered of printed objects whose reason for being was to encourage and preserve writing by hand: editions of Latin classical authors used in sixteenthcentury secondary schools;8 chartes de mariage (marriage charters) used in some dioceses of southern France in the seventeenth century;9 or, in eighteenth-century Italy, the earliest agendas that divided the day into sections.10 The close connections between manuscript writings and printed texts are not limited to the objects that explicitly organize them. Readers of the past, and educated readers in particular, often took works fresh from the presses and made them their own, using pen and ink to correct the errors that they found, drawing up an index or a manuscript errata list, and even cutting apart fragments of printed editions and gluing the clippings onto sheets to create an original book.

The Powers of Print  61 These practices permit us to continue the open discussion about the standardization that has been attributed to printing, recognizing that standardization does not imply that we should ignore the many processes that limited its effects: corrections made in the course of printing that, because of the plurality of associations possible between corrected and uncorrected sheets in copies from a same edition, multiply the states of a “same” text;11 manuscript marginalia that make the copy used by an individual reader unique;12 or a variety of texts, printed or manuscript, brought together in the individual reader’s own way and bound in one volume.13 The printed text was thus open to mobility, flexibility, and variation, if only because at a time in which pressruns remained limited (between 1,000 and 1,750 copies around 1680, according to one insider, the printer Alonso Víctor de Paredes),14 the success, hence the reproduction, of a work supposed multiple editions, which were never identical. Just as the production capacity of the printers’ workshops was far from being totally mobilized (at least for the printing of books), so their ability to reproduce an identical text in each copy does not imply that such was always the case. On the other hand, manuscript transmission did not necessarily involve the alteration of texts, in particular when, as was the case with sacred texts, their letter was fixed and a tight control was kept over copies. More than a sweeping, clearly defined diagnostic contrasting the fixed quality of print with the instability of the manuscript, what is important is a close examination of the specificity of each form of textual transmission. Scribal publication The vigor of manuscript publication between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries should also be understood as a durable effect of a depreciation of print – the “stigma of print.” The Spanish Golden Age offers an example of this. When Don Quixote visits a printshop in Barcelona, he speaks with an overconfident author who had kept for himself the rights to his translation of a work titled Le Bagatele that was being printed in two thousand copies. Don Quixote warns him, You seem to know quite a bit about all this . . . but it seems you haven’t taken into account the fraudulent accounting of the printers and the tricks they play. I assure you that when you find yourself saddled with two thousand copies of your book, you’ll be so exhausted that it will

62  What is a Book? frighten you, especially if the book is a bit perverse and not at all amusing.15

The text is playing here with a commonplace of the Golden Age, denouncing the cupidity and dishonesty of printers, who are seen as always ready to falsify their account books and conceal the true pressrun of editions entrusted to them, thus permitting them to sell copies more rapidly and at a better price than the author could sell them.16 Cervantes had already made use of this theme in one of his Novelas ejemplares, the “Novela del licenciado vidriera.” Tomás declares to the bookseller in a shop against a wall of which he is leaning, “carefully feeling his way for safety’s sake” because, after biting into a quince enchanted by a lover he has scorned, he thinks he is made of glass, “This trade would please me very much, if it were not for one vice connected with it.” When the bookseller asks him what that fault could possibly be, the scorned lover responds that it is: the tricks that you play when you purchase the rights to a book and the sport that you make of an author if by chance he has it printed at his own cost; for in place of fifteen hundred copies, you go ahead and print three thousand, and while the author thinks that it is his copies that are being sold, it is in reality your own that you are getting rid of.17

The booksellers’ misconduct was a favorite topic among all the writers who stigmatized printing, denouncing it because it corrupted the integrity of texts distorted by ignorant compositors, twisted the meaning of works proposed to readers unable to understand them, and debased the ethics of the commerce of letters, degraded by the commerce of books.18 The dialogue that Lope de Vega imagines in Fuente Ovejuna between Barrildo, a peasant, and Leonelo, a student returning home from Salamanca, illustrates the lack of confidence some felt before the multiplication of books brought on by the invention of printing – a recent invention in 1476, the date of the historical events staged in this comedia. When Barrildo praises the effects of printing, saying, “I hear they’re printing so many books now that everyone can write them. It’s wonderful,” Leonelo responds: “And the more the book sounds like gibberish the louder everyone applauds. I don’t deny that printing has thrown up some geniuses, and helps to preserve their work, but at the same time it has destroyed the reputation of others by letting us read them.”19 For the educated student, the multiplication of books and readers who thought themselves learned but who

The Powers of Print  63 were not so subverted the hierarchies of the academic and social worlds, produced more disorder than knowledge and in fact had spawned no genius worthy of comparison with the old Doctors of the Church. Quevedo’s Sueños bears its own witness to the fear of the corruption of texts that are read by readers for which they were not intended. A bookseller condemned to eternal flames states, with bitter irony, I, and all other booksellers, stand condemned by the bad works of others, and for offering reductions on books written in Spanish or translated from the Latin. For thus armed, fools and ignoramuses nowadays know what in former times was extolled by wise men. Even servants can latinize, and you will come across verses by Horace put into the vernacular in any stable.20

There are thus many reasons why manuscript copy continued to be present even when the mechanical reproduction of texts made possible by Gutenberg’s invention seemed to foretell its disappearance. For one thing, the manuscript permitted a controlled and limited diffusion of texts that avoided previous censorship, and that could circulate clandestinely more easily than printed works while running less risk of falling into the hands of readers incapable of understanding them. This is why manuscripts were an essential vehicle for disseminating erudite libertine texts during the first half of the seventeenth century and, in the following century, materialist philosophical texts.21 Moreover, the very form of the manuscript book, open to corrections, deletions, and additions at all stages in its fabrication from composition to copying and from the finished copy to binding, permitted writing on several occasions (in the case of nobiliary instructions, enriched with new texts at each passing generation), or writing by several hands (as in the case of poetry collections whose readers were often its authors). Finally, manuscript publication constituted an alternative to certain forms of corruption produced by printing: it removed the commerce of letters from economic interests (except when it took on a commercial form, as with the nouvelles à la main),22 and it protected texts from alterations introduced by clumsy compositors and ignorant correctors. Book, work, and literature The effects inherent in Gutenberg’s invention are thus perhaps not those that have been stressed the most often. They concern the

64  What is a Book? relations between works as texts and the ways in which those texts were inscribed in material form. In the first place, although the printed book inherited the basic structures of the manuscript book (that is, the distribution of the text among the gatherings and leaves inherent to the codex, whatever the technique used to produce or reproduce it), it proposed innovations that profoundly modified the reader’s relationship to written matter.23 The same is true of the paratexts or, more precisely (in the terminology of Gérard Genette), the peritexts, that make up the book’s introductory matter. With printing, these acquired an identity made immediately perceptible by means of particular signs (italics, vowels with a tilde, symbols) on the signature or signatures that made up the preliminary matter, which was always printed (along with tables and indices) after the body of the book had been printed and was often redacted by the bookseller or the printer.24 The architectural metaphors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that spoke of “porches” that led into the work proper found strong visibility in the marked typographical separation between the work and what Borges called the “vestibule” leading into it.25 Works by one author were more commonly brought together in a printed book than in a manuscript one. The innovation was not absolute, given that, beginning in the fourteenth century, for some writers who used the vernacular, readers formed the habit of assembling their texts in one volume. This broke with the dominant tradition of the age of the manuscript, which was the miscellany combining texts of quite different genres, dates, and authors.26 The Folio edition of Ben Jonson’s Workes put together by himself in 1616 or the 1623 Shakespearean Folio edition, which owed nothing to Shakespeare but everything to his former comrades and to the stationers who owned or had purchased the “rights in copy” to his plays,27 give exemplary illustrations of the connection between the materiality of the printed book and the concept of an author’s oeuvre. The same was true of the notion of “national literature,” as shown by the initiative of the bookseller/publisher Humphrey Moseley, who published a series of the works of contemporary English poets and playwrights beginning in 1645. These volumes had a homogeneous format (octavo for the poetry, quarto for the plays); their title pages had a similar layout and their frontispieces bore a portrait of the author. At a time when theatrical writing was not recognized as “literature” (as shown by the fact that Bodley and his librarians excluded such works from his collection), the enterprise of the ultraroyalist Moseley, the publisher (in 1647) of the Folio edition of the works of Beaumont and Fletcher,28 gave a coherence to a corpus that

The Powers of Print  65 separated poetry and theater from other text genres such as history, narrative, travel works, and more, and constructed a repertory that included only English writers. This initiative was not unique, given that at the same time in France Charles Sorel published his Bibliothèque françoise (1664–5),29 a work that contained only authors born within the kingdom or naturalized by means of translations, as were, for example, “comic novels” that had appeared in Spain and were judged to be sufficiently moral. The authority of the text and the pleasure of reading Thus the printed word was not without powers. But should those powers be attributed to the possibilities opened up by the technical invention or to the social and cultural construction of the credit accorded to them?30 The now classic thesis that drew a close connection between fixing, standardizing, and disseminating texts and their mechanical reproduction and the spread of typographical workshops stood opposed to a perspective that stressed that typography has no intrinsic properties. According to Adrian Johns, such properties are always constructed by the representations and conventions that allow readers to have confidence (or not) in the entrepreneurs, to judge of the authenticity of the texts and the value of the editions, or to give credit to the knowledge transmitted by printed books.31 By establishing shared rules (though not without conflicts and differences of opinion) that could be mobilized to identify corrupt texts and false information, people of the book trade attempted to respond to the long-established discredit attached to both printed books and those who produced them. The focus on collective practices that lend authority to printed works inscribes the history of “print culture” within the paradigm that governs the new history of the sciences. That history, as is known, privileges three things: negotiations that set the conditions for the replication of experiments, thus permitting the comparison or accumulation of their results; the conventions that define the credit to be attributed (or refused) to the certification of discoveries according to the standing of the witnesses and their competence at telling the truth; and the controversies that set up not only antagonistic theories, but, even more, opposing conceptions regarding the social and epistemological conditions that govern the production of statements about the natural world.32 That model of intelligibility speaks pertinently to the multiple transactions that lend (or that attempt to lend) authority to all texts and all books that offer discourses within

66  What is a Book? the regime of the true and the false. Natural philosophy – but also books of theology or travel accounts – produces such truths, which must be accredited in various ways, within or outside of the text. But is this also true of all print production, a large part of which – perhaps the better part – is dedicated to texts that escape the criteria of veracity? Among these, for example, are all the works of fiction not yet deemed to be literature and whose reception is not commanded by the conventions of the discourses of knowledge. In the case of theatrical works, the civility that ought to dictate respect of the “right in copy” owned by the bookseller who first entered a title in the register of the Stationers’ Company by no means implies a similar respect for the authenticity of the text or the accuracy of the print job.33 Here, neither the desire to read nor pleasure in reading seems to depend on the credit accorded to the edition or the confidence awarded to its publisher. This was the case regarding the circulation of comedias in Golden Age Spain. In the dedicatory epistle of La Arcadia,34 Lope de Vega deplored the circulation of faulty editions of his plays, thus justifying his own decision to publish them, in spite of his reticence about printing works destined for theatrical representation. In this dedication he describes one of the procedures that led to the publication of corrupt texts, thanks to “some people who live, feed and clothe themselves, by stealing comedies from those who produce them on the stage, saying that they memorize them simply by listening to them and that this is not theft because the actor is selling them to the public and they themselves can avail themselves of their memory.”35 In order to verify whether those thieves had the good memory they boasted of, Lope states that he had compared his works with the transcriptions made by one of them known as “he of the great memory” [el de la gran memoria]. The result confirmed his worst fears: “I found, reading these transcriptions, that for one line of verse that was mine, there were an infinity by him, composed with enough follies, extravagances, and ignorances to destroy the honor and the reputation of the best of poets, either of our nation or abroad where [the plays] are already read with much pleasure.”36 Lope’s observation is fully confirmed by the analysis of a manuscript, probably based on a reconstruction by memory, of Peribañez y el Comendador de Ocaña that contains barely a hundred verse lines in common with the text as it was printed in 1614 in the fourth Parte of Lope’s works.37 Readers do not seem to have been turned away from these corrupt and unfaithful editions any more than they were by editions that falsely attributed to Lope de Vega comedias that he never wrote, which was another blow to his honor and his reputation and led him

The Powers of Print  67 to publish a list of the works that he had written in the 1604 and 1618 editions of his Christian romance, El peregrino en su patria.38 The sacred, magic, and sentiment In print or in manuscript form, the book was durably endowed with mighty powers, both hoped for and feared. Throughout Christendom, the Bible was the object of propitiatory uses that had little to do with the reading of its text and much to do with its presence in proximity to the body. Also throughout Christendom, the book of magic was invested with a charge of sacrality that gave knowledge and power to the man or woman who read it, but who, by that same token, came under its sway.39 Books of magic contained that double power, whether they were printed, as were the many editions of the Grand Albert and the Petit Albert, or in manuscript, like the books of spells that were copied and kept with fear. Their readers were invaded and seized by the book that subjected them to its power. That sort of capture could only be expressed in the language of either diabolical possession or of a madness brought on by too much reading.40 In the eighteenth century, bodies reflected, for the better or at times for the worse, the powers of the book and the dangers or benefits of reading. Discourse shifted to the medical, constructing a pathology of excessive reading, considered either as an illness striking the individual or as a collective epidemic. Uncontrolled reading was held to be dangerous because it combined corporeal immobility and excitation of the imagination. It introduced the worst ills: an engorged stomach or intestines, deranged nerves, bodily exhaustion. Reading professionals – that is, men of letters – were the most exposed to such disorders, considered the sources of hypochondria, their signature illness.41 But also, the solitary exercise of reading led to a wandering imagination, a rejection of reality, and a preference for chimeras. This implied a close connection between excessive reading and “solitary pleasures,” which produced the same symptoms: pallor, worry, and prostration.42 Danger was highest when the work being read was a novel or a romance and the reader (male or female) had retired to solitude. At this point, reading was thought of on the basis of its corporeal effects, and that somatization of a practice, the dangers of which had traditionally been described with the aid of philosophical or moral categories,43 was perhaps the first sign of a marked change in both behaviors and representations. But the body might also reveal the sincerest form of emotion – the sort produced by identification with a text that brings a pragmatic

68  What is a Book? awareness of things and beings and enables the reader to grasp, in the evidence of sentiment, the difference between good and evil. Diderot experienced that type of emotional upset on reading Richardson. He describes his feelings on reading Richardson’s account of the burial of Clarissa in a letter to Sophie Volland dated September 17, 1761: “My eyes filled with tears, I could no longer read, I got up and began to lament, apostrophizing the brother, the sister, the father, the mother, and the uncles, and talking out loud, to the great astonishment of Damilaville, who didn’t understand a word of my passionate speeches and asked me what was wrong.”44 Several months later, in the Éloge de Richardson that he wrote for the Journal étranger, Diderot attributed his own reactions to Damilaville: I was with a friend when I was given Clarissa’s funeral and testament, two passages which the French translator left out, for some unknown reason. This friend is one of the most tender-hearted men I know, and one of the keenest devotees of Richardson: very nearly as keen as me. He promptly grabbed the pages and went off into a corner to read them. I was watching him: first I saw tears flowing, he stopped reading and began to sob; suddenly he got up and walked up and down without knowing where he was going, crying out like a man distressed, and addressing the most bitter reproaches to the whole Harlowe family.45

Increasingly violent bodily movements and a shaken soul accompany the irrepressible upset that invades the reader, and his tears, sobs, agitation, cries and, finally, imprecations thus show that, as Jean Starobinski put it so well, “the energy that emerges from the novel can be wholly poured into real life.”46 The powers of print; the powers of the codex Reflecting on the powers of print suggests two remarks. The first is a warning against any overly hasty identification of print with the book. Gutenberg’s invention permitted the massive production and broad dissemination of printed objects that were not books. Those humble print products that only rarely survived the time of their usefulness brought on profound transformations in social practices. They made it more necessary to know how to read, and, for the ones that offered blank spaces for manuscript additions, to know how to write. In its humblest and most fragile forms, then, one of the first powers of print was to strengthen writing by hand and create new uses for it.

The Powers of Print  69 A second remark connected with the power and disquieting strength of the book places it in a longer time span. In spite of the title of Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s justly famous book, L’apparition du livre,47 the book, our book, made of leaves and pages, did not arise with printing. This means that we need to take care not to attribute to the printing press and to movable type characters textual innovations (index, tables, concordances, numbered pagination) or customs that accompanied the invention, more than ten centuries earlier, that made these possible: that of the codex. When the new form of the book replaced the roll, it was a first revolution that permitted actions that had been totally impossible before, such as leafing through a work, finding a specific passage with ease, using an index, or writing during the course of reading.48 The period from the second to the fourth centuries ushered in the new form of the book inherited by printing, forming the basis for the very long-term historical sedimentation that, until the digital revolution, defined both the order of discourses and the order of books. If the appearance of the codex is the first legacy of that shift, a second break with Gutenberg’s invention occurred during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the appearance of the “unitary book,” as Armando Petrucci terms it, that collected within one binding the works (or one work) of one author.49 Although that material form was the rule for a juridical corpus, the canonical works of the Christian tradition or the classics of antiquity, the same was not true of texts in vernacular languages, which were usually published in miscellanies of works of different dates, genres, or languages. For “modern” writers, the “unitary” book – a book establishing a connection between the material object, the work (one particular work or a series of works) and the author – sprang up around such figures as Petrarch or Boccaccio, Christine de Pisan or René d’Anjou. The third period in the long history connecting the object, the work and the book was of course launched by the invention of the printing press and movable type in the mid-fourteenth century. From that moment on, although without causing the disappearance of manuscript publication, printing became the technique most often used for the reproduction of writing and the production of books. We are the heirs of those three histories. First, concerning the definition of the book, which is for us both an object different from the other objects of written culture and an intellectual or aesthetic work endowed with an identity and a coherence attributed to its author. Second, and more broadly, for a perception of written culture founded on the immediate and material distinctions between the objects offered by the various text genres and that imply different uses.

70  What is a Book? Digital textuality Electronic textuality challenges that order of discourse. One support – in this case, the computer screen – confronts the reader with various types of texts that, in the world of manuscript culture and, for even greater reason, in print culture, had been distributed among distinct objects. Now all texts, whatever they may be, can be produced or received on the same support and in a form usually chosen by the reader himself. This creates a textual continuity that no longer differentiates genres on the basis of their material inscription. By that token, the perception of works as works becomes more difficult. Reading from a computer screen is usually a discontinuous reading that uses key words or thematic clues to find the desired fragment – an article in an electronic periodical, a passage in a book, a piece of information on a web site – and that does so without the operator necessarily having any knowledge of the identity of that fragment or its inherent coherence within the textual totality from which it is extracted. The relation that makes the coherence of works visible, imposing a perception of them as a textual entity even on a reader who only wants to read a few pages, is thus broken. This is no longer the case in the world of digital textuality because discourses are no longer inscribed in objects that permit us to classify them, set up a hierarchy among them, or recognize them by their nature. The digital world is a world of decontextualized, juxtaposed, and indefinitely recomposable fragments freed from any need or desire for a comprehension of the relation that inscribes them within the works from which they have been extracted. It might be objected that this has always been the case in written culture, which has been largely and durably constructed on the basis of collections of extracts, anthologies of commonplaces (in the noble sense of that word in the Renaissance) and morceaux choisis. True. But, in the culture of print, the dismembering of written works is accompanied by its opposite: their circulation in forms that respect their integrity and that, at times, bring them together in “oeuvres” that may or may not be complete. Furthermore, in the anthology itself fragments are necessarily and materially connected with a textual totality that is recognizable as such. The digital world bears a seductive promise, offered by the new technology’s ability to invent original forms of writing freed of the constraints imposed by the morphology of the codex and the juridical regime of copyright. That writing, which combines polyphony and

The Powers of Print  71 palimpsest and is open and malleable, infinite and in movement, upsets the categories that, since the eighteenth century, have been the foundation of literary property and of all the practices and habits of reading.50 In the digital realm, it is not the written object that is folded, as is the case with the manuscript or printed page, but the text itself. This means that reading consists in “unfolding” that mobile and infinite textuality.51 Reading of that sort brings to the screen ephemeral, multiple, and individual textual units, brought together by the will of the reader, that cannot be defined, once and for all, as pages. It is in this sense that the promise is also a challenge. The image of digital navigation that has become so familiar clearly shows the characteristics of a new, segmented, and discontinuous manner of reading. Although it is quite appropriate for texts like encyclopedias that are fragmented by their very construction, this way of reading is perturbed or disoriented when used with genres whose appropriation supposes continuous reading and the perception of the text as a coherent and original creation. That challenge is particularly strong for the youngest generations of readers who (at least in sufficiently wealthy milieus and in the more developed countries) have entered into written culture facing a computer screen. In their case, a very immediate and very spontaneous practice of reading accustomed to the fragmentation of texts of all sorts collides frontally with categories forged in the eighteenth century to define works on the basis of their singularity and their totality. There is much at stake. One result might be the possible introduction into digital textuality of procedures capable of perpetuating the classical criteria of the definition and perception of works that underlay literary property; another might be the abandonment of those criteria to the profit of a new way of perceiving and thinking of the written word, held to be a continuous discourse in which the reader cuts up and recomposes texts in total liberty. History does not give us an answer. The only competence of historians, who are poor prophets of things to come, is to recall that within the long term of written culture, every change (the appearance of the codex, the invention of printing, revolutions in reading practices) has produced an original coexistence of actions of the past with new techniques. Every time such a change has occurred, written culture has conferred new roles on old objects and practices: the roll in the age of the codex, manuscript publication in the age of print. It is just such a reorganization of written culture that the digital revolution requires, and one can suppose that, as in the past, writings will be redistributed among the old and the new supports that permit their

72  What is a Book? inscription, their publication, and their transmission. There remains, however, the new fact of the dissociation of and even the contradiction between categories that have constituted an order of discourse founded on the name of the author, on the identity of works and on intellectual property and, on the other hand, the radical challenge to those notions, all of them expressed by the digital world, which proposes for writing what Michel Foucault desired for speech: I would really like to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture, as into all the others I shall be delivering, perhaps over the years ahead. I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyond all possible beginnings. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon to me.52

5 The Author’s Hand

The starting point of this reflection is the constitution of literary archives throughout Europe. The first of these was the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, a project defined in these terms: “The archives aims to collect, catalogue and process all kinds of documents connected with modern German literature (from 1750 up to the present day).” Whence my first question: Why 1750? French and British literary archives, in part inspired by the example of Marbach, are of no direct help in answering this question since they deliberately chose to focus only on records of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such is the case with the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), founded in 1988 with the aim “of gathering, preserving and exploiting the archives of the different actors involved in publishing and aesthetic creation.” IMEC collections, stored and consulted since 1998 in the Abbaye d’Ardenne near Caen, consist mainly of two series of records: 85 archives of publishers, the oldest being the archives of Hachette, Hetzel, and Flammarion – all publishers of the second half of the nineteenth century – and 345 archives of authors who lived in the twentieth century. The same emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is true of the two collections of the Archive of British Publishing and Printing and Authors’ Papers held in the Special Collections of the Library of the University of Reading, where among the literary manuscripts of fifty writers the most spectacular archive is the Beckett Collection with more than six hundred of that author’s manuscripts or typescripts. Following the British and French examples, the answer to my initial question could be a very simple one: modern literary archives collect and preserve documents that were not previously

74  What is a Book? taken into consideration by traditional archives. They save a precious patrimony of modern records and papers that was generally ignored by national or regional archives and was instead preserved by publishers or writers. The date of 1750 remains intriguing, however, because it raises another issue: Would it have been possible to construct literary archives for early modern times? Records of publishers and printers of the first three centuries after Gutenberg’s invention are really exceptional, as are authors’ manuscripts. This absence has worried scholars who do critique génétique [genetic criticism] devoted to following the creative process that leads to the printed text and leaves multiple records: outlines and sketches of the work, notes and documents, series of drafts, corrected proofs. Such a critical approach presupposes that traces of the different stages of the creative process were kept – generally by the author himself. But is genetic criticism possible before the nineteenth or the twentieth century, when authors like Flaubert, Zola, or Proust left traces that permit critics to go, as Pierre-Marc de Biasi has written, “from the author to the writer, from what has been written to writing, from structure to process, from the work to its genesis”?1 Autograph manuscripts before the mid-eighteenth century Such a question led first to a quest for authors’ manuscripts previous to the nineteenth century. For French writers of the eighteenth century, findings are not so rare. Autograph drafts with erasures, corrections, alterations, or annotations exist for Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, Diderot’s La Religieuse, Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (not to mention the exceptional twelve-meter roll of Sade’s Cent vingt journées de Sodome). Also surviving is the autograph manuscript of Rousseau’s Dialogues ou Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques that the author wanted to leave in the choir of Notre-Dame immediately after having completed the work but, because the gates of the cathedral were closed, decided to give it to Condillac. Rousseau made three other autograph copies of the Dialogues, a work that was published only in 1782. French autograph manuscripts do exist, then, but all the examples I have mentioned are from after 1750, as are scribal copies corrected by the author, such as that of Voltaire’s Candide or Diderot’s works copied by his scribe Girbal. Before the mid-eighteenth century, authorial manuscripts are infrequent and were preserved for exceptional reasons. Brantôme, who

The Author’s Hand  75 died in 1614, left to his heirs the seven volumes of his Livre des dames, asking them to publish the work, which was done only in 1665.2 Pascal’s fragments for his apology of the Christian faith were gathered, transcribed, and put in order by the Messieurs de PortRoyal for their edition of the Pensées in 1669–1670. Even today, the Pascal manuscripts fail to resolve the question of the relations between the two copies of this transcription (BNF Ms Fr. 9203 and Fr. 12449), the so-called “Port-Royal” edition of the Pensées and the autograph texts written by Pascal on large sheets of paper and cut up by him. Pascal placed these fragments in various bundles, attaching the slips of paper to one another by a string threaded through a small hole made in each slip. Unfortunately, during the eighteenth century these fragments were reordered and pasted onto the folios of a notebook (BNF Ms. Fr. 9202), which makes it very difficult to consider them the “original” manuscript of the Pensées.3 A last example is Montaigne: his only autograph “literary manuscripts” are the annotations he left in some of the printed books he read (now in the Bibliothéque municipale de Bordeaux, the Bibliothéque nationale de France, and the library of Trinity College, Cambridge) and the corrections and additions he wrote in his copy of the luxury quarto 1588 edition of the Essais (known today as the exemplaire de Bordeaux), in which large margins provided space for lengthy rewritings and additions and additions to the additions.4 There are some exceptions, however, to this scarcity of autograph manuscripts before 1750. The first concerns dramatic works, both in Spain and England. Authorial or partially authorial manuscripts still exist for plays by Calderón, Tirso de Molina, and Lope de Vega. Two of Lope’s forty-six autograph plays are in the collections of the Library of the University of Pennsylvania: Los Benavides, signed by Lope on June 15,1600, and Carlos V en Francia, signed on November 20, 1604.5 The Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid holds seventeen autograph manuscripts by Calderón and twenty-two by Lope, as well as a total of at least one hundred autograph manuscripts by playwrights of the Golden Age.6 Such manuscripts confirm that in his writing practices Lope de Vega respected the rules that he stated in his normative poetics. For him, the first condition for a comedia was the acceptable length of the spectacle (i.e., no more than two hours), which dictated the number of pliegos or folded sheets of paper that the playwright had to write. According to his Nuevo arte de hacer comedias deste tiempo, read in 1609 in the Count of Saldaña’s academy in Madrid, each act must correspond to four pliegos, and since a comedia was composed of three acts, its manuscript could not exceed twelve pliegos. The term pliego must be understood as a

76  What is a Book? sheet of paper folded twice, thus giving four leaves per pliego, sixteen for one act and forty-eight for the entire play.7 The autograph manuscript of the play Carlos V en Francia almost exactly matches that length, since the text consisted of fifty leaves.8 The last folios of the manuscript indicate the reason for its survival: they mention the licenses given by the Inquisitors or the bishops for performances of the play between 1607 and 1620 in various cities of Spain (Valladolid, Madrid, Málaga, Murcia) as if the autograph manuscript has been used as a promptbook by the company of strolling players that owned it. In England as well, some playwrights’ authorial manuscripts survive. One spectacular example is The Booke of Sir Thomas More, an undated dramatic manuscript written by six hands – or seven, with the observations made by the Master of Revels, who asked for some cuts or rewriting (British Library, MS Harleian 7368). The original play seems to have been written, probably between 1592 and 1595, by Anthony Munday, whose handwriting can be identified by a comparison with two of his autograph manuscript plays, John a Kent and John a Cumber (both at the Huntington Library). Henry Chettle and Thomas Dekker seem to have collaborated on the original play. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the manuscript was revised and scenes were added by Thomas Heywood and perhaps also by Shakespeare, whose hand would be Hand D of the manuscript, according to paleographic and stylistic evidence. If this is really the case (as it is now believed, in spite of the weakness of paleographic comparisons between the hand of the two passages attributed to Shakespeare and his few and changeable signatures or his possible but not certain holograph will), the one hundred and fifty-nine lines added in the third scene of Act II and the twenty lines of More’s soliloquy that open Act III would be the only surviving Shakespearean “literary manuscript.”9 The Booke of Sir Thomas More is not the only Elizabethan or Jacobean autograph dramatic manuscript: among other examples, there is one of the six manuscripts of A Game at Chess written entirely or partially in Middleton’s hand.10 The Italian Trecento is another and prior example proving that autograph literary manuscripts existed before the mid-eighteenth century. Petrarch’s autographs are numerous and preserve traces of his creative poetic labor.11 The most spectacular of these manuscripts, studied by Armando Petrucci, are the draft codex of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Vat. Lat. 3196) and the so-called original Canzoniere (Vat. Lat. 3195).12 The first manuscript binds together nine folios and two loose sheets from Petrarch’s papers. It contains sketches, first drafts, corrections, additions and cross-outs but also,

The Author’s Hand  77 in the margins, precise chronological references to the successive stages of drafting individual texts. The second manuscript, the Canzoniere, is an “author’s book” in which Giovanni Malpaghini, Petrarch’s scribe and disciple, copied the opening sections of the first and second parts of the collection, while from 1368 to 1373 Petrarch himself continued the patient labor of copying, making additions and corrections, and reordering materials. This manuscript illustrates Petrarch’s attempts to reform the system of book production and guarantee the author’s control over his works by protecting them against what he perceived to be the faulty copying of professional scribes. Thus with the multiplication of autograph manuscripts, a more direct and authentic relation could be instituted between the author and his readers because, as Petrucci indicates, “a perfect textuality, a direct emanation from the author validated by his autograph writing, was (and forever remained) a guarantee of absolute readability for the reader.”13 The draft codex of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta belongs to another world and shows how writing habits of the vernacular poets were dependent upon contemporary notarial practices. Notarial minutes and poetic autograph manuscripts shared several practices: sketches written in an extremely rapid flowing hand on leaves of paper, notes in the margins witnessing the various phases of elaboration of the text and corrections crossing out fragments of the text transcribed elsewhere with great oblique strokes. Observations of the sort remind us that many poets’ families included notaries: Petrarch was himself the son and grandson of a notary, and Francesco da Barberino, whose part-autograph manuscript of his Documenti d’amore in vernacular verse shows the same characteristics as Petrarch’s draft codex (Vat., Barb. Lat. 4076), was not only the son and grandson of notaries but also a notary himself. The close connection between notarial writing and poetic drafting in the Italian Trecento also indicates that many autograph manuscripts of the early modern period should not be considered equivalent to the literary sketches and drafts of nineteenth-century authors. In the earlier period, authors often acted as their own scribes and wrote in their own hand presentation copies offered to their patrons. Consequently, their manuscripts must be situated – perhaps paradoxically – within the corpus of the scribal copies that constitute the majority of the literary manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is the case, for example, with Middleton’s plays: five out of the six manuscripts of A Game at Chess and the manuscripts of The Witch, Hengist King of Kent and The Lady’s Tragedy are scribal copies, and five of them were copied by the same scrivener,

78  What is a Book? Ralph Crane, who was also employed by Shakespeare’s company. The same is true of the scribal dramatic manuscripts held in the Biblioteca del Palacio in Madrid of eighty pre-1600 plays collected by the Conde de Gondomar in his library in Valladolid14 and more generally of the hundreds of non-autograph copies of comedias and auto sacramentales written in Golden Age Spain for different purposes: as promptbooks used by theatrical companies, as “editions” sold by stationers, or as revisions or adaptations of original plays by autores de comedias, i.e., theatrical entrepreneurs or directors of companies. The connection between scribal copies and autograph manuscripts is shown by the coexistence in the same manuscript of both authorial and scribal hands – Hand C in The Booke of Sir Thomas More is a copyist’s hand – and also by the confusion denounced by Ben Jonson in the epistle that opens the 1607 edition of Volpone in which he stigmatizes both corrupt poets and dishonest scribes. For him “the writers of these days” are no more “the interpreter and arbiter of nature, a teacher of things divine no less than human, a master in manners” because “not only their manners, but their natures, are inverted; and nothing remaining with them of the dignity of poet but the abused name, which every scribe usurps.”15 In this sense, autograph dramatic manuscripts belong within the multiple productions of the professional scribes who transformed “foul papers” into “fair copies” for the censors or the printers, established elegant presentation copies for the patrons and proposed to the readers what Harold Love calls “scribal editions.”16 The decisive role of scribes in the publication process is one of the reasons for the loss of authorial manuscripts in early modern times. In Golden Age Castile, manuscripts sent to the Royal Council to receive aprobación and privilegio (license and privilege) were never autograph copies but always copias en limpio (fair copies) written by a professional amanuensis and often corrected by the author who wanted to change some words or sentences, to introduce additions in the margins, to cross out some lines, or even to attach fly leaves to the manuscript. Once approved and eventually corrected by the censors, the manuscript was given to the publisher and then to the printer. This printing copy, called in Spanish original, subjected the text to a first series of transformations in spelling and punctuation. Whereas authorial manuscripts, for example their letters, generally show very few punctuation marks and a great irregularity in spelling, the scribal “originals” (which of course were not at all original) provided a necessary legibility to the text intended for the censors and the compositors.

The Author’s Hand  79 Once the scribal copy of the autograph manuscript entered the printshop, it was further prepared by the corrector, who added accents, capital letters, punctuation, and casting-off marks so the sheets could be set into type in forms and not seriatim. Thus prepared and corrected, the manuscript copy was composed and printed. After these textual interventions made by the copyist, the censor, the copyeditor, and the compositors, the autograph manuscript lost all importance. Moreover, after the printing of the text, the printer’s copy shared the same fate and was generally destroyed or recycled. This is why only a limited number of the copies used in the printshops have survived,17 with the exception, however, of Spain, where the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid holds several hundred originales dating from the mid-sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. This is perhaps because in Spain, once a book was printed, it had to be collated with the licensed manuscript by a secretary of the Royal Council in order to check that nothing had been added to the text after its licensing by the censors.18 The fetishism of the author’s hand So why were autograph manuscripts kept and preserved after the mid-eighteenth century? Clearly, the constitution of literary archives cannot be separated from the construction of philosophical, aesthetic, and juridical categories that defined a new regime for the composition, publication and appropriation of texts – particularly the “literary” ones. The lawsuits that developed in England following the Statute of Queen Anne in 1710 led to a novel association of notions of individual authorship, aesthetic originality, and literary property as opposed to collaborative writing, recycling of stories or commonplaces, and stationers’ right in copy. Defense of the traditional rights of London booksellers and printers, which had been undermined by this new legislation that limited the duration of the copyright to fourteen years, assumed that ownership of the manuscript implied a perpetual patrimonial right to a work once the publisher acquired it from the author, and hence that the author previously possessed an imprescriptible but transmissible ownership of his composition. The object of this primary propriety was the work as composed by its author in its immaterial existence, “invisible and intangible” in the words of William Enfield in 1774.19 Defined by the fundamental and perpetual identity given to it by the mind of its author, the

80  What is a Book? work transcended any possible material embodiment. According to Blackstone, who defended the cause of the London booksellers: The identity of a literary composition consists intirely in the sentiment and the language; the same conceptions, cloathed in the same words, must necessarily be the same composition: and whatever method be taken of conveying that composition to the ear or the eye of another, by recital, by writing, or by printing, in any number of copies or at any period of time, it is always the identical work of the author which is so conveyed; and no other man can have a right to convey or transfer it without his consent, either tacitly or expressly given.20

For Diderot, every work is the legitimate property of its author because a literary composition is the irreducibly singular expression of that author’s thoughts and feelings. As he put it in his Mémoire sur le commerce de la librairie: What property can a man own if a work of the mind – the unique fruit of his upbringing, his studies, his evenings, his age, his researches, his observations; if his finest hours, the most beautiful moments of his life; if his own thoughts, the feelings of his heart, the most precious part of himself, that which does not perish, which makes him immortal – does not belong to him?21

After Diderot, Fichte reframed the same claim in a new way in the course of the debate about the reprinting of books in Germany, where piracy was especially widespread owing to the fragmentation of the Empire into many small states in which book privileges were confined to the narrow territory of their sovereignty. To the classic dichotomy between the book’s two natures, corporeal and spiritual, as opus mechanicum and discourse addressed to the public, he added a second one, located within the text itself, between the ideas expressed by a book and the form given to those ideas by writing. Ideas are universal by nature, purpose, and use, hence no personal appropriation of ideas can be justified. Literary property is legitimate only because each person has his own thought processes, his own way of forming concepts and connecting them. .  .  . Now, since pure ideas without sensible images cannot be thought, even less are they capable of presentation to others. Hence each writer must give his thoughts a certain form, and he can give them no other form than his own, because he has no other. .  .  . No one can appropriate his thoughts without thereby altering their form. This latter remains for ever his exclusive property.22

The Author’s Hand  81 The textual form, always irreducibly singular, was the sole but powerful justification for individual appropriation of the common ideas conveyed to others by printed books. Thus, paradoxically, in order to conceptualize texts as individual property, they had to be divorced conceptually from any particular material embodiment and located in the author’s mind – or hand. Indeed, the nearest that one could come to a material form of an immaterial work was the trace left by the author’s hand. The autograph manuscript thus became the outward and visible sign of the inward and invisible genius of the writer for all those who were not able to visit or to meet him. This was not the case in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, when a signature could be delegated to someone either on the parish registers or on a will, and when even autograph signatures could be very different one from another, as seen in the six authenticated Shakespeare signatures. At the time, the printed text could be considered a fiction of the hand without any need to show it. In their address to “The great Variety of Readers,” the two editors of the Shakespeare First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, claimed that their printed edition of Shakespeare’s “writings” was in fact conveying Shakespeare’s handwriting: “His mind and hand went together. And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”23 In the eighteenth century, such an affirmation was no longer sufficient and the author’s real hand became the guarantee of the authenticity of his works. Consequently, forging autograph manuscripts became an art of the time. In February 1795, William-Henry Ireland exhibited in his father’s house several recently “discovered” Shakespeare manuscripts: the autograph manuscript of King Lear; two unknown plays, Henry II and Vortigern and Rowena (performed without great success and only once at the Drury Lane Theater on April 2); the letters exchanged by the poet and his patron, Southampton; the very Protestant Shakespeare’s “Profession of Faith” and a letter addressed to him by Queen Elizabeth.24 When the documents were published in December 1795 under the title, Authentic Account of the Shakespearean MSS., Edmond Malone was the first to expose Ireland’s forgeries by comparing the handwriting in the forged documents and authentic ones. His meticulous exposure of the imposture was published with the long but significant title, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellanies Papers and Legal Instruments. Published Dec. 2 MDCCXCV, and Attributed to Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, and Henry, Earl of Southampton: Illustrated by Fac-similes of the Genuine Hand-writing of that Nobleman, and of Her Majesty; A New Fac-simile of the Handwriting

82  What is a Book? of Shakespeare, Never before Exhibited; and Other Authentick Documents.25 Genuine handwriting had become the material embodiment of the immaterial spirit of the author. In the twentieth century, the fetishism of the author’s hand led some writers to the fabrication of supposed autograph manuscripts that were, in fact, fair copies of preexisting writings. This was the case, for example, for the famous “original” autograph manuscript of Ulysses now in Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum and Library. This script was written by Joyce as a clean copy of previous drafts (generally written in his notebooks) in order to make a legible text that a typist could read, but Joyce also thought of it as an object that could be sold to a collector and whose value lay in its being a handwritten authorial manuscript. The New York lawyer and art patron John Quinn bought it from Joyce in 1919, and then in 1923 sold it with his collection in an auction, when it was acquired by Dr Rosenbach, a man who was both a scholar and a book dealer. As Vicki Mahaffey wrote, the Rosenbach Manuscript of Ulysses is at once “a presentation manuscript and a working manuscript, a relic and a commodity.”26 The strong relation between autograph manuscripts and the authenticity of the work was internalized by writers who became archivists of themselves and, before Hugo or Flaubert, created their own literary archives. Rousseau kept the draft, four autograph copies, corrected proofs and annotated printed copies of three different editions of La Nouvelle Héloïse, a collection that constitutes a “dossier” of several hundred pages of the genesis of that work.27 Goethe’s papers offer a similar example. In a letter written to Chancellor Müller toward the end of his life, Goethe indicated: “My manuscripts, my letters and my collections deserve the greatest attention. . . . Not for a long time will so rich and varied a collection be found for a sole individual. . . . This is the reason why I hope that its conservation will be secured.”28 For both authors, not only the project of a complete or general edition of their works but also – or mainly – a very intense autobiographical relationship with writing led them to constitute meticulously “the poet and writer’s archives,” according to the title that Goethe gave to one of his essays. Later, the same relationship could sometimes be detached from any desire to transmit autograph manuscripts to posterity and as expressing the inseparability between the work as corpus and the author’s body as corpse. This was the case when Flaubert expressed a desire in a letter to Louise Colet, dated April 3, 1852: “I dearly hope that my manuscripts last as long as I myself; it is all that I want. I would have them buried with me, as a savage does with his horse.”29

The Author’s Hand  83 Literary archives, oeuvre and biography In his famous lecture, “What Is an Author?,” delivered in 1968, Foucault stated that, far from being relevant to all texts or genres in all ages, assigning a work to a proper name is neither universal nor constant: “The author function is . . . characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.” The attribution of a proper name to a discourse was for Foucault the result of “specific and complex operations” that put the unity and coherence of a work (or a set of works) into relation with the identity of a constructed subject. These operations rely on a dual process of selection and exclusion. First, the discourses assignable to the author-function – the “oeuvre” – must be separated from the “millions of traces left by someone after his death.” Second, the elements pertinent to the definition of the author’s position must be picked out from among the innumerable events that constitute the life of any individual.30 What is transformed in these two operations when literary archives exist and when they do not? The presence of abundant literary archives makes delimitation of the work itself more complex and makes it more difficult to clearly separate “literary” texts, recognized as such, from the “millions of [written] traces left by an individual.” For Foucault, the problem was both theoretical and technical. He wrote ironically: When undertaking the publication of Nietzsche’s work, for example, where should one stop? Surely everything must be published, but what is “everything”? Everything that Nietzsche himself published, certainly. And what about the rough drafts for his works? Obviously. The plans for his aphorisms? Yes. The deleted passages and the notes at the bottom of the pages? Yes. What if, within a workbook filled with aphorisms, one finds a reference, the notation of a meeting or of an address, or a laundry list: Is it a work, or not? Why not? And so on, ad infinitum.31

“Is it a work, or not?” We need now to invert Foucault’s question about the infinite “proliferation” of Nietzsche’s writings and raise the issue of their possible or necessary “rarefaction” – to use the term that Foucault uses in L’ordre du discours. As proved convincingly by Mazzino Montinari, Nietzsche’s most canonical work, Der Wille zur Macht, was never written by him but must be considered a kind of “forgery” or fabrication of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s. She cut up, gathered together, and ordered into a book various fragments (notes, sketches, reflections) left by her brother, who himself had no intention

84  What is a Book? of transforming them into a book.32 Therefore, does The Will to Power exist as a work, and should it be included in Nietzsche’s work or not? Another example of the textual manipulations made possible by the existence of authorial literary archives is given by Borges who on several occasions set the limits of his “works.”33 He excluded from his Obras completas, published by Emecé in 1974, three books that he had published between 1925 and 1928 – Inquisiciones, El tamaño de mi esperanza, and El idioma de los argentinos – and he forbade any republishing of these three banished works. They were only republished in 1993 and 1994 by his widow Maria Kodama, seven years after Borges’s death – and not without a fierce controversy. Conversely, Borges, together with his editor (in this case Jean-Pierre Bernès, editor of his Oeuvres complètes translated into French and published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), selected all the texts he considered it necessary to include in his oeuvre, that is, not only books and anthologies, but also reviews of books and movies, prologues, articles, chronicles, and the first printed versions of many poems or fictions that he had kept in his personal archive or were held by collectors.34 Modern literary archives that permit such manipulations are not without retroactive effects on the editorial practices devoted to works printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the one hand, they have inspired a quest for identifying the kind of manuscript used for the publication of printed texts. Paradoxically perhaps, the material and analytical bibliography rigorously describes and analyzes the different states (editions, issues, copies) in which a given work appeared in the hope of establishing an ideal copy text purged of the alterations inflicted on it by the process of publication and representing the text as it was written, dictated, or imagined by its author. In a discipline almost exclusively devoted to the comparison of printed texts, this led to an obsession with lost manuscripts and a radical distinction between the “essentials” of a work, located in its absent autograph manuscript, and the scribal or typographic “accidentals” that have distorted or corrupted it. On the other hand, the unstable delimitation of the work introduced by the richness of literary archives inspired editorial decisions for authors who did not leave any autograph documents. The proliferation of the work can be illustrated by the publication of two texts for the “same” work, as was the case for King Lear in the Complete Oxford Shakespeare,35 or more recently for A Game at Chess in the Oxford Middleton’s Collected Works edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. Conversely, the “rarefaction” of the work can find an

The Author’s Hand  85 example in the same edition with the provocative inclusion within Middleton’s corpus of plays that are generally published under another name such as The Life of Timon of Athens, The Tragedy of Macbeth, or Measure for Measure, in which Shakespeare’s hand is considered as not being the only one.36 The most important consequence of the existence of literary archives and the conceptual configuration that made them possible or necessary since the mid-eighteenth century is the relation established between the author’s work and the writer’s life, between Borges and “I.” Since the mid-eighteenth century, literary compositions are no more thought of as based on stories that were reused, commonplaces that were shared, or collaborations that were required by patrons or theatrical entrepreneurs, but rather as original creations that express the most intimate sentiments and decisive and personal experiences. The first consequence of this has been a desire to edit an author’s works according to the chronology of his or her life; the second was the writing of literary biographies – a genre radically different from the “lives” of the philosophers or artists written in the Renaissance whose aim was the constitution of repertoires of proper names and proposition of historical periodization without establishing a strong relation between the narration of the life and the chronology or the contents of the works. For Shakespeare, Edmond Malone was the first to associate the two endeavors. He established the first putative chronology of Shakespeare’s works,37 and he based his “Life of Shakespeare” (printed in 1821)38 on “originall and authentick documents,” breaking with the compilations of anecdotes printed by Nicholas Rowe in his 1709 edition. Consequently, the plays had to be published in the order in which Shakespeare had written them and not according to their distribution into “Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies” in the Folio tradition. Boswell respected this decision in his 1821 re-edition of Malone’s 1790 edition – except for the “histories,” which were still ordered according to reigns, as if the kings were forever more important than their poet. The task was not easy, however, given the absence of any autograph and autobiographical Shakespearean documents and the very few documents about his life. In compensation for scanty documentation, Malone inaugurated the fundamental requirement for any literary biography of writers without archives: locating works within the author’s life requires finding the life within the works. As Margreta de Grazia writes: The life gave way to the work which passed back into the life, all on a single temporal continuum. In lieu of archival documents, the plays

86  What is a Book? were positioned to serve as the primary sources for information about Shakespeare’s life during his years in London. The arrangement itself suggested that only by scrutinizing the plays exhaustively, as if they were archival documents, could Shakespeare’s life in its entirety – from the beginning through to the end – be known.39

After Malone, all of Shakespeare’s biographers have followed this imperative to impose onto authors without archives an interpretive paradigm made possible only by the existence of rich literary records and by a new understanding and reading of literary compositions. A “radical incompatibility,” to use Margreta de Grazia’s expression, thus exists between the romantic or pre-romantic aesthetic of the work, written, as Diderot said, by the heart of its author and readable in his or her genuine hand, and a previous regime of textual production that did not consider that “literature” (a category that did not even exist in its modern sense) must necessarily be assigned to individual singularity. It is this incompatibility that explains why the Deutsches Literaturarchiv was well advised to launch a quest for autograph and authorial materials only for a period beginning in 1750. And it is by keeping such an incompatibility in mind that we must understand the effects produced on editorial practices, textual studies, and reading habits by the existence of literary archives and, more fundamentally, the conceptual mutations that, from the eighteenth century on, made them possible, desirable, and necessary.

6 Pauses and Pitches

Edwardum occidere nolite timere bonum est. In Marlowe’s Edward II, these are the six words written on the paper that Mortimer gives to Lightborne when he sends him to the castle of Berkeley where Edward is kept prisoner. Six words. But what is their meaning? If Lightborne marks a pause after the first four, he must kill the king: “Feare not to kill the king/tis good he die.” But if he divides the sentence into two equal parts, the order has to be understood very differently, and the king’s life must be protected: “Kill not the king/ tis good to fear the worst.” What is at stake in the “unpointed” Latin sentence is nothing less than the life or the death of a sovereign, or, to put it more “cunninglie,” as Mortimer says, the attribution of the crime, not to the person who wrote the sentence and commanded the murder, but to the one who received the order and gave it one of its two possible meanings.1 Fortunately, punctuation is not always so dramatic. But always it constructs meaning by guiding the eye – or the voice. As Yves Bonnefoy suggests in a short text entitled “Les deux points, c’est un peu, en prose la poésie” [The colon in prose is a little poetry], a distinction should be made between two systems of punctuation: The punctuation that elucidates the articulations of a discourse is that required by the syntax, I suppose, and that thus tends to coincide with the structures of thought. Whereas a punctuation that would help reading would instead be there for understanding the needs of the voice or for making rhythms and sounds obvious: in sum, not for thinking but for seducing.2

88  What is a Book? Voice and spelling In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was that second sort of punctuation that was the aim of all the reformers of orthography in both England and France. More than standardizing spelling, their purpose was to approach perfection or, at least, the lesser imperfection about which Antonio de Nebrija, speaking of Castilian, wrote in his Gramática, printed in 1492: “We must write as we pronounce, and pronounce as we write.”3 In all European languages it was hard to effect a close correspondence between utterance and spelling. A first possibility would be to pronounce all the letters of words, as is done in Latin. It is that pedantic manner of speaking English that Holophernes praises in Love’s Labour’s Lost when he accuses (perhaps paradoxically) the Spanish Don Adriano de Armado of being among the “rackers of orthography” who have the “abhominable” habit of suppressing letters in the English words they pronounce: He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. I abhor such fanatical phantasims, such insociable and point-devise companions, such rackers of orthography, as to speake dout, sine “b,” when he should say “doubt”; “det” when he should pronounce “debt” – “d, e, b, t,” not “d, e, t.” He clepeth a calf, “cauf,” half “hauf”: neighbour vocatur “nebour” – “neigh” abbreviated “ne.” This is abhominable – which he would call “abominable.” It insinuateth me of insanire – ne intelligis, domine? – to make frantic, lunatic.4

A less extravagant solution opts for the opposite approach, proposing to reform the spelling of the words in order to adjust spelling to pronunciation. The titles of books published in England claiming to effect an “amendment of orthographie” indicated clearly that their aim was not fundamentally the reduction of diversity in spelling, but harmony between writing and “the image of man’s voice,” as John Hart would have it, or the accurate orthographic rendering of “English speech,” for William Bullokar.5 In France, the desire to impose an “oral writing,” as Nina Catach puts it, went beyond a transformation in spelling. With Ronsard, that desire led to a profound revision of the alphabet itself that would involve the introduction of new characters borrowed from the Spanish alphabet (the ñ and the ll) and the rendering of some letters useless – k and z would systematically be substituted for c or q, writing, for example, “kalité” (for qualité) and “roze” (for rose). He states: “Our manner of writing is deeply vicious and corrupted, and it seems to me that it needs a profound reform, one that will restore the K and

Pauses and Pitches  89 the Z, introduce new characters for the double N, in the manner of the Spanish ñ, for writing Monseigneur, and a double L for writing orgueilleux.”6 The printing houses did not follow such radical and audacious propositions in their practices. They did, however, introduce a decisive innovation for a better correspondence between textual inscription and oral delivery: a determination of the different lengths of the pauses. The fundamental text here is a work of the printer (and author) Étienne Dolet entitled La punctuation de la langue françoyse, which he himself printed in Lyon in 1540. Each sentence or période, when subjected to “human breathing,” can be structured by pauses of one of three lengths, indicated by three different punctuation marks: the point à queue ou virgule (the English comma); the comma, as Dolet calls the colon, “which is placed in a suspended sentence,” and the point rond, full stop or period, which “is always placed at the end of a sentence.” Dolet continues: Every argument or discourse, either oratory or poetic, is divided into periods. Period is a Greek word for what Romans call clausula, or compraehensio verborum, viz. a sentence. This period or sentence is complete, and divided by the punctuation marks mentioned above [comma, colon, period]. And usually [the sentence] must have only two or three parts because if its length exceeds human breathing, it is defective.7

A similar nomenclature but with different ways of designating the punctuation marks was proposed by Jean Gérard in his edition of Olivétan’s Instruction des enfans, published in 1537 in Geneva, where he distinguishes between the virgule ou point à queue, the deux points and the point final.8 French dictionaries at the end of the seventeenth century reflect the success of the system imposed by the sixteenth-century printers, but enriched by a larger use of the semicolon, rare until 1550, to indicate a pause of intermediate duration between the comma and the colon. The same dictionaries also show that a distance had been established between the reader’s voice and punctuation, which Furetière’s 1690 dictionary considered a “grammatical observation” marking the syntactic and logical divisions of discourse. Emphasis What was missing in this system of punctuation was a way to indicate the pitch of the voice rather than the length of pauses. This led to

90  What is a Book? the unexpected use of some punctuation marks, deprived of their original meaning and appropriated so as to indicate to the reader where vocal emphasis was required. This is how Ronsard used the exclamation mark in his address to his reader that opens the first four books of his epic poem La Franciade (1572): I beg only one thing of you, dear reader, that you pronounce my verses properly and that you adapt your voice to match their intensity. Do not read them, as some do, as if they were a mere epistle or some royal letter, rather than a poem deserving proper enunciation. I further beg of you that, when you see the “!” sign, you kindly raise your voice a little to give more grace to what you are reading.9

In the case of Racine, as George Forestier has suggested, the unexpected presence of a question mark in a sentence that is not interrogative may indicate an exceptional use of this punctuation mark as a signal of intensity, as, for example, in the first edition of La Thébaïde (III, 3): “Parlez, parlez, ma Fille?” [Speak, speak, my daughter]. Conversely, the absence of a question mark at the end of an interrogative sentence indicates that the voice must remain even, without any emphasis: “Ma Fille, avez-vous vu l’excès de nos misères” [Have you, my Child, heard our surpassing woes] (La Thébaïde, I, 2).10 Another way to set about “toning and laying Emphasis” on a word in a printed text was to set it in italics and begin it with a capital letter. In his Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, Joseph Moxon states: Words of great Emphasis are also Set in Italick, and sometimes begin with a Capital Letter: If the Emphasis bear hard upon the Word to be exprest as well as the Thing to be exprest, it ought to begin with a Capital. I shall bring for instance an Observation I made above forty years ago on the Word that, viz. that that Word may be reiterated five times, and make good Sense: If it be set thus it will seem nonsense, that that that, that, that; but if it be Set thus, that that That that that Man would have stand at the beginning of the Line should stand at the end; it will, by toning and laying Emphasis on the middlemost That become good Sense. Now all the thats ought to be Set in Italick, and the middlemost That ought to begin with a Capital, because it is both the Thing and Word.11

Such use of capital letters to indicate that the readers or the players must raise their voices and detach a word is given in the first editions of Racine’s plays, for example, in this line from Bajazet: “J’ai cédé mon Amant, Tu tu t’étonnes du reste” [I’ve lost my Lover and You’re shocked I die].12

Pauses and Pitches  91 The last edition of La Bruyère’s Caractères, revised by the author and published in 1696, provides a superb example of the musical uses of the different lengths of pauses and capital letters. The original punctuation of this edition, which was followed by Louis Van Delft in his edition of the text, shows clearly that La Bruyère conceived of the composition of all of his caractères and remarques as a sole musical phrase unbroken by periods but reliant on alternating agitated sequences, the rhythm of which is given by a rapid succession of commas, and longer sequences without punctuation. He treats the text as if it were a musical score and the punctuation marked the different tempi of the arias: staccato, allegro, largo. This mode of textual composition, where punctuation marks guide “breathing” and vocal tone, is clearly intended for reading the work aloud, in whole or in part, either for the reader’s own pleasure or for a select audience. La Bruyère’s musical punctuation is not the only device that governs the aesthetics and reception of his text. The capital letters used for words within a sentence affected the construction of meaning by giving dignity to some words, and consequently to the individuals, institutions, or concepts that they designated. They also suggested that the reader must detach those words by making a pause before them or raising his or her voice when reading them. These capitals therefore contribute to the visual and semantic effect produced by the ways in which the text was inscribed on the page and attest to La Bruyère’s typographic sensitivity. To perceive such a sensitivity, however, we need to go back to the punctuation of the seventeenthcentury editions and free Les Caractères from the anachronistic, misleading and heavy punctuation that, beginning in the nineteenth century, introduced final stops and quotation marks at the same time that it suppressed capital letters.13 Compositors and correctors Can we suppose that all authors were as attentive as Ronsard or La Bruyère to the punctuation of the printed editions of their works? And was punctuation the task and responsibility of the author? As Malcolm Parkes states: “Printed punctuation may reflect that of the author, that of the person who prepared the copy for the press, that of the compositor, or all three.”14 We could add to the list the reader, often invited to correct the punctuation of the book he has acquired according not only to a list of errata printed in the edition but also to his or her own judgment as, for example, in the 1543 London

92  What is a Book? edition of St John Chrysostom’s Homiliae: “Whenever you find punctuation missing and accents either wrongly positioned or else omitted altogether, it will be an act of kindness on your part, gentle reader, to emend them according to judgement.”15 In Golden Age Spain, punctuation, or apuntuación, was the task of the compositors or the correctors. In 1675, Melchor de Cabrera, writing in defense of fiscal exemptions for printers, stressed that “the compositor [must] take care of question marks, exclamation marks and parentheses.”16 A few years later, according to Alonso Víctor de Paredes in his Institución y origen del arte de la imprenta, composed around 1680, “The corrector [must] mark the right punctuation.”17 Decisions concerning material aspects of the text were thus clearly assigned to the multiple agents involved in the process of publication. Today, however, because traditions in the field of textual criticism differ, the main responsibility is not given to those same individuals or their latter-day counterparts. Physical bibliography emphasized the role of the compositors. The compositors of early modern printshops did not all spell words or mark punctuation in the same ways. This is precisely why “spelling analysis” allows us to attribute the composition of a particular printer’s forme to a certain compositor, and why it constitutes the basis for reconstructing the actual process of the making of a book in the printing house, either seriatim, by following the order of the copy text, or by formes in which the pages printed on the same side of a sheet were composed one after another. In this analytical perspective, punctuation is considered, like spelling, to be a result of the decisions of the compositors who, according to Moxon, must “make the Indenting, Pointing, Breaking, Italicking [of a work] the better sympathize with the Author’s Genius, and also with the capacity of the Reader.”18 But, as Alonso Víctor de Paredes stated, spelling and punctuation can also be guided by necessity when the casting off of the copy that allows composition by formes has been done wrong.19 In that case, the compositors had to adjust the layout of the page, the size of the types, and the punctuation in order to save space or fill the space left for composition on the last page of the signature.20 According to Paredes, in order to resolve the difficulty, compositors sometimes used “medios feos y no permididos” [ugly and forbidden means], adding or leaving out words or sentences in the text that they were composing. From another and more philological perspective, an essential role in punctuation was played, not in the composition process, but in the preparation of the copy by correctors who added accents, capital

Pauses and Pitches  93 letters, and punctuation marks. Although choices relative to punctuation remained the result of a process connected with the printshop, they were assigned to the clerics, university graduates, or schoolmasters employed by publishers and printers. Paolo Trovato has noted how important it was for the publishers of the Cinquecento who insisted on the “correctness” of the books they published to publicize their editions, putting on their title pages expressions such as “con ogni diligenza corretto” [corrected with all due diligence].21 Whence the decisive role of copy-editors, who were sometimes also proofreaders and whose textual interventions were spread out over several stages of the publishing process: the preparation of the copy, proofreading, stop-press corrections, the compilation of errata in their diverse forms such as printed pages of errata within the book, loose leaves inserted in the book, or corrections made by hand in each printed copy. At every stage of this process, the punctuation of the text could be enriched or transformed. In the sixteenth century, the texts that underwent such punctuation by the correctors belonged to different repertories: classical works, either Greek or Latin;22 texts in the vernacular that circulated as manuscripts and the spelling and at times the language of which (as is the case in Italy with Tuscan) were standardized;23 the works of contemporary authors whose handwriting was often very difficult to read. In his Orthotypographia, printed in 1608 in Leipzig, Hieronymus Hornschuch complained about the negligence and carelessness of authors who give printers “faulty manuscripts which cannot be read except with extreme difficulty.” “Therefore,” Hornschuch writes, I should like, not so much in the name of the correctors as of printers, earnestly to advise and request all those who ever intend to publish anything in print to present it in such a way that the question need never be asked in the printer’s office which the slave in the comedy [Plautus, Pseudolus] asked: “Do hens too have hands?”

Inverting the usual distribution of roles, Hornschuch enjoins the author to see to the punctuation: What is almost most important of all, let him punctuate his writing. For every day many mistakes are made by many people because of this; and in poetry nothing is more tiresome or blameworthy than the number of people who leave out punctuation marks. .  .  . Moreover, correct punctuation produces great elegance and leads more than anything else to a clear understanding of the

94  What is a Book? subject-matter, whereas inconsistent punctuation seems to be the product of a disorderly mind.

Therefore, the author ought to send to the printing house, not his “actual rough copy” – some would say his foul papers – but a copy “re-written as neatly as possible either by himself or his amanuensis, on firm, non-absorbent paper, and checked again with the utmost care.”24 Authorial punctuation? In the examples he gave in his Dictionnaire, Furetière stated, as might be expected: “This print-shop corrector understands punctuation perfectly well,” but also, and more surprisingly, “The exactness of this author is such that he even pays attention to periods and commas.”25 If the first statement follows normal procedure and assigns punctuation to the technical skills proper to copy-editors employed by the printers, the second refers to authors’ customary lack of interest in punctuation. It also indicates, however, that some rare authors were as attentive to the punctuation of their texts as were Ronsard or La Bruyère. Then there is Molière. Can we find traces of his use of punctuation in the printed editions of his plays? As we know, it would be very risky to attribute too directly to him the punctuation choices found in the first editions of his plays. For example, in the 1660 edition of Les Précieuses Ridicules, punctuation varies from sheet to sheet, even from one printer’s forme to another, according to the preferences or habits of the compositors.26 Nevertheless, the differences between the punctuation of the first editions of the plays (printed shortly after their first Parisian productions) and later editions allow us to reconstruct, if not authorial intent, at least the implied destination of the text and its relation to theatrical performance. The punctuation of the first editions of Molière’s plays shows a clear link to the oral delivery of the text, either because it recalls the text as it was spoken on the stage or because it guided a possible reading aloud of the play. Consequently, the original punctuation marks are more numerous and are often used for portraying the characters in different ways. One example is the comma, present in the 1669 edition of Le Tartuffe and suppressed thereafter, that follows the first word of the line: “Gros, et gras, le teint frais, et la bouche vermeille” [Stout, and fat, with blooming cheeks and ruddy lips] (I, 4). Or the accumulation of commas and capital letters that distin-

Pauses and Pitches  95 guishes the pedantic way of speaking of the Master of Philosophy from the fluid speech of the Master of Dance in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (II, 3).27 The original punctuation also emphasized words charged with particular significance. A spectacular example is the last two lines in Le Tartuffe, spoken by Orgon. Modern editions have printed these lines without any indication of pause: “Et par un doux hymen couronner en Valère/La flame d’un amant généreux et sincère.” The first edition of the play in 1669 and the next edition of 1673 both put commas, in particular, one just before the last words “& sincere”: “Et par un doux hymen, couronner en Valere,/La flame d’un Amant genereux, & sincere.” The last word of the entire play is thus clearly detached and designated as the antonym of the word that figures on the title page, Le Tartuffe ou L’Imposteur.28 Whoever was responsible for this expressive and theatrical punctuation (Molière himself, a scribe, a corrector, the compositors), it indicated a strong relation with the voice – either the voices of the actors on the stage or the voices of those who would read the play out loud and share the pleasure of the text with their listeners. Punctuation games: “to stand upon points” In early modern England, one frequently finds a jocular use of punctuation, either in the “punctuation poem,” the meaning of which changes depending on the reader’s choice to respect or ignore the pauses indicated by the commas or the periods,29 or, on the stage, in comical or dramatic effects produced by faulty punctuation. The most famous example of this is of course the prologue declaimed by Quince before the performance of the “Comedy of Pyramus and Thisbea” given by the Athenian “mechanicals” before the court of Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Prologue: If we offend, it is with our good will. That you should thinke, we come not to offend, But with good will. To shew our simple skill, That is the true beginning of our end.

A correct punctuation would have given: If we offend, it is with our good will That you should think, we come not to offend. But with good will to show our simple skill: That is the true beginning of our end.

96  What is a Book? The scene continues: Theseus:  This fellow doth not stand upon points. Lysander:  He hath rid his Prologue, like a rough Colt: he knowes not the stoppe. A good morall my Lord. It is not enough to speake; but to speake true.30

The capitatio benevolentiae is turned into its contrary by the wrong pauses made by Quince during the delivery of his speech. The compositors of the Quarto edition of 1600, and after them those of the Folio, translated the artisan’s comical clumsiness typographically by putting full stops in wrong places, thus reversing the intended meaning of the text without changing a single word. As Theseus concludes, when punctuation is wrongly distributed, speech is “like a tangled Chain, nothing impaired, but all disordered.” The treacherous Mortimer and the clumsy Quince remind us that punctuation affects meaning. Must we accept the traditional thesis that, since the eighteenth century, grammatical and syntactic punctuation has replaced a rhetorical punctuation that indicated pauses and, sometimes, pitches?31 Or should we consider, with Malcolm Parkes, that the balance between “delineating the rhetorical structure of a period and drawing attention to the logical relationships expressed by its syntactical structures” has dominated the uses of punctuation from the Renaissance onwards and can be found in that same period or even in one same text?32 Is it also legitimate to suppose that all the individuals to whom decisions on punctuation can be assigned shared the same norms and the same expectations? Or, according to Phillip Gaskell’s hypothesis, should we not trace the variations among different punctuations for the “same” work to diverse destinations or uses of the text?33 The profound distance between the actor’s script and the printed edition in the case of Edward Alleyn when he played Orlando in Robert Greene’s The Historie of Orlando Furioso34 or the manuscript punctuation added by John Ward on his printed copy of the 1676 edition of Hamlet35 could support such a hypothesis. A final question might be to elucidate the reasons and modalities for the attempts to restore oral and rhetorical punctuation during the eighteenth century. It was in 1754, and only in 1754, in the second edition of its Ortografía de la lengua española, that the Real Academia introduced into the Spanish language the inverted question mark and inverted exclamation mark to guide the reader’s intonation: After a long examination, the Academy thought it possible to use the same question mark turned upside down and put it before the word

Pauses and Pitches  97 with which the interrogative intonation begins, besides the regular question mark at the end of the period, in order to avoid the confusion that the lack of such a punctuation mark often produces in the reading of long sentences.36

Thirty-five years later, Benjamin Franklin proposed introducing a question mark at the beginning of interrogative sentences in English, as was the habit of Spanish printers, so that an “expressive typography” could properly order the modulation of the voice. In a letter addressed to Noah Webster Jr, dated December 26, 1789, he wrote: Farther to be more sensible of the Advantage of clear and distinct Printing, let us consider the Assistance it affords in Reading well aloud to an Auditory. In so doing the Eye generally slides forward three or four Words before the Voice. If the Sight clearly distinguishes what the coming Words are, it gives time to order the Modulation of the Voice to express them properly. But if they are obscurely printed, or disguised by omitting the Capitals and long s’s, or otherwise, the Reader is apt to modulate wrong, and finding he has done so, he is obliged to go back and begin the Sentence again; which lessens the Pleasure of the Hearers. This leads me to mention an old Error in our Mode of Printing. We are sensible that when a Question is met with in Reading, there is a proper Variation to be used in the Management of the Voice. We have therefore a Point, called an Interrogation, affix’d to the Question in order to distinguish it. But this is absurdly placed at its End, so that the Reader does not discover it, ’till he finds he has wrongly modulated his Voice and is therefore obliged to begin again the Sentence. To prevent this, the Spanish Printers, more sensibly, place an Interrogation at the Beginning as well as at the End of a Question. . . . The Practice of our Ladies in meeting five or six together to form little busy Parties, when each is employed in some useful Work; while one reads to them, is so commendable in itself, that it deserves the Attention of Authors and Printers to make it as pleasing as possible, both to the Reader and Hearers.37

Consequently, for Franklin, it would be possible to organize other gatherings than ladies’ sewing circles around reading aloud and oral delivery, but also, or mainly, to create a public space based on the reproduction of oral speech – a public space that would not necessarily be enclosed within the confines of the ancient city state. On stage, the life or death of a king could depend on the placing of a comma. But punctuation also mattered for the framing of the new republican political sphere.

7 Translation

“Cut off from reality, the Spain of 1600 preferred to dream.”1 That dream, sublimely interpreted by Cervantes, was a refuge in the face of the end of a world. Despite appearing at the peak of its power, Spain in the early seventeenth century was undermined by its weaknesses and, in Pierre Vilar’s opinion, the history of the hidalgo turned knight errant is the most pointed expression of that contradiction: “Cervantes bid an ironic, cruel, and tender farewell to the feudal values whose death in the world – and, paradoxically, at the price of its ruin, whose survival in their own country – the Spanish conquistadors unwittingly prepared. In this unique dialectic of Spanish imperialism lies the secret of Don Quixote.”2 The time of Quixote The wide distribution of Cervantes’s work transmitted that secret well beyond the frontiers of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal, which had been subject to the Spanish king since 1580. The “history,” as written by Cide Hamete Benegeli, portrays its own circulation. In chapter 3 of Part II of the adventures of Don Quixote, published in 1615, when Don Quixote asks the bachiller Sansón Carasco, who is returning from Salamanca: “So it’s true that there’s a history about me and that it’s a Moor and a sage who wrote it?,” the young man responds: “It’s so true, señor, that I am convinced that as of now there are more than twelve thousand copies of that history in print. And if you don’t believe it, just ask around in Portugal, Barcelona, and Valencia, where they were printed. There’s even a rumor that it’s being printed in

Translation  99 Antwerp.”3 The figure of 12,000 copies of Cervantes’s book put on the market between 1605 and 1615 is completely reasonable, given that by the latter date nine editions of the novel had been published, three in Madrid (two in 1605, one in 1608), two in Lisbon (both in 1605), one in Valencia in 1605, one in Milan and two in Brussels (not Antwerp) in 1607 and 1611. According to seventeenth-century printers’ manuals, such as that of Alonso Víctor de Paredes (published around 1680),4 the normal pressrun for an edition was 1,500 copies. This means that there were probably some 13,500 copies of Don Quixote in Castilian circulating in the ten years that followed the princeps edition printed at the end of 1604 in the Madrid printshop of Juan de la Cuesta for the bookseller Francisco de Robles. Sansón Carrasco adds: “And it seems to me that there will be no nation or language that will not have its own.”5 Two translations of Don Quixote had already been published before 1615: in 1612, the English translation of Thomas Shelton, and in 1614, the French translation of César Oudin. The Italian translation followed these shortly, in 1622. There are several signs of the immediate impact of the tale. During the early months of 1613, the King’s Men (the troupe in which Shakespeare was at once an author, an actor, and shareholder) performed before the court of England a play titled Cardenno or Cardenna. Forty years later, the bookseller Humphrey Mosely registered with the Stationers’ Company, the booksellers’, printers’, and binders’ corporation of London, the “right in copy” of a play presented as The History of Cardenio, By Mr Fletcher. & Shakespeare. The play was never printed and, despite the assertions of Lewis Theobald in 1728 that he had revised and adapted the work on the basis of manuscript copies he claimed to own (giving it a new title, Double Falsehood, or the Distrest Lovers), there is no trace of it. Be that as it may, this unexpected connection between Shakespeare and Cervantes bears witness to the echo of Shelton’s translation.6 The French translation of Don Quixote launched a dense flow of translations of other works by Cervantes. In 1615, François de Rosset published Nouvelles exemplaires, his translation of the Novelas ejemplares, followed three years later by Don Quichotte, Part II, and Les Travaux de Persiles y Sigismunde. Also in 1618, another French translation of the Persiles (which had been published in Madrid by Juan de la Cuesta only a year earlier) was published in Paris by Vital d’Audiguier as Les Travaux de Persiles et de Sigismonde, sous les noms de Périandre et d’Auristele. The first English translation of that “northern tale” appeared in 1619 and the first Italian translation came out in Venice in 1626.

100  What is a Book? “To see tapestries from behind” Further along in the story of Don Quixote, in chapter 62 of Part II, when he visits a Barcelona printshop, he meets a translator who “has translated a book from Italian into our Castilian language,” as one of the compositors tells him. The dialogue that he initiates with the autor who is translating a book entitled Le Bagatele refers to two apparently contradictory realities. Don Quixote speaks slightingly of translation, which he deems simple copying: It seems to me that translating from one language to another, unless it’s from the queens of the languages – Greek and Latin – is like seeing Flemish tapestries from behind. Although you can see the figures, threads confuse the images, and you can’t see with the clarity and colors of the front. And translating from easy languages doesn’t show any more ingenuity and good style than copying from one piece of paper to another.7

The dual meaning of the verb trasladar is given in the Tesoro of Covarrubias in the following terms: “Trasladar: At times this means, to interpret some written piece from one language into another; at other times it means to copy,”8 thus presenting translation from one vernacular language to another as either useless or purely mechanical. Few are the exceptions that raise a translation to the dignity of the original. Don Quixote mentions only two: the translation of the tragicomedy of Battista Guarini, Il Pastor Fido, by Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa, published in 1602 and revised in 1609, and the translation of Torquato Tasso’s “favola pastorale” L’Aminta by Juan de Jáuregui, published in 1607.9 On the other hand, equating translation and transcription makes translation seem a form of the professionalization of writing that might assure translators solid revenues. This is at least what the translator of Le Bagatele hopes. When Don Quixote asks him: “But tell me your grace, this book, are you printing it at your own expense, or did you sell the rights to some bookseller?” the man responds haughtily, “At my own expense, and I plan to earn a thousand ducados, at least, with this first printing, which is a run of two thousand copies, and will be sold for six reales apiece in the twinkling of an eye.”10 The pressrun of the first edition of Part I of Don Quixote was probably 1,500 or, at most, 1,700 copies, and the Tasa dated December 20, 1604 fixed its sales price at something just over 8 reales. This means that the translator that Don Quixote met in Barcelona was extremely presumptuous, but his intention was clear

Translation  101 when he kept the privilege for himself, had the copies printed at his expense and controlled their sale, thus assuring himself any profit. He states: “I don’t publish my books to become famous throughout the world, because I’m already well-known through my books. I’m looking for profit, because without it, being famous is not worth a cuatrín.”11 The contracts drawn up by the Paris booksellers and the translators of Castilian chivalric romances in the mid-sixteenth century show that translation into French of Spanish classic works could produce such profits. On November 19, 1540, Nicolas de Herberay ceded to the booksellers Jean Longis and Vincent Sertenas the privilege that he had obtained for the translation of the second, third, and fourth books of Amadis de Gaule, turning over to them the parts of the second book that he had already translated and promising them to translate “as soon as could be done” the rest of Book II and the two following books. In return, the booksellers gave him, as was the custom, twelve unbound copies of each book so that he could present them to the king and offer them as a dedication, but they also paid him 25 gold écus on signing the contract, promising another 25 when he turned in the third book and 30 at submission of the fourth book.12 At a time when authors usually received only copies of their works as payment, the Paris translators were the first to be paid money. Indirect remuneration from patronage, recognized or obtained through dedications were thus added to income that came directly from the book market. On March 2, 1542, the contract drawn up between the same Nicolas de Herberay, the two booksellers, and Denis Janot included similar clauses for the translation of the fifth and sixth books of Amadis. The translator promised to submit the translated text within a year and the booksellers promised him not only twelve copies of each of the two books, ten en blanc (unbound) and two reliés et dorés (bound and gold-edged), but paid him immediately, “manually and in coin,” 62 gold écus, as well as forgiving a debt of 22 écus for a horse that Denis Janot had sold him.13 Before Cervantes, a passion for chivalric romances was one of the earliest bases of “Castilian Europe.” The success of such works led to remarkable innovations in the relations between booksellers and “authors” (or, in this case, translators). Among them, advances paid for a manuscript to come. On April 19, 1543, in a new contract drawn up between Nicolas de Herberay and the three booksellers (Longis, Janot, and Sertenas) for a translation of Palmerin, the booksellers granted the translator an advance of 40 livres tournois for the submission, by St John the Baptist’s Day, of copy for the first twenty quires of the first book, “to begin their printing of the said book,”

102  What is a Book? then, in August, for the rest of Book I.14 In order to satisfy the demands of a public impatient to read the latest Castilian work translated into French, the Paris booksellers decided to print chivalric romances quire by quire, without waiting for the translation of the entire work. There could be no better sign of the success of works from Spain on the French book market. Chivalric romances cannot be separated from other genres that lay the groundwork for the spread of Spanish literature throughout Europe between 1540 and 1560. The inventory of his stock drawn up in April 1561 by one major Paris bookseller, Galliot du Pré, serves as an illustration of this.15 His warehouse held nearly forty thousand volumes, six hundred and thirty-seven of which were translations from the Spanish and seventy-three were editions in Castilian. These were fewer than the Italian books he held, but this “Spanish library” clearly reflects the hierarchy of the most prominent Spanish authors. The first of them was, incontestably, Fray Antonio de Guevara. Galliot du Pré offered his clients translations of the Libro áureo de Marco Aurelio, which he published in 1529, only one year after the Spanish edition, and the Reloj de príncipes, dated 1540. Du Pré held fifty-two copies of the Livre doré and forty-two of the Horloge des princes. But he also stocked copies of Le Favory de Court (a translation of Aviso de privados y doctrina cortesana) and of Mespris de la Court (a translation of Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea), as well as copies of Epîtres dorées, moralles et familières. Another author favored by Galliot du Pré and, we can suppose, Parisian readers was Pedro Mexía, given that his shop at the Palais Royal had eight copies of the Silva de varia lección and thirty copies of the translation, Les Diverses leçons de Pierre Messie Gentil-homme de Séville, translated by Claude Gruget and published in 1552. Gruget translated the work from the Italian edition, which had appeared in Venice in 1544 and included only the three first parts of Mexía’s book (plus fourteen additional chapters by the Italian translator, Roseo da Fabriano). Gruget’s translation was in turn used for the English translation of 1571 and the Flemish one of 1587. Silva de varia lección was both a “best seller” and a steady seller throughout Europe. The work went through twenty-five editions in Spanish between 1540 and 1643 (the 1550–1 edition included, for the first time, the twenty-two chapters of Part IV), thirty-seven French translations between 1552 and 1654, and some thirty in Italian. In both of the latter cases, Mexía’s text received additions or continuations, usually published with the translation: in Italy, those of Francesco Sansovino in 1560 and Geronimo Giglio in 1565; in France, that of Antoine du Verdier, which appeared in 1577.16

Translation  103 A taste for Spanish books was not exclusive to the capital cities. They also found readers in country areas. A minor Norman noble, the Sire de Gouberville, who kept a journal between 1553 and 1562, offers proof of this. Under the date of February 6, 1554 he notes: “It rains constantly; [my men] were in the fields, but the rain chased them away. In the evening, for all of vespers, we read in Amadis de Gaule how he vanquished Dardan.” Although this scene of reading aloud one winter evening in a Cotentin manor is unique in the journal, it nonetheless attests to the wide circulation of Nicolas de Herberay’s translation. In November of the same year, a friend returns to Gouberville a book that he had borrowed. It was not one of those romances that can be read in company, as the harvesters read Don Quixote, but a learned work containing all the knowledge of the world: the “leçons de Pierre Messie.”17 The age of the picaresque In the age of Don Quixote, a second wave of translations hit the Parisian – and European – book market. Basically, this second wave drew strength from a passion for picaresque novels. Corneille is a good witness to this enthusiasm. In L’Illusion comique, first performed during the theater season of 1635–6 and published in 1639, the magician Alcandre describes the busy career of Clindor, chased from home by the rigorous demands of Pridamant, his father, who then desperately searches for him. Alcandre tells Pridamant of Clindor’s itinerant career as a fortune-teller, a public scribe, a notary’s clerk, a professional card player, an author of street songs, and an apothecary who frequents fairs. For Corneille and his audience, an existence of the sort could only be compared to the tribulations of the Spanish pícaros: Enfin jamais Buscon, Lazarille de Tormes Sayavèdre et Gusman ne prirent tant de formes.18

In only two lines, Corneille refers here to three major picaresque works, all three of which French readers and spectators of the early seventeenth century would have recognized immediately.19 La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades, the earliest known editions of which date to 1554, was translated into French in 1560 and reissued in 1561. The spectators watching L’Illusion comique had probably read the second translation, however, which was first published in 1601 and reprinted six times before

104  What is a Book? 1628, augmented by Pierre d’Audiguier’s translation of Juan de Luna’s continuation. Part I of Guzmán de Alfarache, published in Madrid in 1599, was also translated into French twice: first by Gabriel Chappuys in 1600, then by Jean Chapelain in 1619, as Le Gueux, ou La vie de Guzman de Alfarache. The following year Chapelain published his translation of Part II (which had appeared in Spanish in 1604), calling it Le Voleur, ou la vie de Guzman d’Alfarache. Between 1621 and 1646, translations of Mateo Alemán’s entire oeuvre were published three times in one volume and three times with one volume per part. Corneille made double reference to Guzman and to Sayavedra, a pseudonym of Juan Marti, who wrote a continuation to the novel published in 1602 under the name Mateo Luján de Sayavedra, whom Mateo Alemán transformed into a character in Part II of his work. Quevedo’s romance, Historia de la vida del Buscón, llamado don Pablos, published in 1626, was also rapidly translated into French: the translation of the “sieur de La Geneste” (who has been identified as Scarron)20 came off the presses in 1633 and enjoyed a durable success, with eighteen printings between 1634 and 1691. Even more remarkable than this uninterrupted flow of editions was the entry in 1657 of Quevedo in translation in the repertory of texts that the bookseller/publishers of Troyes in Champagne proposed to the lowest social level of readers by means of the inexpensive volumes of the ‘Bibliothèque bleue’ sold by peddlers. It was at the cost of a labor of censorship and adaptation that amputated the translation of blasphemous statements, ecclesiastical characters, and overly strong sexual allusions that Quevedo’s Buscón could delight French readers in both cities and villages until the end of the eighteenth century.21 Beyond these three essential works, French translators did not neglect other texts of the picaresque repertory. Vidal d’Audiguier translated the Relaciones de la vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón in 1618, the same year that the work appeared in Spanish, and it was republished in 1626. He also translated La desordenada codicia de los bienes ajenos of Carlos García in 1619. Published in 1621, the translation was republished in 1623 and 1632. La pícara Justina by Francisco López de Ubeda, published in 1605, had to wait longer for its translation, which appeared in 1635 (the same year as L’Illusion comique), under the title La narquoise Justine. Similar expectations awaited Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares, published in 1613, with a French translation done collaboratively by François de Rosset and Vital d’Audiguier in 1615. That translation was republished eight times during the seventeenth century, and it lent many a plot twist to

Translation  105 the works of French writers of romantic comedies and English playwrights.22 French authors and French readers were so familiar with Spanish romances that when Charles Sorel published his Bibliothèque françoise in 1664, he included them among French books.23 Under the heading “Romans comiques,” he cites, in order, L’Ingénieux Dom Quichotte de la Manche, “which is an agreeable satire against chivalric romances,” Guzman d’Alfarache, L’Écuyer de Marc d’Obregon, Lazarille de Tormes, Buscon, La Narquoise Justine, La Fouyne de Seville, L’Aventurier Nocturne, and Quevedo’s Visions. Translation had naturalized all these works: Sorel states, “I am naming the Books that are Spanish of origin, but that, having been made French by Translation, can hold their place in this category.” For Sorel, all these works shared two traits. He writes, “The Spanish are the first who have created verisimilar and amusing Romances” and he insists on the “moral discourses” (which seemed to him at times overabundant in the Guzman or L’Écuyer de Marc d’Obregon) that were as many warnings against sin and invitations to the reform of mores. In this fashion, tales of the amusing adventures of pícaros and pícaras were understood as both lifelike depictions of their condition and a moral lesson. The titles of translations often emphasized that dual intent. For example, Part I of Chapelain’s Guzman bore the subtitle “Image of Human Life. In which All the Tricks and Bad Deeds that are Common in the World are Enjoyably and Usefully Uncovered.” The subtitle to Part II reads “Portrait of the Times and Mirror of Human Life.” Translation and transcription The large number of translations of Spanish texts into the other European languages does not fully account for the cultural transfers that they achieved. Cervantes knew this, as we can see from the dialogue between Don Quixote and the Castilian translator of Le Bagatelle. Translation, in fact, always implies a unique appropriation of texts. There are several reasons for this. First, there is the personality of the translator, for whom translation was often an entry into a career in letters. For some, translation was simply a professional activity; for others, it was a task that they were assigned but that could also become a literary act. The latter was true of Chapelain, who translated Guzmán de Alfarache in 1619 while he was the tutor of the children of the marquis de La Trousse, whom he also served as secretary. It was also true of Scarron, who translated Buscón in

106  What is a Book? 1633 while he was in the service of the bishop of Le Mans and who later introduced into his own Roman comique translations of four novellas of Solarzano and María de Zayas. This may account for the ambivalent status of translation, as Chapelain strongly emphasizes in the pieces that precede his translation of Guzmán.24 In 1619, he stated that “translation is a vile thing, and translation, in those who profess it, presupposes a lowness of courage and a debasement of the mind.” In 1620, he was even more emphatic: “Imagine that for an ambitious mind, it is a cruel blow to kill oneself for a thing that is neither esteemed nor estimable, of which not only one would not dare boast, but would hold it offensive if others praised it.” Still, a translation was a gift worthy of its dedicatees because it offered an opportunity to read a work of unequaled worth: “The Guzman, all in all, is a rich conception and a wellconstructed satire following the steps of Lucian and Apuleius and his Golden Ass and, more immediately, those of Lazarille de Tormes, which was its prototype. None of these has equaled it in invention, in abundance, or in diversity, and none comes near it in doctrine or flashes of erudition.” A similar ambivalence governed the very practice of translation, which was supposed to combine a demand for fidelity and a need for liberty. Chapelain pursued the paradox in his “Avertissement au lecteur” to the 1621 edition of his Opuscules critiques: And what I say to you about translation should not lead you to believe, however, that it subjected me; for although I hold for fidelity, which gives the essence, and I can boast of having religiously observed it in the manner I am telling you, marching in the strictest rigor, in spite of that, reserving to myself the necessary authority, I transposed, reestablished, cut back, added, united, separated, reinforced, and weakened the discourse, changed the metaphors and the phrases that do not suit our French and left forced terms and some inferior tales out of the work, without destroying anything either in the author’s sentiment or in the gravity of his tale, which I followed from point to point and if anything augmented rather than diminished.

If Spanish literature exerted its “influence” over all of Europe, it did so through interpretations imposed on it by translations. The differences between those translations and the original texts was not only the result of liberties that the translators took. More fundamentally, they derived from the distance separating Spanish aesthetic innovations and the repertories of categories and conventions inherent in the literatures that adopted those innovations. Scarron’s French translation of the Buscón provides a topical example of this.25 A detailed study of the differences between the Historia de la Vida del

Translation  107 Buscón and L’Aventurier Buscon shows that the French translator, although he sought French equivalents for proper names or institutions, strongly emphasized the “Spanish” flavor of the tale. The local color given to the story places it in the realm of the picturesque. To achieve this, Scarron combines a number of techniques: the mobilization of existent stereotypes of Spanish people and customs; the explanation of such Castilian terms as dom, morisque, or corregidor; the conservation of the original names of many places or persons; the quotation of untranslated proverbs; the presence of references to Don Quixote that are not always in Quevedo’s text. Thus Pablos’s horse is “a Rocinante of Don Quixote,” and on his way back to Madrid Pablos mentions “the beard of Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s squire.” This Spanish flavor, whether stressed by the translator or imported by him into the novel, is clearly marked, beginning with the title page, which presents the story as “composed in Spanish by Dom Francisco de Quevedo, Spanish Knight.” The title of L’Aventurier Buscon also refers to the work as a histoire facétieuse, a humorous tale. And indeed, throughout the 1633 translation, the translator uses figures proper to the comic style and to satire to render the register specific to picaresque writing. His lexicon combines coarse words, the jargon of beggars and vagabonds, and the language of the Parisian food market (the Halles), and his style uses procedures of burlesque rhetoric such as repetition, enumeration, periphrase, and comparison. Faced with the complexity of Quevedo’s own writing, the French translator understood the book as belonging to the genre of humor and translated it on the basis of the language and the forms of the burlesque. This, along with other indications, is why the translation was attributed to Scarron, who published Part I of his own Roman comique in 1651, emphasizing the very category in which Sorel placed the Spanish novels that had been naturalized by French translations. The most spectacular change in L’Aventurier Buscon is the complete transformation of the work’s ending. In Quevedo, Pablos is recognized by his former companion, Don Diego Coronel, and his projected marriage with Doña Ana comes to naught. After pursuing several occupations (beggar, actor, poet), Pablos returns to Seville where he frequents some pícaros, joins them in the killing of two archers and takes refuge in the cathedral. A prostitute, La Grajal, takes him as her lover and protector and, to flee the justice of the Alguacil, he takes off with her for America: I made up my mind, after talking it over with La Grajal, to sail for the New World with her and there to see if a change of continents would better my luck. It turned out to be worse, as you will see in the second

108  What is a Book? part, for a man who only changes his habitat and not his way of living never betters things for himself.26

None of that appears in the French translation of 1633. After his wanderings as a beggar, an actor, and a poet, Pablos, having returned to Seville, falls in love with the only daughter of a wealthy merchant, a girl named Rozelle. Once he gains entry into her house as a domestic servant, he lets it be known, by various stratagems, that he is a “cavalier d’Espagne.” The plot winds up: Pablos marries Rozelle, reveals his deceit to her, which she approves of; he then pockets the dowry and the inheritance and decides that from then on he will be an honnête homme. The last words draw the moral of the tale: “All is under the Providence of Heaven, and one cannot predict the future; but now I can say that there are few people in the Universe, of whatever condition they may be and whatever prosperity they may have, whose felicity is comparable to mine. May Heaven long conserve me in the company of my dear Rozelle.”27 An outcome of this sort, which completely denatures Quevedo’s ending to the tale, responds to two demands. On the one hand, it gives the novel a happy ending that seals the destiny of its main character. On the other, it attributes a moral meaning to the story, since Pablos’s return to “honest” living shows that man can seek betterment and return to his true identity. When all is said and done, Buscon’s adventurous life has been nothing but a temporary detour for him and an agreeable one for the reader before the hero reaps the reward of a well-regulated life inherent in the promises of his character and his generous sentiments. By completely rewriting the end of the novel, Scarron makes it conform to a system of conventions, not present in the Castilian original, that requires a happy ending and an exemplary morality. The presence of Spanish literature throughout Europe, and especially in France, was accompanied by the idea of the perfection of the Castilian language and the exact correspondence between how it was written and how it was pronounced. In the age of Don Quixote, Spanish was a language that was known, read, and spoken by the elites and by lettered Europeans. In Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, when the pilgrims enter the kingdom of France, they have no difficulty making themselves understood by the three beautiful French ladies they meet in a Provençal hostelry. When they saw Auristela and Costanza, “They came over and spoke to them with happy faces and polite graciousness, asking them in Spanish who they were, for they recognized the pilgrim women as Spanish and in France there isn’t a man or woman who

Translation  109 doesn’t learn the Spanish language.”28 This is clearly an exaggeration; still, it is equally clear that an acquaintance with Spanish was widespread among the French elites of the early seventeenth century. One proof of this is the presence of books in Castilian in certain private libraries. In a sampling of some two hundred small and middling Parisian libraries inventoried between 1601 and 1641 after the death of their owners, eight mention packets of Spanish literary works and twelve mention works in Italian. The percentage may seem feeble, but two things correct that impression. First, the presence of Spanish is stronger in the more impressive collections, which are those of gentlemen, writers, or précieuses. There we find bilingual dictionaries, Mariana’s Historia general de España (in Voiture’s collection, for example) and literary works in Castilian.29 Second, new works speedily crossed the Pyrenees. Thus the inventory drawn up after the death in 1617 of Jacques de Thou, président at the Parlement de Paris and a member of the Respublica litteraria, shows that his library included a Lisbon 1605 edition of Don Quixote, a copy of Part II of Don Quixote published in 1615, and a copy of the Novelas ejemplares.30 The same was true of Richelieu, who read Spanish and Italian.31 The more learned and more encyclopedic collections, like the one that Gabriel Naudé proposed to the président at the Parlement, Henri de Mesmes, were less open to Spanish literature. In Naudé’s Advis, only the Italians (Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, and Boccaccio) found a place – a limited one, to be sure – in the ideal humanist library.32 Translation or plagiarism? One particularly obvious indication of familiarity with the Spanish language and Spanish literature is the quarrel prompted by Corneille’s Le Cid. First performed in January 1637 in the Théâtre du Marais, the play was an instant success. It was published as a tragi-comédie toward the end of March of the same year. In the pamphlet that launched the polemic, Jean Mairet, who was also a playwright, accused Corneille of plagiarism. This publication, a poem in six six-line stanzas, was entitled L’Auteur du vrai Cid espagnol à son traducteur français (The Author of the real Spanish El Cid to his French translator) and was signed “Don Baltazar de la Verdad.” It cited a rumor accusing Corneille of having drawn his tragi-comedy from a Spanish play and failing to mention the original in his dedication to Richelieu’s niece in which he limits himself to alluding to

110  What is a Book? the legend of The Cid, whose “body, borne by his army, won battles after his death.” Mairet was still unsure of the identity of the work and of the author supposedly plagiarized, but he raises the accusation of plagiarism in order to bring down Corneille’s pretentious self-praise expressed in a letter in verse entitled Excuse à Ariste, published in February 1637. In that verse piece, Corneille rejects the judgment of his peers and claims that his glory was founded on the success of his play with the public and the court: “I owe to no one but myself all of my Renown.” It is certain that this poem, which broke the tacit rules of the world of authors, was the fundamental reason for the attacks on Corneille, but it is nonetheless noteworthy that the first accusation against him was that he translated a Spanish comedia – and that he did so badly, “in rather feeble verse.”33 A second pamphlet, Scudéry’s Observations sur le Cid, published in April 1637, identified the plagiarized text.34 Here the criticism was broader, as Scudéry accused Corneille of having violated the rules of verisimilitude, the unity of time, and propriety, but the accusation of plagiarism was the high point of his indictment: Le Cid is a Spanish Comedy, in which almost all the development, Scene after Scene, and all the thoughts in the French are drawn [from the Spanish text]: yet neither Mondory [the director of the Marais troupe] nor the Periodicals, nor the Printed text have called this Poem a translation, a paraphrase, or even an imitation: rather, they have spoken of it as something that is wholly the work of the one who is only its translator.

In order to prove this, Scudéry, who was eager to show “that I too understand Spanish,” compares forty-nine passages from Corneille’s play, ranging from one line to eleven lines of verse, with the Spanish play, Las Mocedades del Cid by Guillén de Castro, published in 1618 in Valencia in the Primera Parte de las comedias de don Guillem de Castro and reprinted in 1621.35 Corneille replied to this accusation – again demonstrating the wide circulation of the Spanish comedias and the ability to understand Spanish – in a Lettre apologétique published in May 1637. He denies any desire to conceal the play from which he drew inspiration. He states that he himself had revealed the name of the “Spanish Author” to Scudéry and that he had brought “the original in its language” to Cardinal Richelieu. He also rejects the accusation of plagiarism: “You have attempted to portray me as a simple Translator, on the basis of seventy-two lines of verse that you have marked in a work of two

Translation  111 thousand, and that those who are expert in the matter would never call simple translations.”36 The argument seems to have struck its mark. The Sentiments de l’Académie française sur la tragi-comédie du Cid, redacted by Jean Chapelain and published toward the end of 1637, imposed silence on the adversaries and backed Scudéry’s criticisms. Chapelain’s text abandoned the accusation of plagiarism, however, because, “aside from the fact that we remark that in very few imitated things he [Corneille] remained on a lower plane than the original, and that he has rendered some of them better than they were, we still find that he has added many thoughts that have no reason to cede before those of the first Author.”37 Corneille did not forget this affront. In 1648, Le Cid was reissued in an edition of his plays published in Paris by Augustin Courbé. In the preliminary “Avertissement” that Corneille wrote for the occasion, he justified his actions by including quotations from four works in Spanish without displaying any need to translate them.38 The first of these was an extract from Book 11 of Mariana’s Historia general de España in the Castilian translation that the author had made in 1601 on the basis of the Latin original. According to Corneille, this text shows that it is not contrary to propriety to show on the stage Chimène’s consent to a union with Rodrigue, given that the Spanish historian recalls that the marriage was universally approved (“Hízose el casamiento, que a todos estaba a cuento”), and that Chimène’s flawless reputation remained untouched. As Corneille notes, “the kings of Aragon and Navarra were proud to be her sons-in-law when they married her two daughters.” The second citation was sixteen lines from another comedia of Guillén de Castro, Engañarse engañando, which Corneille applied to Chimène, the final quatrain in particular, which ran: Y así, la que el desear con el resistir apunta vence dos veze, si junta con el resistir el callar. [And thus, the woman whose desire Points to resistance Won twice, if she associates Silence and resistance.]

The last two texts are two “romances” defending the reputation of Doña Ximena. The second of these ends with Rodrigo declaring, at the moment of their marriage,

112  What is a Book? Maté hombre, y hombre doy aquí estoy a tu mandado y en lugar del muerto padre cobraste un marido honrado. A todos pareció bien su discreción alabaron y así se hizieron las bodas de Rodrigo el Castellano. [I killed one man, and a man I gave to you I am here at your command And in place of a Dead father You receive an honourable husband. All found this right And praised his tact And thus happened the wedding Of Rodrigo the Castilian.]

Corneille defines the “Spanish romances” as “sorts of little poems [that] are, like the originals, ripped out of ancient histories,” thus considering them as fragments taken from old epic poems. In his 1648 preface, he thus considers that there were enough people in the kingdom of France who understood Spanish to make translation of these texts unnecessary. To refute the criticisms of Scudéry and the Académie, he appealed to the historical and poetic authority of three essential genres that Spanish literature had offered Europe: the romance, the comedia, and the history. In the 1648 edition of Le Cid, Corneille attempted to confound definitively those who accused him of plagiarism: I forgot to say to you that, many of my friends having judged that I should render an account to the public of what I had borrowed from the Spanish author of this work, and having told me that they so wished, I was happy to give them that satisfaction. You will thus find all that I have translated from them printed in another letter [that is, in italics], with a number at the beginning [of the passage] that will serve as a reference to find the Spanish verses at the bottom of the same page.39

Before the appearance of the erudite works of the late seventeenth century,40 Corneille used the typographical device of the footnote in the interest of justifying the originality and excellence of his play. If he uses the vocabulary of translation (“what I had borrowed”; “all that I have translated from them”) it is to stress the gap between his own verse and that of Guillén de Castro. But if his readers fully

Translation  113 grasped what he was saying, it is because they could understand Spanish, hence could acknowledge the genius of the French poet. Cervantes was perhaps not wrong. It is quite possible that, among the public of spectators in the theaters and readers of literature in early seventeenth-century France, “ni varón ni mujer deja de aprender la lengua castellana.” The leyenda negra Still, an acquaintance with the Castilian language and Spanish literature did not necessarily imply benevolence toward them or sympathy with them. The force of the “black legend” – la leyenda negra – was felt everywhere. The history of the translations of the Brevissima relación de la destrucción de las Indias by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, published in Seville in 1552, demonstrates this forcefully. Las Casas’s history, written around 1542, reflects the dual crisis of Spanish colonization:41 a crisis of the Spanish conscience in face of the atrocities committed by the conquistadores that “deprive their victims of the salvation promised by the true faith and send their perpetrators to an eternal punishment” and that brought on a crisis of the legitimacy of Spanish sovereignty over the New World. That sovereignty was founded on the doctrine of the transmission to the kings of Portugal and Spain of the universal potestas that the Pope had received from Christ. The theologians of the University of Salamanca contrasted to that view the Thomist philosophy of natural law that recognizes the sovereignty of indigenous princes and, as a consequence, asserts that the sovereignty of the conquerors must be founded on “just titles.” In the works of Las Casas, these themes take on a prophetic and apocalyptical cast. By destroying the Indians through forced labor, excessive tribute payments and massacres, and by inflicting on them the most terrible tortures, the Spanish had gravely offended God. His anger meant that those who used torture against victims who were burned alive or drowned would themselves die by water or by fire. But the vengeance of the All-Powerful would be even more terrible: the destruction of the Indies announced the imminent destruction of Spain itself. Thus, Las Casas closely connected the prophetic theme of the punishment of a cruel and tyrannical kingdom (often used in millenarist and Morisco circles) with stigmatization of the horrors of conquest and made it available to the adversaries of the Spanish king. In 1579, when the French translation of Las Casas’s treatise by the Flemish Protestant Jacques de Miggrode was published in Antwerp

114  What is a Book? under the title Tyrannies et cruautéz des Espagnols perpétrées ès Indes occidentales, qu’on dit le Nouveau Monde, the text had profoundly changed meaning.42 In Spain, the reaction against Las Casas’s theses had begun ten years earlier, and, although the royal instructions and ordinances seemed to come around to backing peaceful means of conquest, they nonetheless legitimated a recourse to force in case of resistance and the installation of the regime of the encomienda. Also in 1579, in January of that year, the seven Calvinist provinces of the northern Low Countries formed the Union of Utrecht to defend their religious identity against the tyranny of a foreign sovereign – the king of Spain. The intention behind the translation of Las Casas’s work is clear from the title page, which claims: “To serve as an example and warning to the seventeen provinces of the Low Countries.” Recalling the crimes committed by the Spanish in America was a way to alert all who might be tempted to come to an agreement with them. In Jacques de Miggrode’s translation, the destruction of the Indies, which for Las Casas prefigured that of Spain, foreshadowed the possible destruction of the Low Countries: “Here is a true history and composed by one of those of that very nation, which will teach them, not what they have already done in the Low Countries, but, if God had not prevented them, what they might already have done.”43 In 1598, the first translation into Latin of Las Casas’s text was published in Frankfurt. It was illustrated with a series of seventeen engravings by Theodor de Bry that showed the most horrifying of the cruelties described in the book. Tormented, mutilated, and killed, de Bry’s Indians were modern figures of the martyr. Their slaughter recalled the massacre of the Innocents; their tortures recalled those of the saints; their suffering, those of Christ, flagellated, humiliated, and crucified. These images were a far cry from any ethnographic exoticism, and they played an essential role in creating a repellent image of Spain. De Bry’s series of seventeen plates were published in the context of the war of images waged by Protestants and Catholics in an age of religious wars. They responded to another series of twenty-nine engravings published in 1587 in Antwerp (a city that had become a Catholic bastion) by Richard Verstegan under the title Théâtre des cruautés des hérétiques de notre temps, accompanied by a text in Latin in the first edition and a French translation the following year.44 These engravings, made by an English Catholic in exile and put on the market in the period between the decapitation of Mary Stuart and the preparations for the “Invincible Armada” that was to invade

Translation  115 England, showed the violent acts committed by Protestants in England, the Low Countries, and France. Far from inviting viewers to share the blessed fate of the victims, as was the case with images of martyred saints, Verstegan’s engravings were an appeal for vengeance against a cruel and barbarous enemy. In the context of the religious wars, which were also political conflicts, the ostentatiousness of the other side’s violence played an essential role. If Catholics took such portrayals in their stride, the Protestants, who were often more hesitant about manipulating images, found them embarrassing. Hence Miggrode’s and de Bry’s maneuver to substitute the Indian for the Reformed Protestant and to point to violence “over there” to show all Europe the abominable cruelties perpetrated by the Spanish Catholics. As Ricardo García Cárcel writes, “The seventeen engravings that de Bry made undoubtedly did more for the black legend than all the texts of Las Casas.”45 These engravings followed de Bry’s lead for the three volumes of the Latin and German edition of Girolamo Benzoni’s La Historia del Mondo nuovo, published in Frankfurt in 1594, 1595, and 1596. Like the works of Las Casas, and even more than them, Benzoni’s book, which appeared in Venice in 1565, was republished in 1572, and then translated into Latin in 1578 and into French in 1579 by the Geneva pastor Urbain Chauveton, fed the anti-Spanish leyenda negra americana.46 Antipathy and empathy Still, we should not think of the relation of Europe or France to the Spain of Don Quixote in terms of too brutal an opposition between an enthusiastic reception of literary novelties and a determined repulsion before the ambitions of the king of Spain and the cruelties of the Conquista and the Inquisition. The real situation was more complex, as the discourse on Spain in seventeenth-century France shows. One example of this is the uses made of Doctor Carlos García’s La oposición y conjunción de los dos grandes Luminares de la tierra o la Antipatía de Franceses y Españoles, published in both Spanish and French in Paris in 1617. The work met with great success throughout Europe: before 1660, it was reissued twice in Spanish and four times in French; it was published eight times in Italian translation and twice in English and German translation.47 The purpose of the work was clear: to praise the marriages in 1615 of Louis XIII with Ann of Austria, the Infanta of Spain, and that of

116  What is a Book? the Infante, Philip, with Elisabeth of France; a celebration of a conjunción that, overcoming an antipatía founded on differences and discords, would henceforth unite “the two greatest and most powerful kings in the world” for the good of Christendom. The concord that God had ushered in between Spain and France was to manifest His glory by assuring the triumph of the Christian faith and the Catholic Church over the infidels of the “sect of Muhammad.” Inspired by the notion of a crusade, Doctor García’s book insisted on the “antipathies” and “vexations” separating the French and the Spanish uniquely in the aim of praising the happy effects of the union of the two kingdoms. However, as Jean-Frédéric Schaub emphasizes, the book was not read in those terms. Schaub states, “The borrowings from and reuses of Carlos García’s line of argumentation derive from a strict selection among the resources that he offers. This process reveals a global phenomenon of erasing French pro-Spanish manifestations to the benefit of statements to the contrary.” Hence the five short chapters that the book devotes to differences between the French and the Spanish in ways of speaking, walking, drinking, eating, and dressing – and, more fundamentally, contrasts between the bodies, humors, and characters of those of the two nations – become the matrix of a rhetoric of hostility that pervades French political literature of the first half of the seventeenth century. When La Mothe Le Vayer dipped into Carlos García’s book in his own Discours sur la contrariété des humeurs qui se trouve entre certaines Nations, et singulièrement la Françoise et l’Espagnole, published in 1636, it was to demonstrate that any concord or alliance between the two peoples or their kings was totally impossible.48 With the return of war, antipathy clearly carried the day over all hope of “conjunction.” It was only later, and despite the conflict, that French absolutism was to use the founding principles of the universal and Catholic Spanish monarchy to justify its own rule. The force of stereotypes Whether French relations with Spain were governed by empathy or antipathy, they constantly made use of stereotypes to define the essence of Spanishness to foreign readers or spectators. One Spaniard shown on French or English stages can speak for the others: Don Adriano de Armado, a character in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, a comedy first performed at court in the Christmas season of 1597 and printed the following year.49 This is how the king of

Translation  117 Navarre presents the Spanish gentleman, whom he calls “this child of fancy”: Our court, you know, is haunted With a refinèd traveller of Spain, A man in all the world’s new fashion planted, That hath a mint of phrases in his brain.

Biron, one of the young lords of the court, insists on the Spaniard’s taste for linguistic novelties: Armado is a most illustrious wight, A man of fire-new words, fashion’s own knight. (I, 1)

In later scenes, the portrait of Armado is completed by Mote, his page: “You are a gentleman and a gamester, sir,” and he himself tells us that he is a soldier, is in love, and is a poet: “I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise wit, write pen, for I am for whole volumes in folio” (I, 2). That last statement substitutes poetic creation for the soldier’s boasts in a man whose name – Armado – recalled the “invincible” but vanquished Armada of 1588. On two occasions, a letter of Armado’s is read on the stage. In the first, he denounces Costard, the clown, to the king for having frequented Jaquenetta, the “country girl” with whom he is himself in love (I, 2); the second is a letter that Armado addresses to Jaquenetta that is read by Boyet, a noble in the service of the French princesses who have arrived at the court of Navarre (IV, 1). In both cases, the Spanish stereotype is rendered, not by the use of typically Spanish words or turns of phrase, but by an excessive use of images and metaphors, obscure references, an inflated and over-refined style and multiple repetitions organized in a threepart rhythm. For example, the letter to Jaquenetta begins, “More fairer than fair, beautiful than beauteous, truer than truth itself, have commiseration on thy heroical vassal” (IV, 1). Thus Shakespeare attributes to Armado an English that sounds like a precious and pompous Castilian. Much like the character of Matamore in Corneille’s L’Illusion comique, Armado is a swaggering blusterer (Biron calls him “the braggart”; V, 2) – another feature of the stereotypical portrait of the Spaniard. He ends his letter to Jaquenetta with the words, “Thus dost thou hear the Nemean lion roar,” which is a pathetic self-derision, given that the Nemean lion, supposedly invulnerable (as was the Armada) was strangled by Hercules. Stripped of his military virtue

118  What is a Book? and the fear that it inspired, the comedy version of the Spaniard became a character who provoked laughter by his extravagances, his false courage, and his “fantastical” nature. The stereotype of vain appearances, combined with the political rhetoric of antipathy and a denunciation of Spanish arrogance, recurs often in the travel narratives of Frenchmen who crossed the Pyrenees in the seventeenth century.50 It was one of the most common clichés attached to Spain and its inhabitants. Europe in the age of Don Quixote was obsessed by Spain. For better or for worse. In return, it was as if captured by Cervantes’s oeuvre. To be sure, the horizons of the hidalgo and his squire were long limited to the well-defined spaces of the Campo de Montiel and the Sierra Morena. They were enlarged in Part II of the story when, in an attempt to counter Fernández de Avellaneda’s continuation, published a year earlier, Cervantes has Don Quixote set off on the road to Barcelona. There he is captured by the bandit Roque Guinart and his band. The bandit, amused by Don Quixote’s madness, decides to let his friends in Barcelona profit from the presence of the wandering knight whose extravagances were already known by all the readers of the 1605 book and, beyond it, by the broader public. He takes Don Quixote to a beach in that city, where the squire and his master discover the sea for the first time: “Don Quixote and Sancho looked all around and saw the sea, which they had never seen before; it seemed very wide and vast, and considerably larger than the Lagunas de Ruidera that they had seen in La Mancha.”51 It was with the “northern history” of Persiles and Sigismunda that Cervantes’s works opened up to broader spaces. Imitation of the History of Theagenes and Chariclea of Heliodorus led him to situate the multiple shipwrecks, wanderings, and mutual recognitions in his “Greek” romance in a broad geography that covered all of Europe and the lands that bordered it. A reader of encyclopedic compilations such as the Silva de varia lección of Pedro Mexía and the Jardín de flores curiosas of Antonio de Torquemada, but also of the works of the historian Olaus Magnus and the navigator Niccoló Zeno, Cervantes placed the first two parts of his tale in a nordic world, both authentic and imaginary, of stormy oceans, frozen seas, and islands that might be barbaric or welcoming. In Part III of the Persiles, the story turns “southern,” spinning out according to a capricious itinerary that follows the heroes of the tale, become pilgrims, on their way to Rome. Embarking from the north, they land in Lisbon, go to the Monastery of Guadalupe, then travel through the cities of Castile (Trujillo, Talavera, Aranjuez, Ocaña), but avoid Toledo and Madrid. Like Don Quixote, they enter

Translation  119 Barcelona, where they see the galleys (but do not visit a printshop). The pilgrims pursue their route, crossing Languedoc, then Provence, where they have no difficulty making themselves understood by the three French ladies they meet in a hostelry. Their travels end in Italy, where the small band reaches Rome after stopping at Milan, then at Lucca. The microcosm of the Persiles contains large spaces: the imagined seas of the North, the lands that had feared the Spanish sovereign and obeyed his law, then, at the end of their pilgrimage, the most sacred city in Christendom.

Part III Texts and Meanings

8 Memory and Writing

In what follows, I propose a dual adjustment to historians’ relations to the work of Paul Ricoeur. The historians who read his La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli1 have usually been either commentators in their debt or critics. I am thinking, for example, of the discussion of the book in Le Débat.2 I intend to do something else here, which is to show how some of Ricoeur’s analyses can offer the historian instruments of intelligibility, thus substituting analyses based on his own categories for commentary and a heuristic use of his work for an interpretation of it. In certain ways, this project reverses Ricoeur’s own procedure, where a philosophy of time, an epistemology of knowledge, and the phenomenology of memory are nourished by reading historians’ works, since what I am proposing here are historical analyses that mobilize Ricoeur’s own phenomenological or hermeneutic categories. This project is not free of paradox, since Ricoeur’s entire perspective is based on the elucidation of anthropological invariables characteristic, in their universality, of the philosophy of the awareness of time, the phenomenology of memory and, even more fundamentally, the hermeneutic of the historical condition of man. This provides a corollary to Ricoeur’s thought in a setting aside (which is not the same as a denial or a rejection) of any historical or sociological dimension of categories and experiences. Still, I would like to risk the experiment, setting up a dialogue between the anthropological constants that Ricoeur has noted and the discontinuities that are, by definition, the object of all historical work. This leads to a second adjustment. Historians have usually been interested in the poetics of narration proposed in Ricoeur’s Temps et

124  Texts and Meanings récit,3 which showed the relationships among the narrative structures employed by fiction and by history and, more recently, by the reformulation of the epistemology of history proposed in La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Ricoeur analytically distinguishes the three moments of the historiographic operation – documentary criticism, explicative construction, representation of the past – in a way that contrasts them, term for term, with the operations proper to memory – the constitution of testimony through the process of anamnesis, the immediacy of remembrance, and recognition of the past. That series of systematic contrasts, which constitutes the second part of his book, was generally what historians found most interesting. What I would like to do is to focus instead on the first and the third parts of the book, which have received less comment (at least, from historians). Part I, “On Memory and Recollection” and chapter 3 of Part III, “Forgetting,” will provide this essay with keys to reading and tools for comprehension of chapters 23–30 of Part I of Don Quixote, which are imbued with the themes of memory and forgetting. Their interpretation, it seems to me, can be illuminated by the distinctions that Ricoeur proposes in both “A Phenomenological Sketch of Memory” and in his reflections on “Personal Memory, Collective Memory.”4 Mnémé and anamnésis The first distinction that Ricoeur makes is between memory [souvenir] and recollection [rappel]; the unexpected return of the past and the effort of memory. He designates terms for these, either in reference to the Aristotelian vocabulary, using mnémé for spontaneous memory and anamnésis for deliberate recall, or in reference to the vocabulary of Bergson, who calls the work of anamnesis “laborious recollection.” It is that same dual modality of memory, the uncontrolled upsurge of something from the past and the effort of bringing something back into mind, which Cervantes uses, both at the practical level and with an aesthetic goal in mind. The task of anamnesis falls to Cardenio, the young Andalusian nobleman who has withdrawn to the wilderness of the Sierra Morena, lovesick and in despair, and whom the goatherds of the area call “The Knight of the Rock” or “The Ragged One of the Stricken Face.” This is where Don Quixote and Sancho Panza encounter him. “The Knight of the Ill-Favored Face” recognizes in Cardenio a kindred spirit and a double as unfortunate as himself, and “getting off Rocinante, with gentle demeanor and grace, went over to embrace him, and he held

Memory and Writing  125 him for a long while in his arms, as if he’d known him for a long time.”5 At Don Quixote’s request, Cardenio begins to tell the story of his life, which requires a laborious and painful act of memory: If it’s your pleasure, señores, for me to relate to you in a few words the immensity of my misfortune, you must promise me that you’ll not interrupt the thread of my tormented story, because as soon as you do, at that point it will come to an end. . . . I’ve imposed this condition because I want to spend as little time as I can on the narration of my misfortunes, since bringing them to mind [traerlas a la memoria] serves only to add other ones, and the less you ask me the sooner I’ll finish telling them, although I’ll not leave out anything important, so as to satisfy your curiosity fully.6

Anamnesis or recall, which mobilizes procedures that lead to the recuperation of remembrance of the past, is also painful, to the extent that recital of old sufferings redoubles the old pain. Its exercise is necessarily brief, and interruptions prolong the suffering. Using the repertory of ideas and terms available to him in the early seventeenth century, Cervantes associates what Ricoeur, relying on Freud’s “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914) and his “Mourning and Melancholia” (1915), points to as the connection between the treatment of memory as pathos and memory as tekhné of the mind, the “point of intersection between the passive, pathic side of memory and the active side of the exercise of memory.”7 In writing this scene, Cervantes draws an ironic connection between these two figures of memory by introducing a recollection of Don Quixote’s within his account of Cardenio’s declaration: “These words by the Ragged One brought back to don Quixote’s memory the story his squire had told, and when he didn’t know the correct number of goats that had gone across the river, it was over. But going back to the Ragged One, he continued by saying, .  .  .”8 This refers to a passage in chapter 20 in which, to pass the time, Sancho tells a story to Don Quixote. When Don Quixote interrupts him because he has lost count of the number of goats transported from one side of the river to the other in Sancho’s story (“took one goat . . . took another . . . and took another . . .”), it puts an abrupt end to the recitation, thus confirming the warning that his squire had given him: “Now, your grace should keep a careful tally of the goats that the fisherman is taking across, because if you miss one, the story will end and it won’t be possible to say another word about it.”9 Neither Sancho’s effort of memory, as he tells his tale, nor Cardenio’s effort of anamnesis, as he narrates his own woes, can survive an interruption. In the first instance, the interruption upsets the exercise of memory by

126  Texts and Meanings mixing up the obligatory formulas; in the second, it increases to breaking point the pain that accompanies the retelling of bygone misfortunes. The other modality of memory – what Ricoeur calls “spontaneous recollection” [la survenance actuelle d’un souvenir] – is also present in the Sierra Morena. This is no longer anamnesis but rather the Aristotelian mnémé: that is, what happens when a recollection invades the individual without being voluntarily recalled, like a thought from outside. This is the sort of recollection that comes to Don Quixote when he decides to write a letter to Dulcinea and, at the same time, a letter of exchange asking his niece to give Sancho three young donkeys to replace the donkey that had been stolen from him. Writing a letter in the Sierra Morena was not easy to do, however: It would be good, since there is no paper, to write it, as the ancients did, on leaves from trees or on wax tablets, although these would be as hard to find as paper. . . . But now I remember [me ha venido a la memoria] that it would be good, and even very good, to write it in Cardenio’s diary [librillo de memoria]. You’ll make sure to have it copied onto regular paper, in a nice hand-writing, in the first village where there is a school teacher or even some sexton can copy it – but don’t give it to a notary, since they never remove the pen from the paper when they write, and Satan himself can’t understand that style of writing.10

Cervantes refers here to the dual presence of memory, first, as mental evocation (and here the Castilian contrasts clearly the passive form of the sudden arrival of a recollection – me ha venido a la memoria – and the active effort of anamnésis – traer a la memoria – and, second, as writing in the librillo de memoria. “L’oubli de reserve” In the Spanish Golden Age, librillos de memoria, like tablettes in France and “writing tables” in England in the same period, were objects on which writing could be erased, and the writing surface, covered with a thin coat of glue, plaster, and varnish, could be written on with a stylus rather than with pen and ink and could be erased and used again.11 This device was defined in the dictionary of the Real Academia Española in the early eighteenth century as: Small book habitually carried in the pocket, the blank pages of which are covered with a coating and which includes a metal pen into the

Memory and Writing  127 point of which a pencil lead is inserted with which one notes in the small book all that one does not want to confide to the fragility of memory and that one erases afterward so that the pages can be used again.12

The relation between memory and writing, as it was permitted or governed by the librillo de memoria, was thus ambivalent: on the one hand, fixing a thought in writing provided a trace of that thought not subject to the vulnerability of memory; on the other hand, written memory was by definition erasable here, hence it was temporary and ephemeral. The material nature of the librillos de memoria, writing tablets, or tablettes brings together two themes that are fundamental in Ricoeur’s thought. The first is that of the relationship between living memory and written discourse, which he discusses on the basis of a reading of Plato’s Phaedrus that is strikingly different from Jacques Derrida’s famous interpretation, and in which Ricoeur’s essential theme is that “this remnant of writing at the very heart of memory authorizes our envisaging writing as a risk to run.”13 In the second part of his book, Ricoeur turns to “archived memory,” “a backup forgetting, a sort of forgetting kept in reserve,” which he imagines on the basis of inscription, a notion that, for him, goes a good deal farther than merely writing down discourse on a material support, given that writing, “in one form or another, has always accompanied orality.”14 Cardenio’s librillo de memoria, reused by Don Quixote, is just such an archive of memory, a material support that permits “running the risk” of inscribing a trace of memory. It is one of the archives de ressource or de rappel of which Ricoeur speaks, but an archive conceived to disappear to make room for other traces. The ephemeral nature of a written reminder is one of the figures of the oubli de réserve that makes up a major theme in Ricoeur’s book because he considers forgetfulness to be the condition of possibility of memory, much like “the unperceived character of the perseverance of memories, their removal from the vigilance of consciousness.”15 That reserved forgetting, which keeps memory from being paralyzed by individual memories or enclosed within recollection alone, is the foundation of the problematics of equitable memory with which the work closes. Ricoeur constructs that problematics on the basis of three references. The first is Heidegger’s Being and Time, from which Ricoeur extracts the quotation that serves as a base for his entire argument: “Just as expectation is possible only on the basis of awaiting, remembering [Erinnerung] is possible only on the basis of forgetting, and not the other way around.”16

128  Texts and Meanings Ricoeur’s second reference is to Jorge Luis Borges and his “Funes el memorioso.” Here Borges intertwines two motifs: forgetting as a condition of thought inasmuch as it is a process of abstraction and generalization (“Funes, we must not forget, was virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas”) and forgetting as a condition for sleep (“It was hard for him to sleep. To sleep is to take one’s mind from the world”).17 In one of his many interviews, Borges returned to the conditions of the writing of “Funes el memorioso.” He states: An ordinary man, a very ignorant man, has a perfect memory, so perfect that he is incapable of generalizations. He dies very young, overwhelmed by that memory that a god could tolerate but not a man. This would be the contrary case: Funes cannot forget anything. Consequently, he cannot think, because in order to think you have to generalize, which means that you have to forget. . . . What I want to say is that in the last lines Funes dies. He dies overwhelmed by the weight of a past too minutely detailed to be borne. A past made above all of circumstances, which one generally forgets. . . . Not only can he reconstitute everything, but he is forced to do so, that is, he cannot cast off the weight of the universe.18

The burden or the nature of memory rules out sleep and thought, both of which suppose a capacity to forget. Funes, to the contrary, combines an extreme sensitivity of perception incapable of all forms of abstraction and an unlimited capacity to accumulate bits of knowledge. He can learn about everything – languages, world, past events – and, as he declares, “I, myself, alone have more memories than all mankind since the world began.”19 But ceaseless learning and remembering everything is not thinking, because “to think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes there was nothing but particulars – and they were virtually immediate particulars.”20 Funes, the man who could not forget, is a monster who reverses traditional judgments. Whereas as illness or accident are normally supposed to make people lose their memory, it was when he fell, “bucked off a half-broken horse,” that Funes “had been left hopelessly crippled” and acquired a limitless and ever-active memory. What is more, whereas those who have a prodigious memory are traditionally greatly admired (for example, in the Silva de varia lección of Pedro Mexía),21 with Funes it was the cause of his unhappiness and what led him to his death at the age of nineteen. Borges establishes the connection between the excellence of the exceptional memories of great men of the past and the baleful memory of his pitiable hero by having Funes quote from Pliny’s Natural History

Memory and Writing  129 (Book VII, chapter 24, devoted to memory), one of the books he had read and from which he cites, in Latin and Spanish, cases of prodigious memory: Cyrus, Mithridates Eupator, Simonides, Metrodorus. The same names recur in Pedro Mexía’s encyclopedic compilation, which was one of the works that Cervantes used in Don Quixote and later in his “Hellenistic” novel, The Works of Persiles and Sigismunda. Freud is the third reference that Ricoeur uses to construct his notion of “reserved forgetting.” To the two texts of Freud (1914 and 1915) that he cites explicitly, a third should be added, the “Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad,” published in 1925,22 a text on which Jacques Derrida has commented.23 This writing pad or “magic block” was a late nineteenth-century Viennese version of a “magic slate.” It was a slab of wax or resin on a pad or tablet, on top of which a translucent sheet of waxed paper and a transparent celluloid plaque were placed. Writing, traced with a pointed stylus, was erased when the celluloid plaque was pulled up, leaving the tablet ready for a new text. As Freud remarks, however, traces of the erased writing could be deciphered when the tablet was exposed to a certain kind of light. The “magic block” offered a material analogy for the structure of the psychic apparatus (at least in the conceptualization of the notions of preconscious–consciousness–unconscious that Freud was in the process of abandoning), since the perception–consciousness system had an unlimited capacity for receiving perceptions, but without durable inscription, whereas the mnesic system retains durable traces that are recuperable but situated in the unconscious. On the Wunderblock, as in the librillo de memoria before it, writings were erasable, ephemeral, and could be multiplied limitlessly. On both devices, however, the inscriptions that had disappeared could be deciphered, at least in part, by someone who knew how to retrieve them. Freud made use of the “magic block” to explain the structure of the psychic apparatus and the way the relationship between perception and the unconscious functions, but Cervantes was referring to a banal object of his time as a way to designate a tension that inhabits his entire history between the vulnerability of memory and all its supports (whether they belonged to written culture or to the oral tradition), on the one hand and, on the other, the tenuous mutilated and muddled traces that the past, grandiose or ordinary, leaves in us all. Personal memory and collective memory To the opposition between the sudden appearance of recollection and the work of active memory, Ricoeur adds the contrast between

130  Texts and Meanings personal memory and collective memory. His perspective is dual. A first step is to mark the difference between memory as the interior gaze seizes it and memory understood as a collective process inscribed within the social frameworks shared by a group or a society. Thus, to one side there is individual memory, intimately associated with interiority, the conscious mind and self-knowledge; to the other there is a denunciation of the illusory attribution of memory to the singular “I” and an emphasis on collective representations. The philosophical and phenomenological tradition of St Augustine, Locke, and Husserl associates memory and subjectivity, whereas sociological thought, as in Halbwachs’s works, connects it with collective awareness. Ricoeur goes further, however. He uses the phenomenological concept of ascription to show why the same mnemonic phenomena can be attributed to oneself, to the other, or to the group. What makes possible “concrete exchanges . . . between the living memory of individual persons and the public memory of the communities to which we belong”24 is a relocation of the overly abrupt opposition between the interior gaze and the exterior gaze, between phenomenology and sociology. An intersection between the two is possible when the extension of the attention of phenomenology to the social world gives as much importance to the experience of others, thus to the social connection, as it does to the experience of the self, and when the sociology of action or the history of forms of experience become attached to perceptions, the acquisition of knowledge, and the strategies of individual social actors. Ricoeur thus reverses the terms of his first opposition between interior awareness and collective memory by inscribing the first within the “order of living-together,”25 and by replacing individual singularities at the heart of shared rules and conventions. This chiasmus, a device that Ricoeur makes use of several times in the course of his book, helps us to return to the Sierra Morena, where Sancho is a perfect example of the opposition between collective memory (which he possesses) and individual memory (which he claims not to have). When Don Quixote has finished writing his letter to Dulcinea in Cardenio’s librillo de memoria, he “called Sancho and said to him that he wanted to read it aloud so that he could memorize it, just in case he lost it along the way, because with his misfortunes, anything could happen.” To which Sancho responds, “ ‘Write it your grace, two or three times in the book and give it to me, and I’ll take good care of it, but to think that I can memorize it’s foolish. My memory is so bad, sometimes I can’t remember my own name. But in any case, recite it to me, since I’m bound to take pleasure in it,

Memory and Writing  131 and it ought to be just the ticket.”26 Cervantes is playing here with the contrast between the weakness of individual memory, forgetful and resistant to novelty, and the incorporation of a patrimony of memory common to the group. Sancho is in fact quite incapable of reconstituting by memory the letter that Don Quixote reads to him, the written text of which he no longer has because he has left Cardenio’s librillo in the Sierra Morena. On his return to the village, he attempts to remember his master’s letter as the priest and the barber stand by ready to provide a written copy, but his memory betrays him: “ ‘My God, señor licenciado, may the devil take me if I can remember anything from the letter, but it started this way: “High and slobbering lady.” ’ ‘He probably didn’t say “slobbering,” ’ said the barber, ‘but rather “sovereign” señora.’ ”27 Sancho possesses none of the techniques of memory of his age,28 and his pathetic efforts to reconstitute the letter only serve to produce irony in his interlocutors: “The two took no little pleasure in the good memory of Sancho Panza, and they praised him very much.”29 Sancho el olvidoso – Sancho the forgetful. But also Sancho el memorioso, who keeps in his memory a vast repertory of proverbs, tales, and sayings. Sancho is a being of shared memory, the memory that inhabits all the individuals of a same community and a common patrimony and that provides tales and formulas they have heard, retained, and recalled. But that memory, organized within the “social frameworks of memory” of the village, in no way excludes an individual appropriation that can quote a proverb at the right moment or apply to current circumstances the recitation of a tale. This is shown in chapter 20 of Don Quixote by the way in which Sancho tells the story of the shepherd Lope Ruiz and his goats crossing the Guadiana river, one by one, in a fisherman’s boat. While Sancho remains faithful to the line of the narration that he had learned in his village, he multiplies digressions of his own invention and references to the situation in which his master finds himself. Collective and communitarian, Sancho’s memory does not exclude invention and improvisation. It reintroduces the teller into the tale and the singularity of the moment into the shared repertory. Don Quixote, on the other hand, is a person with crossed memory streams. Remembrances of past occurrences just come to him, but he also searches in his memory of his readings for an understanding of what is happening to him. Like many others, within Cervantes’s book and outside it, he has read the chivalric romances, but, as Sancho does with popular tales, he applies them to current circumstances by mobilizing the quotations and references that inhabit his memory. Nothing illustrates this better than the beginning of chapter 5, when

132  Texts and Meanings our knight errant is lying on the ground after one of the mule boys of the merchants from Toledo has given him a good thrashing: Seeing then that he could indeed not stir, he decided to resort to his usual remedy, which was to dredge up some passage from one of his books, and his madness brought to mind the one about Valdovinos and the Marqués de Mantua when Carloto left Valdovinos wounded in the forest, a story that’s known to children, not unfamiliar to young people, venerated and even believed by the older generation, and, for all that, is no truer than the miracles of Muhammad. He thought this would fit just right in his current situation, so, in a lot of pain, he began to wallow around on the ground and say with a debilitated voice the same thing that the wounded Knight in the Wood said.30

At this point, Cervantes quotes six lines from a “romance” belonging to the cycle of the marquis of Mantua that Don Quixote has brought back into his memory, perhaps by using one of the techniques for recalling fragments of texts stored in the warehouses of the mind. Set into motion by the situation in which he finds himself, the labor of memory furnishes the references that show the meaning of circumstances and, eventually, permit him to find a way out of them. For Don Quixote, passages from chivalric novels and poems that he has memorized play the same role that commonplaces do for other, more learned readers. They give meaning to the world and inscribe individual experiences within universal verities. “Two memories possess me” A final text permits us to revisit the plural attributions of memory by means of which Ricoeur reduces an overly strict contrast between individual memory and collective memory. This text (which Ricoeur does not cite) is a work of fiction that opens Borges’s last collection. Under the title “Shakespeare’s Memory,” it presents a literal portrayal of the attribution of one individual’s memory to another individual.31 The fable – not as well known as that of Funes – recounts the peregrinations of Shakespeare’s memory, which can be transmitted, entire and intact, to those who accept the gift. It is thus offered to a Shakespeare critic, Daniel Thorpe, by a soldier who died “in the East, in a field hospital, at dawn.” Thorpe in turn offers it to the narrator, Hermann Soergel, a German specialist in English literature and the author of a Chronology of Shakespeare and a study of the neologisms invented by Chapman for his translations of Homer. Soergel accepts the gift by pronouncing the necessary formula: “I accept Shakespeare’s

Memory and Writing  133 memory.” From that point on, like his predecessors, he becomes a man with two memories. In Ricoeurian terms, this story depends on the contrast between mnémé and anamnésis, memory that springs into the mind and memory that is the result of effort. All that Soergel does to appropriate Shakespeare’s memory turns out to be in vain. Nothing – reading the books that Shakespeare read, reading the sonnets, or even a visit to Stratford – enables Soergel to take possession of the memory that has been transmitted to him. Rather, it is in his dreams that memory takes possession of him. As Thorpe says earlier in the story, “What I possess . . . are still two memories – my own personal memory and the memory of that Shakespeare that I partially am. Or rather, two memories possess me” (the Spanish is more economical and utilizes the same verb, tener: Tengo . . . dos memorias. . . . Mejor dicho, dos memorias me tienen).32 Possessed by Shakespeare’s memory, Soergel becomes its possessor: “After some thirty days, the dead man’s memory had come to animate me fully. For one curiously happy week, I almost believed myself Shakespeare. His work renewed itself for me.”33 In this way, the difficulty (or the pain) of laborious recall is followed by the happiness of immediate evocation and the joyous sudden surge of memory. Happiness does not last long for all those who have to reconcile their own memories with Shakespeare’s overwhelming memory: Throughout the first stage of this adventure I felt the joy of being Shakespeare; throughout the last, terror and oppression. At first the waters of the two memories did not mix; in time, the great torrent of Shakespeare threatened to flood my own modest stream – and very nearly did so. I noted with some nervousness that I was gradually forgetting the language of my parents. Since personal identity is based on memory, I feared for my sanity. . . . As the years pass, every man is forced to bear the growing burden of his memory. I staggered beneath two (which sometimes mingled) – my own and the incommunicable other’s.34

Soergel feels an imperious need to free himself from this other memory that is stifling him. In a telephone call dialed at random, he passes on his gift to the cultivated voice that answers his call and accepts the risk. However, the effort of forgetting is no easier than that of anamnesis. Soergel states: “I had invented exercises to awaken the antique memory; I had now to seek others to erase it. One of the many was the study of the mythology of William Blake, the rebellious disciple of Swedenborg. I found it to be less complex than merely

134  Texts and Meanings complicated. That and other paths were futile; all led me to Shakespeare.”35 As with Cardenio’s librillo and Freud’s “magic block,” erasure was a necessary part of the process but traces remained. The construction of a reserve of memory, which supposes forgetting, is insufficient protection against the unwanted returns of what should have disappeared forever. “Shakespeare’s Memory” ends with a postscript that expresses both the painful need to forget and the happy impossibility of forgetfulness: P. S. (1924) – I am now a man among men. In my waking hours I am Professor Emeritus Hermann Sörgel; I putter about the card catalog and compose erudite trivialities, but at dawn I sometimes know that the person dreaming is that other man. Every so often in the evening I am unsettled by small, fleeting memories that are perhaps authentic.36

9 Paratext and Preliminaries

In the introduction to his Seuils, Gérard Genette defines the paratext as a “vestibule,” a “fringe,” or a “zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public . . . that . . . is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it.” He goes on to remark: “The ways and means of the paratext change con­ tinually, depending on period, culture, genre, author, work, and edition, with varying degrees of pressure, sometimes widely varying.”1 Continuing his taxonomy, he distinguishes two classes of paratextual elements: the peritext, which we find within the book itself (title, epigraph, preface, author’s foreword, preliminary remarks, notes, illustrations, etc.); and the epitext, which is situated outside of the book itself (correspondence, diaries and journals, interviews, etc.). Each one of these elements has its own history, but tracing that history is not the purpose of Genette’s book: “We are dealing here with a synchronic and not a diachronic study – an attempt at a general picture, not a history of the paratext.” This is a useful reminder if we want to avoid the false quarrels too often launched by historians against structuralist approaches that they took for bad history. Gérard Genette goes on, however: “This remark is prompted not by any disdain whatever for the historical dimension but, once again, by the belief that it is appropriate to define objects before studying their evolution.”2 The apparent evidence of the statement does not prevent us from questioning it. Is it, in fact, so sure that the paratext is a category endowed with a transhistorical pertinence, and that the various characteristics and manifestations of the elements that make it up have to be held to be simple variations

136  Texts and Meanings or evolutions of a textual reality defined in its universality? If we think in these terms, do we not run the risk of effacing the specificity of textual configurations that receive that specificity from technical and social conditions that govern the publication and appropriation of works in quite different ways, according to the epoch in which they appear? Formal nomenclature of the elements that make up the paratext is perhaps of little help in understanding – in discontinuity – the logics that govern their composition and articulation. In an attempt to show this, I shall focus on the texts that open the two versions of the second part of Don Quixote: the Segundo Tomo del Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, published by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda in 1614, and the Segunda Parte del Ingenioso Cavallero Don Quixote de la Mancha, published by Cervantes in 1615. First, however, and like Don Quixote in chapter 62 of Part II, we need to visit the printer’s workshop. Printers’ practices In the age of the “typographical ancien régime,” between the midfifteenth century and the early nineteenth century, there was in fact a series of constraints that ruled both the redaction of a book and the relations among the peritextual elements situated ahead of the first title or the first sentence of the work printed in the book. That specificity is immediately visible on the pages themselves by the sig­ nature markings on the first pages of each gathering (also known as a “signature”) to indicate the order in which they should be bound. Whereas such signatures that bear text are usually capital letters of the Latin alphabet (A, B, C, and so forth), the signatures for the preliminaries are all different, vary widely and may include roman or italic lower-case letters, vowels with a tilde (ã, õ), or symbols (*, §, ¶, &). Here a typographical differentiation corresponded to a time sequence. In all European printshops, the practice was to compose the preliminaries and the final portions of the work (tables, index, errata) after the text itself had been printed.3 These final additions to the work could be set within a series of signatures bearing capital letters and placed at the end of the work. The same was not true, however, of the paratextual elements that made up the “threshold” or the “vestibule” to the book (studied by Gérard Genette in the chapters he devotes to titles, dedications, and epigraphs), which display a unity made visible typographically in all the books printed, thanks to the technique invented by Gutenberg (or by Coster or by Fust, according to the preferences of the older authors).

Paratext and Preliminaries  137 There are several reasons for that difference. For one thing, certain parts of the preliminary material obviously could be printed only after the body of the work itself. In Golden Age Spain, these included the fe de errata or testimonio de errata that stated that the printed book wholly conformed to the manuscript submitted to the censors, and the tasa, which fixed the maximum price at which the book could be offered for sale according to the number of gatherings that the book contained. All of the privilegios of the Golden Age, signed “Yo el Rey,” explicitly forbade the printer from printing the first pliego [gathering] of the book or delivering more than one copy to the author or the bookseller before the officers of the King’s Council had checked it over and established its sale price [corregido y tasado]. Only after that point could the first gathering containing (by law) the “privilege” or permission from the king, the approval of the censors, the sale price, and the fe de errata be printed. Moreover, the very different length of the various parts of the preliminaries justified grouping them on the same sheets in order to economize on paper, which was the largest item in the budget for a print edition, compris­ ing as much as 60 percent of total expenditures.4 The practice of printing last the gathering or gatherings containing the preliminary matter has a number of consequences. It permits us to presume that when the preliminaries (the “vestibulary” peritext) were printed within the first gathering of the book with signature markings A1, A2, A3, etc., it was either because they were redacted and composed (in both senses of the word) at the same time as the work itself, or else because this was an edition that literally repro­ duced a printed text that it used as copy. In the first of these cases, attributing to the author of the text the “prefatory instance” (dedica­ tions, preface, advice to the reader) becomes more probable than when the preliminaries occupy a separate signature and may easily have been provided by the publisher, whether or not he is named.5 The manuscripts that were used as copy in the printshops reinforce the second hypothesis to the extent that they only rarely include the dedications that appear in the printed editions of the same works. This is, at least, what is clear from the exceptional series of manu­ scripts of the sort conserved in the Biblioteca Nacional and in the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid.6 The printers’ and booksellers’ control over preliminary matter was widely recognized. One example is the manual on the typographic art written in Latin for confessors by Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz, the abbot of the Monastery of Emmaüs in Prague and later bishop of Satriano and Campagna, published in volume 4 of his Theologia moralis fundamentalis in Lyon in 1664.7 In Article 8 of that work,

138  Texts and Meanings Caramuel, speaking of dedications, prologues, and indices, states: “The printer or the bookseller who assumes responsibility for the cost of the edition always or nearly always takes care of those three ele­ ments. As he is rarely a man of letters, he commits many errors in each of them.” Caramuel adds, speaking of dedications, “Let us dedicate books to our friends, or leave the printer to dedicate them to the princes.”8 Another characteristic of typographical practice in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries was to impose a unity on texts in the pre­ liminary materials with a quite different origin, status, and function. The result was several intertwined relationships. The first, obviously, was the one that the author established with his protectors or his readers thanks to the dedication and the prologue. But beyond that relationship, which has garnered the most paratextual attention, there were other relationships embedded in the preliminary materi­ als: the one between the monarch and the author to whom he grants a privilege; the one between the censors and the authorities who have charged them with examining the work; the ones between the king, his council, or his ministers and all those (booksellers, judges, offi­ cials) who were expected to respect and apply the regulations gov­ erning the book trade. In this sense, the preliminary materials in an old book state and articulate a complex set of relations with power that goes well beyond the strategy “of an influence on the public, an influence that – well or poorly understood and achieved – is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it.”9 The preliminary materials of Don Quixote, 1605 and 1615 The treatment of the preliminary materials of Part I of Don Quixote (which was not yet so named), printed toward the end of 1604 and published with the date of 1605, illustrates the unfortunate effects of the selection from among the various pieces that make it up.10 The French translations of the work, for example, retain only the parts that can be assigned to the author of Don Quixote’s history and reject all others. The most severe selection is that of Louis Viardot’s transla­ tion, which was used as the basis for the Garnier-Flammarion edition: it includes only the famous prologue in the form of a prologue on the vanity of prologues.11 The edition in Aline Schulman’s translation is more generous, given that it includes the dedication to the duke of Béjar, the Prologue (here titled “Au lecteur”), and the ten burlesque poems addressed, as in the Spanish text, “Au livre de Don Quichotte

Paratext and Preliminaries  139 de la Manche.”12 The edition under the direction of Jean Canavaggio for the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade uses the same formula: dedication, prologue, preliminary poems.13 None of these recent editions gives a reproduction of the title page, a translation of the tasa, the testimonio de errata or the licencia y facultad y privilegio of the king. One might say that these documents are of little importance for an understand­ ing of the text, as the first peritext suggests it to the desocupado lector to whom the prologue is addressed. This is not so sure. In the first place, the absence of these official pieces deprives the reader of a comprehension of the mechanisms of censorship and the ups and downs of the printing process that per­ tained in the publication of Don Quixote. What is more, that was not the title under which the work appeared in the notifications of the sale price and the privilege, but rather El ingenioso hidalgo de la Mancha.14 The dedication to the duke of Béjar had a similar history because, although it was signed with the name of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, it had not been written by him, but rather by the book­ seller/publisher Francisco de Robles, who reused for the occasion the dedication of Francisco de Herrera and a fragment of the prologue that Francisco de Medina had redacted for another work (published in 1580), the Obras de Garcilaso de la Vega con anotaciones.15 Next, the absence of any reproduction of the title page separates the con­ temporary reader from the first of all the paratexts related to Don Quixote. The title page communicates more – in fact, much more – than the title itself, to which the translations reduce it. For one thing, as I have attempted to show elsewhere,16 the visual space of the title page shows the three things that commanded all literary practice in the Golden Age: a claim to a paternity of the text that the prologue, and then the fiction of Cide Hamete Benengeli, ironically deny; the patron­ age relationship linking the writer to the duke of Béjar, whose various titles occupy four lines of type; the economic realities of the edition that implied the royal authorization [Con privilegio], the work of the printshop (represented on the title page by Juan de la Cuesta’s impos­ ing device) and the enterprise of the bookseller/publisher who had financed the edition and sold the copies (“Vendese en casa de Francisco de Robles, librero del Rey nuestro Señor”). What is more, the three first lines of the title itself, “El Ingenioso/Hidalgo Don Qui-/xote de la Mancha,” are an immediate indication of the comic exaggeration of the hero whose adventures the reader is about to read. He is a hidalgo, a minor and provincial noble, thus had no possible claim to the title of “don”; “quixote” was a piece of armor; and the suffix “-ote,” detached from what preceded it by the line break, had a

140  Texts and Meanings grotesque or humorous connotation. The 1605 reader knew imme­ diately who or what awaited him. The title page of the Segunda Parte of the tale, published in 1615, is preceded by preliminary material that was at once familiar and original.17 As was usually the case, the title page, the tasa, and the fe de errata were the first items in the first gathering, whereas the privilegio, the prólogo al lector and the dedicatoria al conde de Lemos were the last items. Between them, however, the bookseller-publisher Francisco de Robles or the printer (who was no longer Juan de la Cuesta – who left Madrid in 1607 – even though his mark was still present on the title page) introduced three texts, signed, respectively, by the vicar general of Madrid, Doctor Gutierre de Cetina, and by two chaplains (and poets) under Cardinal don Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, at the time archbishop of Toledo, the maestro Josef de Valdivielso and the licenciado Márquez Torres. The first two of these had been charged by the commission of the King’s Council and the third by order of the vicar-general of Madrid to examine the manu­ script of the book to see whether it contained anything deleterious or “to the prejudice of our holy Catholic faith, or sound morals” [No contiene cosa contre nuestra fe católica ni buenas costumbres]. All three of these men had judged this to be true, and it was the texts of their aprobación that was published in the preliminary matter. The particular status of these three approvals, which were both legal documents connected with the mechanisms of censorship and literary praise similar to preliminary poems, means that recent translations do not ignore them systematically, even when they do not print the title page, the tasa, the fe de errata or the privilege. If Aline Schulman’s translation reproduces only the prologue and Cervantes’s dedication, in Jean Canavaggio’s edition the two pieces are translated and placed ahead of the author’s two preliminary texts.18 A survey of all of the pieces that made up the first gathering of the book in 1615 shows, first, that the order in which these texts were presented in that work reverses the chronology of the various stages of the publication process. During Spain’s Golden Age, that process began with the presentation to the King’s Council of a corrected manuscript [copia en limpio] of the work and that body’s naming of the censors who were to examine it and, eventually, authorize its publication. In the preliminary matter, the three approvals are traces of that first moment, given that they are dated February 27, March 5 (for November, a typographical error), and March 17, 1615. Once the text was approved, it could receive an authorization to be printed [Puédesele dar licencia para imprimirle]. That authorization took the form of the royal privilege, which was placed after the third approval

Paratext and Preliminaries  141 and dated March 30, 1615. The king (or his secretary, Pedro de Contreras) recalls the censors’ approval, grants a print privilege valid for ten years (rather than the twenty years that Cervantes has requested) and indicates the steps still to come, which included veri­ fication that the printed copies conformed to the manuscript. This statement was initialed and signed [rubricado y firmado] by a notary of the King’s Chamber, Hernando de Vallejo. This was followed by the redaction of the fe de errata and the tasa, which gave permission to print the first gathering and to publish the book. The final docu­ ments in the censorship process, the fe de errata and the tasa, appeared first in order in the preliminary matter, printed on the recto of the title page, and they bear the same date (October 21, 1615), which left almost seven months for printing the book. Printing was com­ pleted in November with that of the first gathering, which included the first page (the title page) and, in its final leaves, the prologue to the reader and the dedication to the count of Lemos dated October 31, 1615. The backwards order of printing the various pieces of preliminary matter authorizing publication introduced different attributes of the sovereign king. The censors’ approbations attested that he was the defender of the faith and of Christian morals. The tasa, which estab­ lished the just price to the public for the book, designated the king as the protector of the common good. The privilege assured a just remuneration for the author and for those whom the author might choose to print and sell his work and threatened heavy punishments for anyone who violated the publication monopoly thus granted. In granting this as a “grace,” the king guaranteed the property rights acquired by work and study [trabajo y studio], which was a sign that he was not an oriental despot who claimed total control of the wealth and the lives of his subjects. The first person whom the reader encountered in the preliminary matter was thus his own king. The second person that the reader encountered was the author, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, praised three times by the approving censors. Their texts situated the book that they had read and that the reader was about to read between amusement and morality. The vicar-general Gutierre de Cetina, stating laconically that the book “is fraught with much lawful amusement, blended with moral phi­ losophy” [es libro de mucho entretenimiento lícito, mezclado de mucha filosofía moral].19 Like the doctor-vicar general, it is not in terms of genre that the poet and playwright Josef de Valdivielso qualifies the work, but on the basis of its effects (laughter and amusement) and its intentions (mockery and the banishment of chiv­ alric romances). The lexicon that he sees as characteristic of the

142  Texts and Meanings 1605 Part I and that creates the level of expectations for the reader of Part II is that of satire: “This author . . . has mingled fiction with truth, delight with instruction, and morals with pleasantry; disguis­ ing the hook of reproof, with the bait of sprightly entertainment” [mezclando las veras a las burlas, lo dulce a lo provechoso y lo moral a lo faceto, disimulando en el cebo del donaire el anzuelo de la reprehensión]. The licenciado Márquez Torres accentuates his remarks a bit differently. Torres was a poet, but also an arbitrista [giver of advice], as shown in the memorandum on the state of the kingdom that he addresses to Olivares. In his approval statement, praise of the satirical and comic verve of the Quixote gives way to a celebration of its moral teachings [reprehensión cristiana], the purity of its language [la lisura del lenguaje castellano], and its erudition [erudición]. The last two were not unconnected with a polemical intent against all those – Lope de Vega at the head of the list – who had mocked Cervantes for his ignorance and the awk­ wardness of his writing style. Márquez Torres’s praise leads him to amplify a motif we also find in Valdivielso’s approval: the construction of Cervantes as a figure of the glory of the “nation,” defined, as in the 1611 Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española of Covarrubias, on the basis of the sovereignty of the king of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal and that of the use of the “Spanish” language. Valdivielso concludes his censor’s report: “In short, it is a work worthy of that great genius which is the honour and ornament of our nation, and the envy and admiration of stran­ gers” [Es obra muy digna de su grande ingenio, honra y lustre de nuestra nación, admiración y invidia de las estrañas]. Márquez Torres picks up the theme, declaring that Cervantes’s books “have met with such general applause, on account of the decency and decorum, as well as the agreeable sweetness of his stile, in Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and Flanders” [libros que con general aplauso, así por su decoro y decencia como por la suavidad y blandura de sus discursos, han recebido España, Francia, Italia, Alemania y Flandes]. Márquez Torres cites an example of that universal fame: two days before he redacted his approval, some French gentlemen among the suite of the French ambassador (to whom the cardinal-archbishop of Toledo had paid a visit concerning the marriage between the infante Philip of the Asturias with Elizabeth of Bourbon of the French ruling house) had interrogated him about the latest and most popular liter­ ary works. When Márquez Torres mentioned the second part of Don Quixote, which he was in the process of reviewing for the censors, the noble Frenchmen proclaimed the “high esteem” in which Cervantes’s book was held in “France and the neighbouring king­

Paratext and Preliminaries  143 doms,” citing in particular “the Galatea, which one of them could repeat; [and] .  .  . the novels,” clearly a reference to the Novelas ejemplares published in Madrid in 1613 (La Galatea, que alguno dellos tiene casi de memoria, la primera parte desta, y las Novelas). Recalling that conversation clearly had a more immediate purpose. When the French gentlemen wanted to know more about Cervantes, Márquez Torres felt obliged to respond that he was “a gentleman, oppressed with poverty and old age” [que era viejo, soldado, hidalgo y pobre], which led one of them to express an astonishment that the censor may easily have shared: “What! does not Spain load such a man with riches, and maintain him out of the public treasury?” [¿Pues a tal hombre no le tiene España muy rico y sustentado del erario público?]. Within the 1615 preliminary materials, the statements of approval, or censuras, as was said at the time, played a dual role. They took the place of the laudatory “sonnets, epigrams, and eulogies” that the 1605 Prologue deplored the lack of, which led a wise friend to declare: “you can fix that if you write them yourself” [se puede remediar en que vos mesmo toméis algún trabajo en hacerlos].20 Ten years later, Cervantes did not go to that trouble, but the publisher or the printer found a way to make up for it by printing required texts that much resembled literary praise.21 Márquez Torres was well aware of this when he wrote, “I believe, this will be thought rather too much for a certificate; and some will say, that I have even encroached upon the bounds of flattery” [Bien creo que está, para censura, un poco larga; alguno dirá que toca los límites de lisonjero elogio].22 That praise is more easily understood if we retrace the connections between the various authors of the preliminary materials of Part II of Don Quixote. As Anne Cayuela has pointed out,23 Valdivielso and Márquez Torres were both chaplains and protegés of Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, the cardinal archbishop of Toledo, whose charity [caridad] Cervantes praises at the end of his Prologue to the reader. Moreover, in 1614 Valdivielso had written an approval for one of Cervantes’s earlier works, the Viaje del Parnasso, and in 1615 he was to serve as censor for the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos. In September 1616, after Cervantes’s death, Valdivielso wrote a laudatory and emotional approval for Los trabajos de Persiles. This led to the hypothesis that the various approvals were written in full knowledge of those written by others and were known to Cervantes (and perhaps even written by him, in the case of Márquez Torres’s text), given that Cervantes implicitly addresses them in his own prologue and dedica­ tion.24 This in turn explains the second role of the 1615 preliminary materials, which was to manifest the solidarity of a clientele that had

144  Texts and Meanings become a literary party in the service of Cervantes, who very prob­ ably had great need of it. Preliminary materials and polemical arguments A first Part II of Don Quixote had been published during the summer or the autumn of 1614. The title page of that apocryphal sequel promised Segundo Tomo del Ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, que contiene su tercera salida; y es la quinta parte de sus aventuras [The Second Part of the Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, which Contains his Third Excursion; and Constitutes the Fifth Part of his Adventures].25 Tercera salida is an allusion to the final pages of the 1605 Don Quijote de la Mancha, which state: “There is only what tradition has preserved in the memories of la Mancha – that don Quixote, the third time he left his home, went to Zaragosa, where he took part in some famous jousts held in that city” [solo la fama ha guardado, en las memorias de la Mancha, que don Quijote la tercera vez que salió de su casa fue a Zaragoza, donde se hallo en una famosas justas que en aquella ciudad se hicieron].26 As for the “Fifth Part,” it refers to the division in four parts of the book published in 1605, which at the time were by no means con­ ceived of as Part I of a two-part work. The later work is presented as written by “el Licenciado Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, natural de la villa de Tordesillas,” using a pseudonym that, in spite of numer­ ous and highly ingenious hypotheses, has not yet been penetrated. The place of publication is given as Tarragona and the printer as Felipe Roberto. An analysis of the fonts used for the book suggest that the typographer’s address given on the title page in fact dissimu­ lates the actual place and publisher, which could have been the print­ shop of Sebastián de Cormellas in Barcelona – the very typography shop visited by Don Quixote during his stay in Barcelona and described by Cervantes on the basis of his own acquaintance with Juan de la Cuesta’s workshop in Madrid.27 Fernández de Avellaneda’s Prologue is a violent attack on Cervantes, whose arrogance he condemns, citing his ironic prologue to Don Quixote and the presumptuous one to the Novelas ejemplares. He also denounces Cervantes’s envy and his stinginess, as expressed in complaints about a book that deprived him of the profits he was counting on for its continuation [Quéjese de mi trabajo por la ganancia que le quito de su segunda parte].28 After this spiteful sally, he makes fun of Cervantes’s infirmity as an old soldier who, as the proverb puts it, had “more tongue than hands” [más lengua que manos] and quali­

Paratext and Preliminaries  145 fies Don Quixote, not as a “history,” as Cervantes himself called it, or as a satire, as his censors deemed it, but as a “comedy,” which was equivalent to a denial of the work’s originality. Behind a justification of continuations by other hands than those of the original author (backed up by examples from the past such as the various Arcadia, Diana, or Celestina), the real point of the pro­ logue to the spurious Part II was a defense of Lope de Vega. It was in fact he who was reported to have been mocked by the light-hearted prologue to the 1605 Don Quijote, making fun of the false erudition of citations placed in the margins or at the end of the volume and the exaggerated flattery of the accumulations of praise by great and noble figures in the preliminary matter. Both in his Arcadia (1598) and in his Christian romance, El peregrino en su patria (1604), Lope had shown himself to be a fervent adept of both of those practices and had taken offense at Cervantes’s remarks. Ten years later, Fernández de Avellaneda took on the defense of Lope, using a some­ what menacing tone and declaring that Cervantes had offended he who is so justly celebrated by foreign nations and to whom our own owes much, for having amused, with so much honesty and fecun­ dity and for so many years, the theaters of Spain by offering them excellent and innumerable comedias that combine the rules of the art demanded by the public and the authority and integrity that one has a right to expect from a minister of the Holy Office [a quien tan justamente celebran las naciones más estranjeras y la nuestra debe tanto, por haber entretenido honestísima y fecundamente tantos años los teatros de España con estupendas e innumerables comedias, con el rigor del arte que pide el mundo y con la seguridad y limpieza que de un ministro del Santo Oficio se debe esperar].

I might recall that Lope de Vega had been ordained as a priest in 1614 and became a familiar [officer] of the Inquisition in 1608. Preliminary materials also became a small stage for literary con­ troversies in which political machinations were played out (as they also were in the war of lampoons). The criticisms in the preliminaries to the 1615 Quixote constitute a first response by asserting that, at the least, the European glory of Cervantes was equal to that of Lope. The prologue to the reader was another response. Here the tone was one of condescending irony toward Fernández de Avellaneda and, perhaps, a slightly more pointed irony concerning Lope. Cervantes first asserts: “I’m not of a mind to attack any priest, especially if he’s a member of the Holy Office” [no tengo yo de perseguir a ningún sacerdote, y más si tiene por añadidura ser familiar del Santo Oficio]. He also states, “I worship his genius, I admire his works, and his ever

146  Texts and Meanings virtuous way of life” [de tal adoro el ingenio, admiro las obras y la ocupación continua y virtuosa],29 whereas everyone knew that Lope led a life that was far from being a model of Christian virtue. After recalling the loss of the use of his left hand at Lepanto in “the noblest battle any age ever witnessed, or that current and future ages will ever witness” [la más alta ocasión que vieron los siglos pasados, los presentes, ni esperan ver los venideros], Cervantes turns Fernández de Avellaneda’s accusations back against him. He was the one who wanted to make money out of books, not Cervantes, who relied on the liberalities of his protectors, Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, the cardinal archbishop of Toledo, and his nephew, the count of Lemos, to whom Part II of the Don Quixote was dedicated and whose titles (which included those of “Viceroy, Governor, and Captain General of the Kingdom of Naples”) stretch out over seven lines of the title page. Fernández de Avellaneda’s intention was a diabolical temptation, “one of the greatest” of which is “to make a man think that he can write and publish a book to become as famous as he is rich, and as rich as he is famous” [unas de las mayores es ponerle a un hombre en el entendimiento que puede componer y imprimir un libro con que gane tanta fama como dinero y tantos dineros cuanta fama]. When this enterprise makes profit from a book that was already written by another, it is shameful because its author “doesn’t dare appear in an open field under the clear sky, but rather conceals his name and disguises his hometown, as if he had committed high treason” [no osa parecer a campo abierto y al cielo claro, encubriendo su nombre, fingiendo su patria, como si hubiera hecho alguna traición de lesa majestad].30 In order to put an end to such harmful temptations, which inflate books in much the same way as the madman of Seville, whose story is told in the prologue, inflated dogs, Cervantes announces that in the work that his reader is about to read “I give you don Quixote at greater length and finally dead and buried, so that no one else can dare relate new stories about him since those already told are enough” [te doy a don Quijote dilatado, y finalmente muerto y sepultado, porque ninguno se atreva a levantarle nuevos testimonios, pues bastan los pasados]. The 1615 volume, which begins with a title page that counters the apocryphal continuation with the authenticity of a Part II written “Por Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, autor de su primera parte,” announces in its preliminary materials the death of the hidalgo who becomes, on the same title page, “El Ingenioso/Cavallero Don/Quixote/de la Mancha.” The precaution was a useful way to discourage future Fernández de Avellaneda and, at the same time, it anticipated the reader’s expectations by inviting him to read other of Cervantes’s works such as the Persiles, which he promised “soon”

Paratext and Preliminaries  147 and the second part of the Galatea, a work “that I’m finishing” [que estoy acabando], which had been promised as early as 1585, imme­ diately after the publication of Part I of that work.31 The dedication to the count of Lemos, the nephew and son-in-law of the powerful duke of Lerma, the valido, or prime minister, of Philip III,32 closes the preliminary materials of Part II. It forms something like a diptych with the title page and echoes the prologue in which Cervantes praised the viceroy of Naples, saying that his “charity and well-known liberality support me” [cuya cristiandad y liberalidad, bien conocida, contra todos los golpes de mi corta fortuna me tiene en pie].33 Similar praise is transmitted in the fable of the Emperor of China, who is supposed to have asked for Part II of Don Quixote so he could have it read to the students of the school he was intending to found with Cervantes as rector. Cervantes refuses the offer, however, saying that “I have for myself, at Naples, the great Count of Lemos who, without all that trumpery of titles of schools and other rector­ ships takes care of my needs and protects me and shows me more favors than I would know how to want” [en Nápoles tengo al grande conde de Lemos, que, sin tantos titulillos de colegios ni rectorías, me sustenta, me ampara y hace más merced que la que yo acierto a desear]. While reaffirming the power of his patrons, which reached almost to the king by the chains of kinship connecting Cardinal Sandoval, Count Lemos and the duke of Lerma, Cervantes also uses the dedica­ tion for two other purposes. He pursues his denigration of Fernández de Avellaneda’s continuation of his work even more harshly this time. The work that he presents to the count is aimed at “healing the bit­ terness and the nausea brought on by another Don Quixote who, disguised under the name of Second Part, has traveled throughout the world” [para quitar el hámago y la náusea que ha causado otro don Quijote que con nombre de Segunda parte se ha disfrazado y corrido por el orbe]. As is known, beginning with chapter 59 of his own book, Cervantes plays in many ways with that “other Don Quixote.” Moreover, repeating what he says in the prologue (which he may have written after the dedication), Cervantes announces the imminent completion of Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, “a book that I hope to finish within four months” [libro a quien daré fin dentro de cuatro meses]. Announced by its author as “the worst [book] or the best that has even been written in our language, at least among books for entertainment” [o el más malo, o el mejor que en nuestra lengua se haya compuesto, quiero decir de los de entretenimiento], but already hailed by his friends as capable of “attaining what is best in the world” [ha de llegar al estremo de bondad possible], the romance that Cervantes declares will rival Heliodorus was

148  Texts and Meanings awaited impatiently, not only by his generous protector, but also by all those who had become his faithful readers. Hence the obligations of patronage in no way excluded caring about the reading public or – whatever Cervantes might say – the profits permitted by the book market. Typology and typography What lessons can we draw from having accompanied Don Quixote and his double along their road? The most fundamental one, it seems to me, is a need to situate all the peritextual materials within the multiple relations that bind them together. If we want to understand the preliminaries, those relations count more than whether each piece, taken separately, belongs to one paratextual genre or another. Those relations, which form a system,34 are of several sorts. Within any one book, they are organized on the basis of the relationship among different registers of texts that seem totally heterogeneous (to the point that many modern editions retain only the most immedi­ ately authorial or literary portions). Still, strong links exist among the pieces connected with the process of publication and those that are addressed to the reader, whoever he may be. This means that we need to restore the multiple logics that determined how a collection of texts of highly different natures – juridical, administrative, enco­ miastic, performative, biographical, and more – would be gathered together. The relations among several paratexts also concern the preliminar­ ies to different parts of a same work (as, for example, the two parts of Don Quixote); of different works by the same author (for example, of the Novelas ejemplares, Part II of Don Quixote, and the Persiles); or of works by different authors (as in the case of the two versions of Don Quixote, Part II). The interpretation of each paratext, or each element of each of the paratexts, is closely dependent on all the others. As Anne Cayuela writes, we need to “throw into relief the coherence of the paratextual whole,” considered in this manner.35 In this sense, the study of texts must follow the same course as that of societies, which today puts more emphasis on relations than on taxonomies and on dynamic contextualizations than on tables of classification. That said, how are we to avoid the risk of falling back, to use a different vocabulary, into the temptation of transhistorical invari­ ances? Have we overcome the difficulty by substituting – as is the case in the present essay – the lexicon of the object, defining the

Paratext and Preliminaries  149 preliminary pieces by their typographic materiality, for the language of textual instances? Perhaps, but only on the condition that we situate the pertinence of that description within a historicity of its own, here that of the “typographical ancien régime.” It would not work before then, in the age of the manuscript, or after, in the age of the industrialization of printing and composition. In those other time periods, all the paratextual relations, within the book and among books, had or have other modalities directly dependent on the tech­ niques of reproduction of the written word, on the supports used for texts, and on the circulation of works. When we emphasize their discontinuity we lose much, and what remains is a nostalgia for lost taxonomies that welcomes into their generic classifications all types of texts,36 in much the same way that the compositor’s case served for all typographic sorts. But that nostalgia is perhaps compensated for by a more complete and denser comprehension of the texts that led the readers of the early modern period to the works that provided them with profit and pleasure.

10 Publishing Cervantes

Authors do not “write” books, not even their own books. Always, however, their readers have been tempted to leaf through the printed pages in order to encounter the work as the writer composed it, desired it, and dreamed of it. In his El texto del “Quijote,”1 Francisco Rico recalls that, although that aspiration is legitimate and shared by the literary critic and the ordinary reader, it should not allow us to forget that a text goes through many operations to become a book. This was just as true in the age of Cervantes – perhaps even more so than today, when books are usually printed from an electronic version written by the author on his computer screen. Autograph manuscript, fair copy, and typographic composition There are several reasons for asserting that the text of Don Quixote, printed in 1604 in the printshop of Jean de la Cuesta with a pressrun somewhere between 1,500 and 1,750 copies, was quite different from the text that had come from Cervantes’s pen (or, if you like, that of Cide Hamete Benengeli, the Arab historian designated as the author of the history in chapter 9). In the Spanish Golden Age, the typographers who set type for the pages of a book never used the author’s manuscript. They used a corrected copy, made by a professional scribe, which had been sent to the King’s Council to receive the censors’ approvals, and had then been submitted for permission to print the work and the king’s privilege. After being returned to the author, that corrected copy was then turned over to the bookseller/

Publishing Cervantes  151 publisher responsible for its publication, then passed on to the master printer and his workers. Thus a first disparity separated the text as the author had written it (what Francisco Rico calls the borrador or rough draft) from the fair copy [copia in limpio or original] produced by a copyist, who imposed certain norms usually absent in authors’ manuscripts. An author’s manuscript usually observed little regularity in spelling and was almost without punctuation, whereas the original (which, of course, was not the original manuscript) supposedly assured a higher degree of readability in the text as it was submitted to the censors for their examination. Before the original became copy to be used for typographic composition, further preparation increased the distance between the autograph manuscript and the text as it was offered to readers. All seventeenth-century treatises on the art of printing – held to be one of the liberal arts, not a mechanical one, and even the art of all arts – insist on the decisive role of correctors and compositors. The forms and dispositions of the printed text (spellings, accents, punctuation) did not depend on the author, who delegated to whoever prepared the copy or those who set the type all decisions regarding such matters. Another part of the printshop workers’ role was to divide the original in such a way that the book could be composed, not according to the order of the text, which would require the use of too many characters for too long a time and use the workers’ time inefficiently, but rather by formes – that is, composing at one time all the pages to be printed on the same side of a print sheet. In the case of Don Quixote, for example, an in-quarto book in which each signature was made up of two printer’s sheets, this meant that the first sheet would contain pages 1, 4, 13, and 16. That way, the workers could begin by printing that one sheet before setting type for the other pages of the gathering. The original, which was already quite different from the autograph manuscript, was further transformed and altered by the work of the printshop. The compositors usually made errors that introduced a number of distortions; it was even more likely (as we can see from a careful examination of the differences between the chapter titles in the body of the first edition of Don Quixote and the versions of them listed in the “Tabla de los Capítulos” placed at the end of the book) that the same copy, read by different correctors or compositors, could produce noticeable variations in the use of pronouns, verb tense agreement, grammatical accords, and even vocabulary. Francisco Rico’s verdict is thus final: the princeps edition of Don Quixote, printed hastily in fewer than sixty days between the end of September and the beginning of November 1604, can in no way be

152  Texts and Meanings considered the very same text that Miguel de Cervantes wrote, in the strict and material sense of the term. This forcefully impugns the myth of the first edition, which certain editors of the work have claimed offers the text exactly as its author confided it to the pages of his manuscript. This erroneous certitude has led to enormous extravagances. At the end of the nineteenth century, the advent of photographic techniques fed the fetishism of the facsimile that, by offering an identical reproduction of the first edition, gave the illusion of returning to the authentic original text. At the end of the twentieth century, when the obsessive theme of the infinite polysemy of texts invaded literary criticism, it led to interpreting every anomaly as the expression of a subtle intention, a voluntary error, or a note of parody intended by the author. Only a profound ignorance of the practices of early publishing could have made anyone think that Cervantes could have ignored the limitations that the state of the language and the common experience of his age imposed on the composition of his book or that he could have freed himself from the legal and technical constraints imposed on publication. His text was subjected, like all other texts (and perhaps more than others, thanks to the haste of his publisher, Francisco de Robles, to get the book off the presses before the Christmas holidays of the year 1604) to the habits of the copyists, the mistakes of the compositors, and the preferences of the correctors. No old edition, and the first edition even less than another – not even the original, if it had been conserved – can place the reader face to face with the text that Cervantes’s pen traced in the notebooks and sheets of paper that, as the years went by, made up a manuscript that was undoubtedly quite disparate and very thick. Author’s corrections and the printing process But must we conclude that Cervantes intervened in no way in the early editions of the history of the ingenioso hidalgo, as a number of critics and editors have maintained (to some extent in contradiction with their devout respect of the princeps edition)? Probably not. First of all, it seems certain that Cervantes introduced corrections and revisions in the fair copy established by a professional scribe either before (which was allowed) or after (which was forbidden) the moment when the text received its approbation and its privilege. Francisco Rico’s thesis is that while the original was in the hands of the officers of the King’s Council or the censors charged with

Publishing Cervantes  153 approving it, Cervantes modified his own manuscript and later inserted his changes (perhaps not always very clearly) into the copy used for printing the work. The clearest indication of this is given by the discordances between the content of certain chapters in the book printed in 1604 and the titles of those same chapters, as if confusion created by the author, the corrector’s misunderstandings, and compositors’ mistakes had all left traces in the published work or an earlier state of the division of the text. For example, the title of chapter 10, “Of what else happened to don Quixote with the Basque and the danger in which he found himself with a mob of Yangüesans” [De lo que más le avino a don Quijote con el vizcaíno y del peligro en que se vio con una caterva de yangüeses), announces an episode (the fight with the Basque) that had in fact occurred in the preceding chapter and another episode (the encounter with the mule drivers from the town of Yanguas in the province of Soria) that occurs only in chapter 15. Again, the title of chapter 36, “Which deals with the fierce and colossal battle that Don Quixote had with some wineskins, and other strange adventures at the inn” [Que trata de la brava y descomunal batalla que don Quijote tuvo con unos cueros de vino, con otros raros sucesos que en la venta le sucedieron], announces Don Quixote’s massacre, in his sleep, of the innkeeper Juan Palomeque’s wineskins full of red wine, which he takes to be the wicked tormentor of Princess Micomicona. Cervantes, probably in the process of revising the original organization of his text, introduced the episode into the preceding chapter, where it briefly interrupts the reading of the “novela” of the “IllAdvised Curiosity” begun in chapter 33.2 No less confusion resulted from additions to the new edition in 1605. To prove this point, Francisco Rico returns (but with new insights) to the famous and bothersome episode of Sancho Panza’s donkey. In the edition printed in 1604, the animal disappears, with no explanation, in chapter 25 and returns, also with no explanation, in chapter 46. Criticized for his lack of concentration and mocked for his negligence, Cervantes wrote two additions for the 1605 edition, one describing the theft of the animal by Ginés de Pasamonte, the other his recuperation by Sancho. These interpolations – and Rico uses persuasive stylistic and lexical comparisons to demonstrate that they were made by Cervantes – were placed into chapters 23 and 30. Unfortunately, several phrases in chapter 23 and the beginning of chapter 25 were not corrected as they should have been: we find Sancho still sitting on his donkey, despite the fact that the animal is given as stolen only a few lines earlier. The third

154  Texts and Meanings edition (Madrid 1608), also printed in the workshop of Juan de la Cuesta and reviewed by Cervantes, attempted to correct these contradictions by introducing into chapter 23 supplementary explanations that show that Sancho, once his mount had been stolen, went on foot carrying his pack and the donkey’s saddle, a detail that was not clear in the 1605 edition. The report he makes of the theft in Part II, published in 1615, confirms the story by comparing the roguery of Ginés de Pasamonte to the wiliness of Brunello in Orlando furioso, who steals Sacripante’s horse while he is still mounted in the saddle. Francisco Rico draws several conclusions from this little donkey tale. First, it shows that although Cervantes probably never corrected the proofs of the various editions of his book (authorial proofcorrection was made difficult by the necessity to break up the composed forms quickly so that the type could be used for the composition of new pages), he did manage to introduce modifications in the new editions of 1605 and 1608. Those concerning Sancho’s donkey are not the only ones: there is also the transformation of the improvised chaplet that Don Quixote makes in the Sierra Morena in his attempt to imitate the melancholy and the piety of Amadís de Gaula. In the 1605 edition, he uses a piece of his shirt as a rosary: “He tore off a strip of cloth from his shirttails, and he made eleven knots, one larger than the rest, and this served him as a rosary while he was there, where he prayed a million Hail Marys” [rasgó una gran tira de las faldas de la camisa, que andaban colgando, y diole once ñudos, el uno más gordo que los demás, y esto le sirvió de rosario el tiempo que allí estuvo, donde rezó un millón de ave marias].3 The second edition, which appeared in 1605, corrected this awkward solution and made the chaplet of more natural materials: “And to serve him as a chaplet [he took] some large acorns from a cork oak, which he strung together and made a rosary of ten beads” [Y sirviéronle de rosario unas agallas grandes de un alcornoque, que ensartó, de que hizo un diez].4 The story of Sancho’s donkey also shows that negligence threatened at every moment of the publishing process with the insertion of additions where they did not belong and the omission of corrections demanded by the new state of the text. Confusion in an original with reference marks and slips bearing additions that were probably not easy to read, the inattention of the Madrid correctors, who were infinitely less rigorous than the corrector who prepared the copy for the edition published by Velpius in Brussels in 1607, whom Rico calls “a master at detecting the manuscript reading that preceded a poor interpretation in the print version” [maestro en detectar la lección

Publishing Cervantes  155 manuscrita que subyaccía a una mala interpretación del impreso]5 or the technical errors of the compositors are as many explanations for why the early editions of Don Quixote are just as inaccurate as other contemporary books, if not more so. The tribulations of Sancho’s donkey pose an even more basic question: How are we to connect Part I and Part II of Don Quixote? With which edition of Part I (1604, 1605, 1608) does what Sancho has to say in Part II fit the best? And under what overall title should the history of the ingenioso hidalgo and the ingenioso cavallero be gathered together – if we admit, with Francisco Rico, that the title of Part II (as well as the introduction of the name of “Don Quijote” on the title page of Part I) was the decision of the publisher or the printer, not that of Cervantes, who never joined the terms ingenioso and cavallero? We know the choices that Francisco Rico made for “his” two Don Quijote of 19986 and 2004,7 which was to publish the 1604 text (placing the 1605 additions in an appendix) and title both parts Don Quijote de la Mancha, a choice that accords with the privilege granted in 1615 designating the text as Segunda Parte de don Quijote de la Mancha, where the 1604 edition was simply titled El ingenioso hidalgo de la Mancha. Historicity and readability Returning to the principles that guided him in his edition of the text, Francisco Rico offers, under the term ecdótica del Siglo de Oro, a theory, a practice and an ethics of the editing of texts in the early modern period. For him, every modern editor has a double task: he is responsible for mobilizing all the fields of expertise (philological, bibliographical, historical) that help to relate the composition and the publication of a text to their conditions of possibility, thus avoiding factual anachronisms and interpretive fantasies. On the other hand, he must propose a text that respects what can be known of the author’s desires and that is readable for a contemporary reader who is neither a philologist nor a bibliographer. This explains the strong distinction that Rico establishes between “critical editions” that are increasingly expected to exploit the resources of multimedia hypertextuality in order to publish and compare the many states of a given work, on the one hand, and, on the other, “reading editions” that profit from accumulated textual knowledge to present a text – and one text only – in an object, the printed book, that resembles the one that offered that text to its early readers.

156  Texts and Meanings This double requirement defines Francisco Rico’s innovative position in debates that were often vigorous and at times obscure and that are still reflected in literary criticism and editorial practice. Some scholars follow the lead of the classical philologists who trace the entire manuscript tradition of a work so as to establish the most probable text8 in the aim of reconstructing an original text supposed to exist beyond or above its multiple material forms and that is, according to the vocabulary of analytical bibliography, the “ideal copy text.” A rigorous study of the various states of a given work (editions, issues, copies) is mobilized with the aim of returning to a text purified of alterations inflicted on it by the publishing process and in conformity with the text redacted, dictated or desired by its author.9 Hence the radical distinction between the work in its essence and the accidents that have deformed or corrupted it. In a different perspective – for example, that of Shakespeare criticism – even when they are strange, the forms in which a work has been published must be considered as different historical incarnations.10 All states of the text, even the most inconsistent and bizarre, must be included and eventually published because, as the result of acts of writing and as printshop practices, they constitute the work as it was transmitted to its readers. Editing a work is not a matter of rediscovering an ideal text, but rather of showing explicitly the preference given to one or another of its states along with the choices made for its presentation in such matters as divisions, punctuation, written forms, and spelling. Between an absolute respect for texts as they were printed and read by readers of the past, including their incoherences and their anomalies, and the sovereign authority of a philologist more Cervantian than Cervantes or more Shakespearean than Shakespeare, Franciso Rico proposes a more pragmatic way. In his works, which include editions of the canonical texts of the Spanish Golden Age,11 an ultrascrupulous collation and a complete command of the different states of the text of a given work enable him to distinguish between several readings, repair the obvious errors that disfigure a text and, at times, restore a text betrayed in all printed editions – which returns us to a basic inspiration of the most innovative editors of the eighteenth century. Rico also is aware that the text established by these means is not and cannot be the text that its first copyist read in the autograph manuscript. And even if by some miracle Cervantes’s original manuscript were to be found in some other Alcana, as is that of Cide Hamete Benengeli in Don Quixote, it would be only one of the states of the work.

Publishing Cervantes  157 Francisco Rico asserts both the reader’s right to a readability that must not be lost within a forest of variants and the editorial responsibility to refuse arbitrary solutions and to base decisions on a profound knowledge of the historical conditions that governed the composition, transmission, and publication of texts.12 It is in this sense, but in this sense only, that, like Borges’s Pierre Ménard, the editor becomes the author of Don Quixote.

11 Publishing Shakespeare

In 1986, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor divided King Lear’s kingdom in their own way. In the Oxford University Press edition of Shakespeare’s works, they decided to publish two different states of the “same” play: the True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King LEAR and his three Daughters, published in 1608 in a quarto printed for Nathaniel Butter; and King Lear as it was published in the Folio edition of 1623 of the Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies of Mr. William Shakespeare, which placed the play among the Tragedies, between The Tragedy of Hamlet and Othello, the Moore of Venice.1 This division of Lear’s textual territory was not accepted without resistance. It set off a controversy, but it was followed by other divisions, for example, that of the three versions of Hamlet of 1603, 1604, and 1623,2 or of other Shakespearean plays whose quarto editions predating the Folio of 1623 were published in modern editions.3 These moves oblige us to consider, in all its consequences, historical and aesthetic, critical and editorial, the contrast between the most highly canonical body of written works and the extreme diversity of the texts that offer it for reading. The new Shakespearean criticism has focused on that underlying tension by accentuating the logic inherent in each printed version of the “same” play,4 or the innumerable variations introduced into the materiality of the works, all the elements of which were unstable, from their multiple texts to the fluctuating components of the Shakespearean corpus, the names given to the characters in the plays and how the author is designated (or not) on the title-pages.5

Publishing Shakespeare  159 The work in all its states David Scott Kastan’s Shakespeare and the Book directly follows that same approach, and it permits us to return to Shakespeare, his public, and his publishers.6 Kastan firmly states a question that is particularly acute where the Shakespearean text is concerned but that reaches far beyond it, that of “the relation of the linguistic structures of the literary work to the material forms that make it available.” In other words, “Do texts exist independently of the medium in which they appear, its material forms accidental and merely vehicular; or do they exist only in those forms, each a unique textual incarnation whose materiality itself crucially shapes meaning, altering in some way the significance of the linguistic organization of the work?”7 The answer – adopted by an entire branch of Shakespearean criticism – is to hold each state of the text to be one of the “incarnations” of the work itself, without being able to separate (to borrow the language of the New Bibliography) the essence from the accidents. That position is faithful to the definition of the “sociology of texts” proposed by D.  F. McKenzie, understood as “the discipline that studies texts as recorded forms, and the processes of their transmission, including their production and reception.”8 As is known, that proposition prompted suspicious or hostile reactions on the part of the more orthodox supporters of the bibliographic tradition set in place by the classic works of Walter Greg, R.  B. McKerrow, and Fredson Bowers.9 In that perspective, the material study of books is put to the service of establishing a text as faithful as possible to the one the author wrote and intended. This led to a meticulous analysis, in the extant copies of the different editions of a given work, of indications that permit a reconstruction of the history of their typographic composition, their correction, and their printing as a means for rediscovering the original text as it was before it underwent changes in the printshop. The point was to establish the spelling habits of the various compositors who worked on a given text, to note certain particularities of their materials (damaged letters, initials, or ornaments) and to detect the corrections introduced during the printing process in order to identify textual variants that could be imputed, not to the author, but to the typographers or the correctors. That approach, and the many erudite studies that subscribed to it, supposed a radical distinction between accidental variations that resulted from operations within the printshops and corrupted the meaning of the text and the work as it had been written, dictated and desired by its author.

160  Texts and Meanings By insisting on the role that material forms play in the process of the construction of meaning, D. F. McKenzie rejected the opposition between “substantives” and “accidentals” and between the text in its essence and the alterations inflicted on it by the preferences, habits or errors of the men who set it in type and corrected the composed pages. Thus he opened the way for all the studies that, in recent years, have focused on the plural states of the “same” work that can be discerned in its different editions or even in different copies from the same edition and on the multiple meanings that such an instability assigned to the work. If material bibliography has made, paradoxically, a painstaking study of printed copies in order to reconstruct an ideal manuscript, gone forever, the sociology of texts, as defined by D.  F. McKenzie, led to holding each state of a work as one of its historical incarnations that must be understood, respected and, if possible, published. For McKenzie, the concept of an “ideal copy text” that exists above and beyond the various printed forms of a work is an illusion that textual criticism must abandon in favor of an analysis of the effects produced on the text, on its readers and, eventually, on its author by each example of the material existence of that text. That position is shared by Jerome J. McGann, for whom “literary works do not know themselves, and cannot be known apart from their specific material modes of existence/resistance,”10 and David Scott Kastan, who states, “I would argue .  .  . that literature exists, in any useful sense, only and always in its materializations, and that these are the conditions of its meaning rather than merely the containers of it.”11 The tension between the work in its aesthetic permanence, as a work always identical to itself, and the plurality of its textual states is rendered even higher in the case of Shakespeare by the ambivalence of the work’s relation to print publication. That tension is obvious in the editions of his poems. Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were published in 1593 and 1594 by the same printer, Richard Field, who, like Shakespeare, came from Stratford-uponAvon, and the two works were dedicated to the same person, the count of Southampton, whom Shakespeare addresses in a letter. It is also possible (although Kastan thinks it not so) that Shakespeare was also involved in the 1609 edition of the Sonnets that figures, with the name of their author, in the registers of the Stationers’ Company.12 The situation is quite different for the theatrical works, which were published without Shakespeare’s direct intervention in the editorial process. Shakespeare wrote for the stage and for the spectators of the Globe or Blackfriars, not for the booksellers who published his plays on the basis of the various manuscripts available to them: prompt-

Publishing Shakespeare  161 books that contained the text as it had been authorized, after the censors’ approval, by the Master of Revels and that bore the indications indispensable for performance; “fair copies” made on the basis of the “foul papers” (autograph manuscripts), or on reconstructions from memory or stenographic copy.13 Dramatic writing and print publication The market for theatrical works, which influenced the way texts were printed, displayed several characteristic traits in England between 1565, the date of publication of the earliest English tragedy, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s The Tragedy of Gorboduc, and 1642, the date of the closing of the theaters. We should keep in mind that the legal requirements for publishing books were defined by the regulations of the Stationers’ Company, which recognized a patrimonial and perpetual “right in copy” granted to the bookseller or the printer who had acquired a manuscript and registered it with the Company. In this system, the only illegal act that could be brought before justice was to publish, without a prior agreement, a title that another printer had “entered” into the registers of the Company. In contrast, publishing a text without the permission of its author on the basis of an unreliable manuscript was not a crime. The only recourse for authors who thought themselves betrayed by the publication and circulation of corrupt versions of their works was to prepare the publication of a new edition. However – and this is a second characteristic trait – not all playwrights shared that concern. As Douglas Brooks has shown, authors’ unequal interest in the printing of their plays depended directly on their position in the world of dramatic production and on their ideas regarding the destination of theatrical works.14 The notice “To the Reader” that opens the 1612 edition of John Webster’s play, The White Divel, draws a clear contrast between authors (Webster himself among them) who hold the play as performed to be possibly an alteration of the work and see the greater theater public as an ignorant multitude and those who write to satisfy the vulgar taste of that public.15 It is paradoxical that, as Webster writes, he considered the dispersed public of the readers of the print edition to be the true “auditory” that his tragedy deserved: “since it was acted, in so dull a time of Winter, presented in so open and blacke a Theater, that it wanted (that which is the onely grace and setting out of a Tragedy) a full and understanding Auditory.” The print edition of “the most sententious Tragedy that ever was written” must be

162  Texts and Meanings removed from “the breath that comes from the uncapable multitude . . . able to poison it” and be allowed to seek out the lettered public, the only public capable of perceiving the “sententiae,” the sublime sayings or “commonplaces” that the play contained. Print would permit that public to share with the author the many untranslated Latin quotations scattered through the text of the preface “To the Reader” and to appreciate the verse published in “continuous printing” – that is, printed on one line like poetry even when two speakers were involved.16 That primacy of the reading text over the theatrical spectacle led Webster to present himself as an erudite author who writes slowly, not “with a goose-quill, winged by two feathers,” but whose work will live through time. For such a playwright, the circumstances of the performances of his work were merely accidents repaired by the print publication of a work written by an author whose name figures in capital letters on the title page, as “Written by JOHN WEBSTER” does in The White Divel. A modern Euripides, he can respond to those who might reproach him for his slowness as his master responded to Alcestides. When the latter objected “that Eurypides had onely in three daies composed three verses, whereas himselfe had written three hundred,” Euripides retorts: “Thou telst truth . . . but heres the difference, thine shall onely be read for three daies, whereas mine shall continue three ages.” A like principle of distinction determines the order in the list of authors about whom Webster states his high opinion, as Douglas Brooks emphasizes.17 Webster places at the head of his list the most learned playwrights, the translators of ancient writers such as Homer or Horace and the playwrights who paid the most attention to the print publication of their plays, offering for reading a version that could not have been entirely performed and restoring their works in their totality. Thus his highest praise goes to “that full and haightened style of Maister Chapman” and “the labor’d and understanding workes of Maister Johnson [Jonson],” followed by “the no less worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Maister Beamont [Beaumont], and Maister Fletcher.” Only after them does he list three authors known for their “right happy and copious industry” rather than their elevated style or their learned writing: “M. Shake-speare, M. Dekker, and M. Heywood.” Those three were “company men,” authors who wrote for a theatrical company or for the theater or theaters in which the company mounted plays (the Chamberlain’s Men, and, after 1603, the King’s Men for Shakespeare and the Prince’s Men for Thomas Dekker). Thanks to their “copious industry,” all three had many of their plays produced, Thomas Heywood in par-

Publishing Shakespeare  163 ticular, who claimed in 1633 that he had written 220 plays “in which I have had either an entire hand, or at the least a maine finger.”18 All three men had strong connections with the theater: Shakespeare was not only an author and shareholder in his troupe, but also one of the actors; Dekker had close relations with the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe; in 1612, Heywood published an Apologie for Actors that argued, against the theater’s detractors, for its aesthetic dignity and moral utility. All three of these men display another characteristic – collaboration – that was typical of theatrical production in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Philip Henslowe’s Diary mentions Dekker as the author of forty-five plays,19 thirty-one of which were written collaboratively (eighteen of them with two or more coauthors), and five others that reworked extant texts. Thomas Heywood is mentioned eleven times, six times for a play written in collaboration with others (twice with Dekker and with other playwrights), and once for additions to a play. Two-thirds of the 282 plays mentioned by Henslowe between 1590 and 1609 have at least two authors, and often more than two. There is a striking gap between this high proportion of works written in collaboration and the much more modest percentage of plays attributed, during the same decades, to several authors in various documents (printed editions, the registers of the Stationers’ Company, journals, memoirs, etc.) and compiled in The Annals of the English Drama, where collaborations represent 15 percent of plays for 1590–9 and 18 percent for 1600–9.20 The difference can be accounted for by the fact that in the printed edition, as perhaps in the spectators’ memories, plays written by several hands were eventually assigned to one author. Shakespeare’s name The bookseller/publishers of the Shakespeare quarto editions whose title pages David Scott Kastan analyzes followed a similar logic of construction. The 1598 edition of A PLEASANT Conceited Comedie called Loves Labors Lost is the first to mention the name of the author, but without clearly attributing paternity of the play to him, given that the ambiguous statement, “Newly corrected and augmented By W. Shakespere” might lead the reader to suppose that all that Shakespeare did was to revise and expand a text that already existed. Before that date, Shakespeare’s plays were published following the usual practice, discernible in nearly half of the dramatic texts printed before 1600,21 of listing no author (or authors) and

164  Texts and Meanings mentioning only the name of the troupe and the places or dates of performances. Thus the second quarto of THE MOST EX-cellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Iuliet, printed in 1599 for Cuthbert Burby, the same publisher as the quarto edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost, indicates only: “As it hath bene sundry times publiquely acted, by the right Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants.” After 1598, Shakespeare’s growing reputation, attested by the Palladis Tamia of Francis Meres, a work often cited and that compares Shakespeare to Plautus and Seneca and calls him “the most excellent in both kinds [comedy and tragedy] for the stage,”22 encouraged booksellers and printers to feature a name that sold books. There are several signs of this. For one thing, Shakespeare’s name figures on the title pages of new editions of plays that had been published earlier with no mention of the author, as was the case with the quarto editions of Richard II and Richard III in 1598 or that of Henry IV, Part I the following year. For another thing, Shakespeare’s name or initials appear on poetry collections in which he is only one author among others, as is the case with THE PASSIONATE PILGRIME, published by William Jaggard in 1599, which states it is “By W. Shakespeare,” although the anthology contains only four of his sonnets, or in theatrical works generously attributed to him and that in fact entered into the Shakespearean corpus with the second issuing of the third Folio in 1664 before being eliminated – except for Pericles – by eighteenth-century editors. Finally, the booksellers’ assertion of Shakespeare’s authorial authority occurs in a paroxysmal but unique form in the 1608 quarto edition of King Lear, in which the first lines of the title read: “M. William Shak-speare: HIS True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King LEAR and his three Daughters.” The claim to ownership implied in “HIS” King Lear is not due to Shakespeare’s hubris, but rather refers to a competition between stationers, with Nathaniel Butter attempting to place his edition of Shakespeare’s King Lear in a better position than THE True Chronicle History of King Leir, and his three daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella, a work by another playwright using the same story that was printed for John Wright in 1605. The eagerness to use Shakespeare’s name after 1598 should not obscure two very real aspects of the publication of theatrical texts. First, that eagerness was not shared by all publishers, and not all editions displayed Shakespeare’s name. The new quarto editions of Titus Andronicus of 1600 and 1611 and those of Romeo and Juliet of 1599, 1609, and 1622 make no mention of Shakespeare’s name. Moreover, playwrights usually had to share space on the title page

Publishing Shakespeare  165 with the bookseller/publisher and/or the printer, but also with the theatrical company, and, to some extent, with the spectators, be they royal or not. In the first quarto edition of Hamlet, published in 1603, the text is credited to “William Shakespeare,” but the title page also states who performed the play and where: “As it hath beene diverse times acted by his Highnesse servants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and else-where.” Even more significantly, the title page in the quarto edition of King Lear (“HIS” King Lear) states, “As it was played before the Kings Majestie at Whitehall upon S. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes. By his Majesties servants playing usually at the Globe on the BanckeSide,” thus inscribing the performance of the play within the festive twelve-day cycle of celebrations and stressing royal protection. Even with a publishing logic that exploits the reputation won by playwrights (or some of them), the texts that were published remained, as Kastan states, “fully a record of the collaborative activities of a theatrical company.”23 Recalling the circumstances of performance on a title page is perhaps a trace of an attempt to bridge the gap between the large public of the “public playhouses” and the narrow market for printed plays. One proof of this is the fact that, in spite of the small investment needed to publish an in-quarto edition, most of the plays that were performed were never printed. David Scott Kastan advances the idea that fewer than 20 percent of plays performed were printed (“almost certainly less than a fifth of the number played”),24 whereas Douglas Brooks somewhat more generously suggests, after comparing the number of known titles and that of extant texts, that the percentage of plays performed between 1580 and 1640 that had at least one print edition is 36 percent.25 If the bookseller/publishers were unenthusiastic about publishing the texts of plays, they were just as reticent about republishing them, which hints that, although the pressruns were not large, plays did not sell well and many works may not have found buyers. According to Peter Blayney, if about half of the plays published before 1622 had at least one new edition in the twenty-five years following their initial publication, the percentage falls to only 29 percent for plays that appeared between 1623 and 1642.26 From that point of view, Shakespeare represents an ambiguous case, given that, on the one hand, eight of the eighteen plays published in a quarto format before his death in 1616 had only one edition, but, on the other hand, certain of them met with great success in the bookshops and went through a number of editions – three for Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, five for Richard II and Richard III, and six for Henry IV Part I.

166  Texts and Meanings The Shakespearean monument David Scott Kastan, following the example of others such as Gary Taylor or Michael Dobson,27 painstakingly traces the process by which publishers monumentalized and canonized Shakespearean texts (and others), detaching them from the theater to celebrate them as “literature.” This process began in 1623 when two former fellow members of Shakespeare’s troupe, John Heminges and Henry Condell, themselves actors and shareholders in the company, decided to bring together in one volume the plays of their comrade who had died seven years earlier. They persuaded the printers William and Isaac Jaggard to back the venture, which was much riskier than the publication of modest in-quarto pamphlets. The Jaggards assumed the costs, creating a consortium with two booksellers, John Smethwick and William Aspley, who owned a “right in copy” to six of Shakespeare’s plays, and a third bookseller, Edward Blount, who specialized in the publication of literary novelties of the sort and in translations such as Montaigne’s Essays in John Florio’s translation (1603 and 1613) and Part I of Don Quixote, translated by Thomas Shelton (1612).28 It is not my intention to retrace, once again, the material and editorial history of the Folio edition, one of the world’s most famous books. Others have done it, and done it well.29 Two points should be stressed, however. First, the 1623 Folio presented the entire Shakespearean theatrical corpus for the first time. Unlike the 1616 Folio edition of the works of Ben Jonson, which was titled THE WORKES OF Benjamin Jonson but included only nine of his plays along with his masques, his epigrams, and his poems, the Folio constructed by Heminges, Condell and the booksellers of the consortium included only all the theatrical works written by Shakespeare: eighteen plays that had been previously published, the “rights in copy” which had been contributed by their publishers or bought from colleagues, and another eighteen plays that had never been printed and were bought from the theatrical troupe. The criterion for limiting the repertory held to be Shakespearean pushed to its limit the editorial logic that preferred attributions to a single author. This means that Heminges and Condell excluded plays that they knew had been written in collaboration with others (The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles – even though the quarto edition of 1609 mentioned the name of Shakespeare on its title page – Edward III, and Sir Thomas More). On the other hand, they included some plays (such as Henry VIII) that later critics have identified as collaborative works but they recognized as fully Shakespearean. The Folio’s monumentalization of Shakespeare, as shown in all the preliminary matter (engraved

Publishing Shakespeare  167 portrait, eulogistic poems, notice “To the great Variety of Readers” signed by Heminges and Condell), supposes the elimination of the collective practice of the theater to the profit of the construction of a unique author. That same authority was the justification if not for the true nature of the texts as they were published in the Folio edition, which had a variety of origins (in-quarto editions, promptbooks, manuscript copies) at least for the affirmation that they were “Published according to the True Originall Copies.” The 1623 Folio thus presented their “master text” as the very text that had been conceived, composed, and written down by Shakespeare: “His mind and his hand went together. And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” By reproducing “his owne writings,” the Folio offered the reader a faithful version of the works as the “Author” had “uttered” them – that is, enunciated as one recites poetry and emitted as if they were precious coin. The rhetoric of Heminges and Condell removed the Shakespearean text from the implied deformations of performance and the corruptions introduced into the various editions that put into circulation, not an authentic reproduction of the author’s manuscripts, but “diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors, that expos’d them.” Thanks to Shakespeare’s unblemished “papers,” without strike-outs or second thoughts, the Folio was doubly perfect: it restored to their original purity texts that had been corrupted by earlier editions (“even those, are now offer’d to your view cur’d, and perfect of their limbes”). For the first time, all of the author’s plays were offered for reading (“and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them”).30 Already in this first publishing venture, there is a discernible tension between the demand for an ideal text in perfect conformity with what the author had conceived and written and the variations introduced by the material nature of the printed book. Those variations occurred on different levels. First, they applied to the contents of the Folio. Because of the difficulties that the publishers encountered in acquiring the “right in copy” to Troilus and Cressida, which they obtained only after the printing process had begun, certain copies of the book do not include the play (and its title does not figure in the “Catalogue” of the plays contained in the volume); other copies do contain it, with or without its prologue, depending on the individual copy. There are also variations within the text itself, given that “stop-press” corrections permitted modification of the pages contained in a given form, but the sheets that had already been printed before the correction was made were not destroyed, leading to differences among copies

168  Texts and Meanings of the edition. Finally, an extreme diversity in spellings, punctuation, and the distribution of the text resulted from the differing habits of the various compositors (at least five of them, perhaps more) and the constraints of composition,31 which were particularly strong in the case of a folio edition composed by formes and of which each gathering included three printer’s sheets, which gave six leaves or twelve pages. How the text was divided up shows a particularly great diversity on the page in each gathering that was composed last and for which the page layout (tighter or looser, with few or many abbreviations) was directly dependent on errors in estimating, or “casting off,” the copy.32 Thus Heminges and Condell’s claim to have produced what was an early form of an “ideal copy text” stood in stark contrast to the plural, mobile, and uncertain reality of the text in its printed versions. The publishers of the 1623 Folio, whose commercial initiative invented Shakespeare as an author, bequeathed to their successors an impossible quest for an authentic Shakespeare that was always present and always betrayed.33 Editing and adapting With the Restoration in 1660 and until the early nineteenth century, those contrasting aims took two main forms. The first of these set the modernization of the plays, demanded by the stage, against the publishers’ tenacious desire to return to the original, pure, and authentic text. David Scott Kastan qualifies that ambivalence, which affected an entire age, not to mention individuals, as “schizophrenic”: he speaks of “the era’s schizophrenic relation to Shakespeare – always admiring, but, in one mode, presumptuously altering his plays for success on the stage, while, in another, determinedly seeking the authentic text in the succession of scholarly editions.”34 Texts were cut, adapted, and transformed for stage performance in the theaters. John Dryden, Nahum Tate, and William Davenant specialized in rewriting Shakespearean texts to adjust them to the new demands of the theater and tame them by applying the conventions and censorship of an age that was no longer that of Elizabethan England. Scholarly editions had the contrary aim of finding, as Lewis Theobald put it, “the original Purity” of the work and of restoring “the Poet’s true text.”35 Theobald offers a radical illustration of the contradiction between the stage and the book since as an editor he was dedicated to the restoration of the text as the poet had written it, but as an “author” he profoundly transformed Richard II in 1720 to adapt the play to the aesthetic taste and the political demands of his age.

Publishing Shakespeare  169 A similar tension is perceptible in some of the editions of Shakespeare’s plays that were performed on the stage and that indicate cuts made in the text to modernize the syntax and make the versification more regular, all the while proclaiming their fidelity to the “incomparable Author.” Thus the 1676 edition of Hamlet as it was performed by Davenant’s troupe signals, in a note to the reader: “The Play being too long to be conveniently Acted, such places as might be least prejudicial to the Plot or Sense, are left out upon the Stage: but that we may no way wrong the incomparable Author, are here inserted according to the Original Copy with this Mark “ [open quotation mark or “inverted commas”].”36 In this manner, the marginal quotation marks, along with other signs (inverted comma, asterisk, manicule, or pointing finger) that for some time had indicated to the readers of theatrical works verses or lines that they should remember, copy into their commonplace books, or cite in their own writings,37 came to designate what could be cut in performance. The “schizophrenic” relationship inaugurated by the Restoration did not only concern the contrast between stage performance and the book. It also affected editing, which used a number of techniques to accomplish an end that it knew to be impossible. The English editors of the eighteenth century mobilized various strategies to restore the Shakespearean text to its full authenticity. Nicholas Rowe in 1709 and, more systematically, Alexander Pope in 1725 collected and collated the old quartos (twenty-nine editions of eighteen plays in Pope’s case).38 In 1733, Lewis Theobald based the corrections he made in the plays on a theory of the transmission of texts, and he was the first to establish the text (at times at least) “against all Copies.”39 In 1765, Samuel Johnson inaugurated the Variorum editions, which saturated the text with notes,40 and in 1790 Edmond Malone based his critique of his predecessors and the establishment of the texts and their author’s biography on a search for authentic materials (the oldest quartos and the first Folio, or archival documents concerning Shakespeare).41 This labor of restoration reached a first limit in the positions taken by editors who thought themselves more Shakespearean than Shakespeare – or at least than the Shakespeare transmitted by the print tradition. Pope gives a spectacular example of this when he decided to “demote” and place at the bottom of the page verses and lines that he holds to be “suspected passages, which are excessively bad” and could not have been written by the sublime author. In the 1730s and 1740s, in great part thanks to the women gathered in the Shakespeare Ladies’ Club, the work of the poet, once forgotten, became the emblem of national taste (as opposed to depraved Italian

170  Texts and Meanings fashions) and the expression of the most profoundly English virtues and values.42 Even more than the works themselves, which were known by their printed editions and were performed on the theater stages (but perhaps less than some other plays), their author had his statue erected in Westminster Abbey in 1741 and became the supreme incarnation of national culture. The change in the public and aesthetic status of Shakespeare, henceforth the “the national poet,” transformed not only the significance attributed to his plays, but also the letter of their texts. Pope’s edition bears witness to this to the extent that he set out to purify the poet’s work of the vulgar interpolations that had muddied it. He did so, as Michael Dobson points out, by “excising ‘low’ passages and marking non-Shakespearean ones by relegating many of Shakespeare’s passages of low humour to the foot of the page as vulgar theatrical interpolations, unworthy of the great poet this monumental edition hopes to redeem.”43 The project was a desperate enterprise, however, since the necessary documents were not to be had. Rowe notes in 1709: “I must not pretend to have restor’d this Work to the Exactness of the Author’s Original Manuscripts. Those are lost, or, at least are gone beyond any Inquiry I could make.” Pope echoed him fifteen years later: “It is impossible to repair the Injuries already done Him, too much time has elaps’d and the material are too few.” Theobald was forced to admit that “the want of Originals reduces us to the necessity of guessing, in order to amend [the text].”44 In the eighteenth century, the absent manuscripts haunted Shakespearean criticism, as they would continue to do in the bibliographic tradition that attempted to reconstruct them on the basis of the printed editions, finding them, not in their material forms, but in their supposed identity as “foul papers,” “fair copy,” or “promptbooks.” The publication in 1807 by the Wright brothers of the first facsimile edition of the 1623 Folio, reedited and respecting its page layout, its page numbering, and its text, though not its typography, was like a sign of a renunciation, violently criticized by Malone, of the hope to restore an authentic Shakespeare, a task that proved as impossible as always. Since that was the situation, why not consider Heminges and Condell to have been both the first and the last editors of Shakespeare’s works? Platonism and pragmatism As is known, that suggestion was not accepted, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the zeal of the Bard’s editors never faltered. Their tenacity has only been encouraged by the new resources offered

Publishing Shakespeare  171 by electronic textuality, which makes it easier to make a systematic comparison of editions or copies. Digital possibilities multiply hypertextual connections with many archives and, above all, can show with greater immediacy than print can do that it is impossible to reduce every work to one text, be it the text of an old edition or a modern one.45 Will this new technique appease the entrenched opposition between the two traditions that Kastan calls “platonic” and “pragmatic,” the first stating that the work transcends all of its possible material incarnations, the second that there is no text outside of its material aspects? We are permitted to doubt it. Perhaps what is needed is to shift the question and hold as equally well-founded these two perceptions of the texts that not only inhabit philological criticism and the practice of editing, but also intimate and ordinary relations with works. Setting up a brutal opposition between them is perhaps to launch a false quarrel. Always, in fact, works have been presented for reading in particular forms. According to the time and the genre, variations in those forms are more or less important and concern – separately or simultaneously – the materiality of the object, the spelling of the words, or the text itself. But it is also true that multiple systems (philosophical, aesthetic, juridical) have always attempted to reduce that diversity by postulating the existence of a work identical to itself whatever its form might be. In the West, neo-Platonic philosophy, aesthetic judgments, and the definition of copyright have contributed to constructing an ideal and immaterial text that readers recognize in each of its particular states. Rather than attempting, in one manner or another, to get rid of that irreducible tension, what is important is to identify how it was conceived of and expressed in each moment in history – including our own.

12 The Time of the Work

In one of the collections owned by the John Work Garrett Library of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, there is a copy of the 1676 edition of Hamlet. There is nothing particularly astonishing about this because that edition, the first of the play after the Restoration, is not a bibliographical rarity and a number of libraries own a copy. This Baltimore example is particularly interesting, however, thanks to the manuscript annotations written in the margins and the corrections, deletions, or additions that one of its owners made in the printed text itself. Known as the first printed promptbook of Hamlet,1 this copy was used for performances of the play. It enables us to enter into “the time of the work” because we can discern in this unique object different states of the text and successive forms of its performance. One edition, three Hamlets (1676, 1661, 1604) The title page announces: The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark. As it is now Acted at his Highness the Duke of York’s Theatre. Thus the edition is clearly related to the revival of performances of Hamlet given by Sir William Davenant’s Company, first in its hall at Lincoln’s Inn Field and, after 1671, in its new theater at Dorset Garden. The reopening of the theaters in 1660 was intended to celebrate the coronation of the new king and renew the connection between the monarchy and dramatic display broken off by the Civil War. The older repertory was divided between the two troupes authorized to give performances, that of Sir Thomas Killigrew and that of Davenant,

The Time of the Work  173 both of whom had been supporters of Charles I as well as dramatic authors. Thanks to a patent granted on December 12, 1660, Davenant held a monopoly on Hamlet and eight other Shakespearean plays, including The Tempest, King Lear, and Macbeth. It was probably his production of The Tragedy of Hamlet that Samuel Pepys saw, for the first time, on its opening night.2 The great actor Thomas Betterton played the prince of Denmark and his wife took the role of Ophelia.3 A preliminary notice “To the Reader” states: “This Play being too long to be conveniently Acted, such places as might be least prejudicial to the Plot or Sense, are left out upon the Stage: but that we may no way wrong the incomparable Author, are here inserted according to the Original Copy with this Mark “.” This remark and the typographical device help us to distinguish three layers of text in the 1676 printed edition. The matrix of Davenant’s Hamlet is thus neither the text of the first quarto, published in 1603, nor that of the Folio edition of 1623. The play, as it was played and published during the Restoration, remained faithful to the 1604 version, the last edition of which before the Civil War (known as the fifth or sixth quarto) dates from 1637.4 But – and this is a second text within the text – the text as published in 1676 was revised along the lines of the patent granted to Davenant by the Lord Chamberlain on December 12, 1660, which ordered him “to peruse all playes that have been formerly written, and to expunge all Prophanesse and Scurrility from the same, before they be represented or Acted.”5 As shown by comparing the 1676 text with the text as it appears in the 1637 quarto, the 1676 version respects the injunction. This led to two types of textual modifications. The first were of a religious or moral nature: the word “God” was deleted or replaced, as were oaths and words or expressions considered indecent or offensive to piety. A second series of alterations concerned the language itself and led to the substitution of current words and expressions for obsolete, archaic, and obscure ones; mythological and classical allusions were omitted or clarified, rhetorical figures and conceits were simplified or made more literal, and grammar and metrics were modernized.6 The text published in 1676 thus registered changes that had been made for performance purposes in the 1660s. Those changes underline the gap – political, religious, and aesthetic – between Elizabethan times and those of the Restoration. The third layer present in the 1676 edition of Hamlet is the text as it was performed by Davenant’s company, in which some 850 lines out of the 3,730 lines in the second quarto edition are omitted. These cuts, which we can trace thanks to the typographic markings inserted by the publishers (an open quotation mark or “inverted commas”

174  Texts and Meanings placed at the beginning of the line) obeyed several logical demands. For one thing, they permitted shortening the duration of the performance to make it acceptable to the theater public of the 1660s and 1670s.7 For another, they reinforced censorship of the play by omitting the sexual allusions and the irreligious phrases that had escaped the vigilance of the rewriting process, and they shortened or deleted the lyrical and narrative passages judged to be useless to the development of the plot. Finally, and above all, they dramatically reduced the role of Fortinbras.8 That alteration modified the very meaning of the tragedy and adapted it to the political context of the Restoration, since it assigned the return to order, not to conquest by a foreign prince, but to the revenge of a legitimate prince against the usurper of his throne. It should be noted that the typographical device chosen by the publishers or the printer of the 1676 edition to indicate “the places left out upon the stage” reversed the traditional practice of printing houses. In the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century, it was in fact lines that were to be retained, memorized, or copied by the reader that were distinguished typographically. The procedures for doing this were varied (quotation marks, asterisks, pointing fingers placed in the margins or the use of type characters other than those used to print the text), but the aim was always the same: to indicate sententiae, the formulas and maxims pronouncing universal verities of the sort that filled commonplace books. The earliest example of that practice is in the edition of the tragedies of Seneca published by the Giunta firm in Florence in 1506. In France at the end of the sixteenth century, the editors of the plays of Robert Garnier followed the same model,9 and in England there were many editions of theatrical works (in particular, those of George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston) that indicate in one manner or another the lines considered commonplaces, understood as rhetorical amplifications of discourse.10 The 1676 edition of Hamlet reversed that tradition because the typographic marking no longer designated the essential passages but rather those that could be omitted in performance.11 The different texts present in the 1676 edition – Hamlet as transmitted by the second quarto, the text censored and modernized by Davenant and the shortened text performed on the stage at Lincoln’s Inn Field beginning in 1661 – refer to two different times of the play. The text of the second quarto seems to date from several years after the earliest performances. It has been interpreted in the critical tradition either as a rewriting of an earlier state of Hamlet, published in the first quarto of 1603, or, and more probably, as the original text

The Time of the Work  175 that served as the basis for that of the first quarto, which is thought to be an extremely inaccurate reconstruction from memory, and that of the Folio, understood as a revision adapting the text for performance purposes.12 The corrected, censored, and shortened text, as it was published in 1676 after having been performed, was part of a completely different theatrical world. The “public playhouses” open to the skies, the troupes composed exclusively of men and young boys, and the rudimentary scenic elements characteristic of theatrical practice in the age of Queen Elizabeth and the first Stuarts gave way to closed halls, the presence of actresses in female roles, “machines,” and scenery. The Hamlet of 1676 was thus not only transformed by the new religious and political demands of the Restoration: it was also changed by the new conditions of its representation on the stage and, by the same token, by how it was perceived when it was read. Promptbook and acting copy The changes within the play can of course also be found in all the copies of the 1676 edition. What makes the copy in the Garrett Library at Johns Hopkins University of particular interest is the presence of the many manuscript annotations that transformed the printed edition into a promptbook used for performances. Fifty years ago, James McManaway, who persuaded the Friends of Johns Hopkins University to purchase this copy, identified the author of the annotations by comparing the handwriting with that of several manuscript documents – a notebook, a letter, and various scraps of paper bearing theatrical notes – conserved in the Folger Library in Washington. He had no doubt that the marginal mentions found in the Johns Hopkins copy of the 1676 edition should be attributed to the same hand, that of John Ward.13 John Ward was an actor who worked between 1723 and 1742 in London at Lincoln’s Inn Field, then in Dublin with the Smock Alley Company and the Aungier Street Company, before returning to London to perform at Drury Lane. In 1746, he abandoned his career in London and founded a company of strolling players that toured for the next twenty-five years in Hereford, Warwickshire, Gloucester, Shropshire, Radnor, Monmouthshire, and Brecknock. The company played four nights a week, staying in one town sometimes for several weeks or even the greater part of the year. John Ward retired in 1766, leaving his company in the hands of his son-in-law, Roger Kemble. James McManaway conjectures that the manuscript annotations on the 1676 Hamlet date from the 1740s. A preliminary typology of

176  Texts and Meanings their nature shows they were of several sorts. Controlling the performance was their first purpose. There are entries in the margins noting the names of characters that are about to come on stage, placed thirty or forty lines before their actual entrance as given in the printed text. The purpose is clearly to warn the actors to prepare themselves for their entrance. The number of these warnings varies from one act to another: there are fifteen in the first, act, seven in the second, twenty in the third, eighteen in the fourth and eight in the fifth and final act. The whole text was thus organized by establishing a relationship between the handwritten marginal indications of the names of the characters that were to enter shortly and a series of horizontal lines crossed by four, five, or six vertical strokes placed next to the printed indication of those characters on stage. In the 1676 edition, each act consisted of only one scene (“Act I, Scene I,” “Act II, Scene I,” etc.), and, in the absence of scene divisions, it was the lines with strokes that structured the performance. This was a device invented by John Ward to cut the acts of the tragedy into scenes.14 Warnings were also provided for the musicians who played both for the entrances of the sovereigns (where the word used was “flourish,” as in the printed text itself) and for the end of each act except the fourth, where the marginal indication was “ring.” That term was also used for the music accompanying the entrances of the ghost in another edition of Hamlet, dated 1683, a copy of which was also transformed into a promptbook by the same John Ward.15 Manuscript marginalia also regulated other aspects of performance. They indicate objects that the actors should have on the stage. They also mention the places where the action takes place: the word “Town” written beside the printed indication, “Act I, Scene I,” suggests the possible use of painted backdrops; under “Act V, Scene I,” the marginal notation states “Long Trap open, Earth, Sculls and Bones in it.” Finally, the marginalia give stage directions: for example, the entrances and exits of the ghost are indicated by “Ghost under the stage” at the end of Act I and “Ghost Ready at long trap” at the end of Act III. John Ward’s manuscript annotations were not limited to the margins of the printed text, as he also marked the text itself. The most striking changes were a series of sizable cuts that shortened the play even more than Davenant’s adaptation had done. In Ward’s version, Hamlet was two or three hundred lines shorter than the Hamlet played under the Restoration. It is interesting to note that in abridging the tragedy, Ward did not necessarily follow the cuts that Davenant had made. At times, he circled and crossed out in ink lines

The Time of the Work  177 that Davenant had retained; at other times he preserved lines that Davenant had cut, which he indicated by placing the open quotes mark at the beginning of the line in the printed text. The reasons for these differences are multiple and not always easy to understand. The most significant change is undoubtedly the total elimination of Fortinbras in the final scene. The lines that end the tragedy are thus given to Horatio, who declares: “There cracks the cordage of a noble heart, good night sweet Prince,/And choires of Angels sing thee to thy rest. Take up the bodies, such a sight as this/Becomes the Field, but here shows much amiss.” This rewriting, which pushes to an extreme the interpretation of the play that Davenant had proposed to Restoration audiences, leads to the omission of the final words of the play in the quarto edition: “Go bid the Souldiers Shoot.” The beginning of Horatio’s speech, “There cracks the cordage of a noble heart,” also shows that Ward’s adaptation occasionally transformed the text, since the same line in the quartos and in the Folio edition is “Now cracks a noble heart.” Conversely, it is clear that in a number of places Ward rejected Davenant’s modernizations, returning to the text as it was originally printed in the quartos before the Revolution, reinstating the old word order and restoring whole sentences and lines omitted in the 1676 edition. It is likely that Ward compared the text of the copy that he transformed into a promptbook with other editions – the quartos published between 1604 and 1637, the Folio versions of 1623, 1632, 1663–4 and 1685, or the editions of the complete works published at the beginning of the eighteenth century by Nicholas Rowe (1709), Alexander Pope (1723–5), and Lewis Theobald (1733).16 One example of this is Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” monologue.17 Following the text of the quarto and the Folio, Ward restored the line “Is sick with the pale cast of thought,” against the altered and abbreviated 1676 version “Shows sickled ore with thought.” Following the reading of the quarto, he corrected “With this regard their currents turn away” that the 1676 edition shared with the Folio to read “turn awry.” Conversely, it was by following the text of the Folio that he completed “Thus conscience does make cowards” with the words “of us all,” which the quarto had omitted. But between these two lines he retained, in opposition to the tradition of both the quarto and Folio, the modernized lines, “And thus the healthful face of resolution” in place of “And thus the native hew of resolution.” Ward’s meticulous work of collation and adaptation is demonstrated at the end of Act II when he copied from the quarto edition two lines in the dialogue between Hamlet and Polonius before the entrance of the players that had been omitted by the compositor in the 1676 edition. However, in a second

178  Texts and Meanings stage of the preparation of the promptbook, he decided to suppress them for performance and crossed out his own handwritten addition. Punctuation and performance Ward’s final changes to the 1676 text lay in the substitution of punctuation in his hand for the punctuation given in the printed copy.18 Such substitutions were made only in the role of Hamlet, as if John Ward (or another actor) were preparing on the printed page the oral delivery of the lines. In the first six lines of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in the 1676 quarto, the punctuation is faithful to the tradition of the previous quartos: To be or not to be, [comma] that is the question, [comma] Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outragious fortune, [comma] Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, [comma] And by opposing end them: [colon] to die to sleep No more, [comma]

In these six lines, the printed punctuation uses only six punctuation marks, five of them commas. Ward radically changed the text by introducing a more complex punctuation with the addition of a question mark, and a more musical one, since he distinguishes four different pause durations: comma, semicolon, hyphen, and dash. The handwritten punctuation replacing what the publishers had proposed gives the lines a totally different rhythm: To be, [comma] or not to be? [question mark] that is the question. – [period, dash] Whether ’tis nobler in the mind, [comma] to suffer The slings and arrows of outragious fortune; [semicolon] Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, [comma] And by opposing end them? [question mark] to die - [hyphen] to sleep – [dash] No more; [semicolon]

Only one punctuation mark is common to the printed edition and Ward’s new punctuation: the comma placed after “a sea of troubles.” It is clear that the system of punctuation that John Ward created was intended to prepare the declamation of Hamlet’s role on the stage.

The Time of the Work  179 As in musical scores, it indicates a complex use of the pauses and, thanks to the question mark, the desired voice placement.19 Later in the same soliloquy, the printed text indicates: To dye to sleep, [comma] To sleep perchance to dream; [semicolon]

By modifying the punctuation, Ward gave his own interpretation of these lines, both in his mind and on stage. He increases the number of pauses, plays on silences of longer and shorter duration and indicates the tone of voice to be used on the stage: To dye – [hyphen] to sleep – [dash] To sleep? [question mark] perchance, [comma] to dream; [semicolon]

The annotations that John Ward made on his copy of the 1676 edition set the play within a new temporality – that of performance. The shift is dual: first, it is chronological, since Ward was preparing for performances given in the 1740s a text that had been published in 1676 and created in 1660. Second, it is aesthetic, since his manuscript annotations and corrections were aimed at introducing into this copy of Hamlet, which was both a promptbook and an acting copy, what was designed to be the way the play unfolded in performance and how the actor was to play his part. The example of this modest annotated quarto of Hamlet teaches a double lesson. It recalls that the “publication” of a play always implies the involvement of a number of people, places, and operations that made it possible for a text to circulate between composition and revision, representation and the printing process, the theatrical troupe and the typographic workshop. It is in this sense that works should be understood as collective productions and as the result of “negotiations,” which consist not only in the acquisition of objects for the stage, the appropriation of languages, or the symbolic reuse of social and ritual practices,20 but are also, and fundamentally, “transactions” that are always unstable and always renewed, between the work in its perpetuated identity and the various forms of its transmission and its representations.21 A second lesson concerns the temporality of the works. There are several ways to reconstruct a text: by following the genesis of the text itself in its successive states; by focusing on the history of its receptions and interpretations; or by analyzing the changes in the modalities of its publication. These approaches are based on different

180  Texts and Meanings disciplines (genetic criticism, the sociology of reception, bibliography), but they all suppose a comparison between states of the text (or its appropriations) separated by spans of time of varying length. The example we have been examining here is different. The point has been, in effect, to identify in a unique object (an annotated copy of a seventeenth-century edition) the simultaneous presence of multiple temporalities in the same text. The copy of Hamlet acquired by the Friends of Johns Hopkins University in fact contains several Hamlets in one: that of the 1604 quarto; that of Davenant, who purified and abridged the work in 1660 to adjust it to new political and aesthetic requirements; that of its 1676 publishers, Martyn and Herringman, who published a version indicating the cuts made for stage performance; and that of John Ward, the strolling player who was attempting to return to something of the old text and to interpret the role of the prince of Denmark as he understood it.

Notes

Chapter 1 1 This text was presented as the inaugural lecture of the chair of “The Writing and Cultures in Early Modern Europe,” delivered on October 11, 2007 at the Collège de France.

Chapter 2 1 Roger Chartier, Au bord de la falaise: L’histoire entre certitudes et inquiétude (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), trans. Lydia G. Cochrane as On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 2 Paul Veyne, Comment on écrit l’histoire: Essai d’épistémologie (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 67, trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri as Writing History: Essay on Epistemology (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 87. 3 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), ix, 31. 4 Michel de Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 110, quoted from The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 93. 5 François Hartog, “L’art du récit historique,” in Passés recomposés: Champs et chantiers de l’histoire, ed. Jean Boutier and Dominique Julia (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 1994), 184–93. 6 Hayden White, Tropics on Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 85. 7 Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof, The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures (Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1999), 25.

182  Notes to pp. 29–33 8 Carlo Ginzburg, “Spie: Radici di un paradima indizirio,” in Crisi della ragione: Nuovi modelli nell rapporto tra sapere et attività umana, ed. Aldo Gargani (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 56–106; (1999), trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi as “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Universiy Press, 1989), 96–125. 9 Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 283. 10 Penser par cas, ed. Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Enquête, 2005), and the dossier “Formes de la generalization,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales (2007): 5–157. 11 Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire, 5; Writing of History, trans. Conley, xxvii. 12 Reinhart Koselleck, “Erfahrungswandel und Methodeweschel: Eine historische historisch-anthropologische Skizze,” in Koselleck, Historische Methode, ed. C. Meier and J. Rüsen (Munich, 1998), 13–61. 13 Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire, 111; Writing of History, trans. Conley, 94. 14 Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire, 111; Writing of History, trans. Conley, 94. 15 Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire, 64, n. 5; Writing of History, trans. Conley, 103, n. 5. 16 Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire, 78; Writing of History, trans. Conley, 68. 17 Roger Chartier, “Historiography in the Age of Absolutism,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 345–9. 18 Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1981), 95; quoted from Marin, Portrait of the King, trans. Martha M. Houle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 78. 19 Pierre Bourdieu, “Le champ littéraire,” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 89 (1991): 4–46, esp. p. 13. 20 Certeau, Writing of History, trans. Conley, 63. 21 Certeau, Writing of History, trans. Conley, 77. 22 Lorraine Daston, “Une histoire de l’objectivité scientifique,” in Des sciences et des techniques: Un débat, ed. Roger Guesnerie and François Hartog (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Cahier des Annales, 1998), 115–26. 23 Paul Ricoeur, Mémoire, histoire, oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000); trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer as Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 2006). 24 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, p. 497. 25 Jeux d’échelle: La micro-analyse à l’expérience, ed. Jacques Revel (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1996).

Notes to pp. 34–39  183 26 Ricoeur, Mémoire, histoire, oubli, 306; quoted from Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Blamey and Pellauer, 237. 27 Ricoeur, Mémoire, histoire, oubli, 306; quoted from Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Blamey and Pellauer, 237. 28 Ricoeur, Mémoire, histoire, oubli, 106; Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Blamey and Pellauer, 87. 29 Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 202. 30 Steven Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1–20. 31 Ibid., 6. 32 Roger Chartier, “Jack Cade, the Skin of a Dead Lamb, and the Hatred for Writing,” Shakespeare Studies 34 (2006): 77–89. 33 Roland Barthes, “L’effet de réel” (1968), in Roland Barthes, Le Bruissement de la langue Essais critiques IV (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 153–74; quoted from “The Reality Effect,” in Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986), 141–8, esp. p. 148. 34 Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” 147. 35 Marcel Schwob, Vies imaginaires (1896) (Paris: Flammarion, 2004); trans. Lorimer Hammond as Imaginary Lives (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924). 36 Jorge Luis Borges, Historia universal de la infamia (1935) (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, Biblioteca Borges, 1995), 105–32; Borges, El Hacedor (1960) (Madrid: Alianza Editorial Biblioteca Borges, 1997), 117–25. 37 Max Aub, Jusep Torres Campalans (1958), new edn (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1999), trans. Herbert Weistock as Jusep Torres Campalans (New York: Doubleday, 1962). 38 Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 39 Eric Hobsbawn, “The Historian between the Quest for the Universal and the Quest for Identity,” Diogenese 168 (October–December 1994): 51–63. 40 Gérard Noiriel, Sur la “crise” de l’histoire (Paris: Belin, 1996). 41 Proceedings/Actes: 19th International Congress of Historical Sciences/ XIXe Congrès International des Sciences Historiques, Oslo, 2000, “Perspectives on Global History: Concepts and Methodology/ Mondialisation de l’histoire: Concepts et méthodologie,” 3–52. 42 Marc Bloch, “Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes,” Revue de Synthèse historique 46 (1928): 15–50. In English as: “A Contribution Towards a Comparative History of European Society,” in Marc Bloch, Land and Work in Medieval Europe. Selected Papers, trans. J. E. Anderson (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 44–81. 43 See Reinhard Koselleck, “Geschichte,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed.

184  Notes to pp. 39–42

44 45

46 47

48 49 50

51

52 53 54 55 56

Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhard Koselleck, 8 vols in 9 pts (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1975), 2: 647–717. Marcel Détienne, Comparer l’incomparable (Paris: Seuil, 2000); trans. Janet Lloyd as Comparing the Incomparable (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” in Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to c. 1830, ed. Victor Lieberman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 289–315. Serge Gruzinski, “Les mondes mêlés de la Monarchie catholique et autres ‘connected histories,’ ” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales (2001): 85–117. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Sixteenth-Century Millenarianism from the Tagus to the Ganges,” in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History. From the Tagus to the Ganges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 101–37; Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008). Carlo Ginzburg, “Représentation: Le mot, l’idée, la chose,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales (1991): 1219–34. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century,” Representations 91 (2005): 26–57; Serge Gruzinski, Les quatre parties du monde: Histoire d’une mondialisation (Paris: La Martinière, 2004). Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three SeventeenthCentury Lives (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995); and Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteeenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (New York: Hill & Wong, 2006). Roger Chartier, “Languages, Books, and Reading from Printed Word to Digital Text,” in “Arts of Transmission,” ed. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Adrian Johns, Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004): 133–52. Robert Darnton, “An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” American Historical Review 105 (February 2000): 1–35. See, for example, the project developed by Columbia University Press in New York: Electronic Publishing Initiative @ Columbia, and its series, “Gutenberg-e series of monographs in History.” Robert Darnton, “The New Age of the Book,” The New York Review of Books, March 18, 1999, 5–7; Darnton, A Case for Books: Past, Present, Future (New York: Public Affairs, 2009). Roger Chartier, “Mort ou transfiguration du lecteur?” in Où va le livre?, ed. Jean-Yves Mollier (Paris: La Dispute, 2000), 295–312. On electronic publishing, see John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), ch. 9, “The Digital Revolution,” 312–68; Marin Dacos and Pierre Mounier, L’Édition électronique (Paris: La Découverte, 2010).

Notes to pp. 44–48  185 Chapter 3 1 Fernand Braudel, Les Écrits de Fernand Braudel, vol. 1, Autour de la Méditerranée (1996); vol. 2, Les Ambitions de l’histoire (1997); vol. 3, L’Histoire au quotidien (2001) (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 1996). 2 Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1947), 2nd edn (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966); trans. Sián Reynolds as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). 3 Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, 3 vols (Paris: Armand Colin, 1979); trans. Miriam Kochan as Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, 3 vols (New York: Harper & Row, 1982–4; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 4 Fernand Braudel, L’Identité de la France, 3 vols (Paris: Arthaud, 1986); trans. Sián Reynolds as The Identity of France, 2 vols (New York: Harper & Row, 1990). 5 Fernand Braudel, “L’Histoire, mesure du monde,” in Braudel, Les Écrits de Fernand Braudel, vol. 2, Les Ambitions de l’histoire, 11–83. 6 For these three references to fireflies and events, see Les Écrits de Fernand Braudel, vol. 2, Les Ambitions de l’histoire, 23–4, 103, and 133. 7 Fernand Braudel, “Les Espagnols et l’Afrique du Nord de 1492 à 1577,” Revue Africaine 2 and 3 (1928): 184–233 and 351–428, reprinted in Les Écrits de Fernand Braudel, vol. 1, Autour de la Méditerranée, 48–124. 8 Braudel, Les Écrits de Fernand Braudel, vol. 2, Les Ambitions de l’histoire, 22. 9 Fernand Braudel, “Personal Testimony,” Journal of Modern History 44(4) (1972): 448–67, reprinted as “Ma formation d’historien,” in Braudel, Écrits sur l’histoire, vol. 2, Les Ambitions de l’histoire, 9–29. 10 Braudel, “Personal Testimony,” 453; “Ma formation d’historien,” 14. 11 Braudel, “Personal Testimony,” 449–50; “Ma formation d’historien,” 11. 12 These two texts can be found in Braudel, Les Écrits de Fernand Braudel, vol. 2, Les Ambitions de l’histoire, 135, 180; the second quotation is taken from Braudel, “History and Sociology,” in On History, trans. Matthews, 64. 13 Braudel, Les Écrits, vol. 2, Les Ambitions de l’histoire, 38, 50. 14 Braudel, Les Écrits, vol. 2, Les Ambitions de l’histoire, 135; quoted from “The Situation of History in 1950,” in On History, trans. Matthews, 17. 15 Braudel, “Personal Testimony,” 455; “Ma formation d’historien,” 17. 16 Braudel, “Histoire, mesure du monde,” in Les Écrits, vol. 2, Les Ambitions de l’histoire, 30. 17 Ibid., 28. 18 Braudel, Les Écrits, vol. 2, Les Ambitions de l’histoire, 65, 68–73, 75–7, 81.

186  Notes to pp. 49–52 19 Ibid., 81–2. 20 Ibid., 178; quoted from “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” in Braudel, On History, trans. Matthews, 52. 21 Braudel, Les Écrits, vol. 2, Les Ambitions de l’histoire, 189–90; quoted from “History and Sociology,” in On History, trans. Matthews, 74. 22 Paul Ricoeur, Temps et Récit, vol. I, L’intrigue et le récit historique (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 289; trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer as Time and Narrative, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–8). 23 Ricoeur, Temps et Récit, 1: 303; quoted from Time and Narrative, 2: 217. 24 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire,” in Hommage à Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), 145–72, reprinted in Foucault, Dits et écrits, 1954–1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, with Jacques Lagrange, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 2: 136–56; in English translation as “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. with an introduction by Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). 25 Foucault, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire,” 148; quoted from “Nietsche, Genealogy, History,” trans. Bouchard and Simon, 154–5. 26 Pierre Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 262–73, esp. p. 265, quoted from Pascalian Meditations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 223. 27 Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes, 270; Pascalian Meditations, 228. 28 Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes, 264; Pascalian Meditations, 222. 29 Jacques Revel, “Microanalyse et construction du social,” in Jeux d’échelles: La micro-analyse à l’expérience, ed. Jacques Revel (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1996), 15–36, esp. p. 18; quoted from Revel, “Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social” (1966), in Histories: French Constructions of the Past, ed. Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, trans. Arthur Goldhammer et al. (New York: New Press, 1995), 492– 502, esp. pp. 494–5. 30 Paul Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 280; quoted from Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 218. 31 To cite two examples of the sociopolitical use of microhistory, see Giovanni Levi, L’eredità immateriale: Carriera di un esorcista nel Piemonte del seicento (Turin: Einaudi, 1985), in French translation as Le Pouvoir au village: Histoire d’un exorciste dans le Piémont du XVIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), and in English translation by Lydia G. Cochrane as Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Jaime Contreras, Sotos contra Riquelmes: Regidores, inquisidores y criptojudíos (Barcelona: Muchnik, 1992), in French translation as Pouvoir et Inquisition en Espagne au XVIe siècle (Paris: Aubier, 1997).

Notes to pp. 52–60  187 32 See Carlo Ginzburg, Storia notturna: Una decifrazione del sabba (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), in French translation as Le Sabbat des sorcières (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), and trans. Raymond Rosenthal as Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (New York: Pantheon, 1991; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). See also the critical remarks in Roger Chartier, “L’invention du sabbat,” in Chartier, Le jeu de la règle: Lectures (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2000), 89–96. 33 Braudel, Les Écrits de Fernand Braudel, vol. 2, Les Ambitions de l’histoire, 153; quoted from Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” in On History, trans. Matthews, 28. 34 Braudel, Les Écrits de Fernand Braudel, vol. 2, Les Ambitions de l’histoire, 140–1. 35 Revel, “Microanalyse et le construction du social,” 26; quoted from “Microanalysis,” trans. Goldhammer, 501. 36 Paul Veyne, Comment on écrit l’histoire: Essai d’épistémologie (Paris: Seuil, 1971), trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri as Writing History: Essay on Epistemology (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984). 37 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 38 Michel de Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975, 2002), trans. Tom Conley as The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 39 Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée: L’espace et l’histoire (Paris: Arts et Métiers Graphiques, 1977; Paris: Flammarion, 1985), 7. 40 Quoted by Maurice Aymard in Braudel, Autour de la Méditerranée, 125. 41 Braudel, “L’histoire, mesure du monde,” in Les Écrits de Fernand Braudel, vol. 2, Les Ambitions de l’histoire, 46.

Chapter 4 1 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; 2nd edn, 2005), in French translation as La Révolution de l’imprimé à l’aube de l’Europe moderne (Paris: La Découverte, 1991). 2 D.  F. McKenzie, “The Economies of Print, 1550–1750: Scales of Production and Conditions of Constraint,” in Produzione e commercio della carta e del libro, secc. XII–XVIII, ed. Simonetta Cavaciocchi, (Prato: Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica), series II, no. 23 (Florence: Le Monnier, 1992), 389–425. 3 Antonio Castillo Gómez, Escrituras y escribientes: Prácticas de la cultura escrita en una ciudad del Renasimiento (La Palmas de Gran Canaria: Fondación de Enseñanza Superior a Distancia, 1997).

188  Notes to pp. 60–61 4 Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sydney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 5 Fernando Bouza, Corre manuscrito: Una historia cultural del Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2001). 6 De bonne main: La communication manuscrite au XVIIIe siècle, ed. François Moureau (Paris: Universitas; Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993); François Moureau, Répertoire des nouvelles à la main: Dictionnaire de la presse manuscrite clandestine XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999); François Moureau, La plume et le plomb: Espaces de l’imprimé et du manuscrit au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2006). 7 Roger Chartier, “Le manuscrit à l’âge de l’imprimé (XVe–XVIIIe siècles),” La lettre clandestine 7 (1998): 175–93 (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1999). 8 Anthony Grafton, “Teacher, Text, and Pupil in the Renaissance ClassRoom: A Case-Study from a Parisian College,” History of Universities 1 (1981): 37–70; Ann Blair, “Ovidius Methodizatus: The Metamorphoses of Ovid in a Sixteenth-Century Paris College,” History of Universities 9 (1990): 72–118; Jean Letrouit, “La prise de notes de cours sur support imprimé dans les collèges parisiens au XVIe siècle,” Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale de France 2 (1999): 47–56. 9 Roger Chartier, “Du rituel au for privé: Les chartes de mariage lyonnaises au XVIIe siècle,” in Les usages de l’imprimé (XVe–XIXe siècles), ed. Roger Chartier (Paris: Fayard, 1987), 229–51; in English translation by Lydia G. Cochrane as “From Ritual to the Hearth: Marriage Charters in Seventeenth-Century Lyons,” in The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 174–90. 10 Lodovica Braida, “Dall’almanacco all’agenda: Lo spazio per le osservazioni del letttore nelle guide del tempo italiane (XVIII–XIX secoli),” Acme: Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università degli Studi di Milano 41(3) (1998): 137–67. 11 David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order 1450– 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 121–6. 12 See the essays brought together in The Reader Revealed, ed. Sabina Alcorn Baron, with Elizabeth Walsh and Susan Scala (Washington, DC: Folger Library, 2001), and in the special issue of the Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale de France 2 (1999) dedicated to “Le livre annoté.” See also William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2008). 13 Max W. Thomas, “Reading and Writing in the Renaissance Commonplace Book: A Question of Authorship?” in The Construction of Authorship:

Notes to pp. 61–62  189 Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 401–15. 14 Alonso Víctor de Paredes, Institución y origen del Arte de la Imprenta y reglas generales para los componedores, ed. Jaime Moll (Madrid: Bibliotheca Litterae, Calambur, 2002). 15 Cervantès, L’ingénieux Don Quichotte in Cervantès, Oeuvres romanesques, ed. Jean Canavaggio (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1: 1359; quoted from Don Quixote, ed. and trans. Tom Lathrop, in consultation with Annette Grant Cash and Victoria Richardson (Newark, DE: European Masterpieces/Lingua Text, 2005), 801. For the Spanish text, see Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Instituto Cervantes/Critica, 1998), II, 62, 1145: ¡Bien está vuesa merced en la cuenta! – respondió don Quijote. Bien parece que no sabe las entradas y salidas de los impresores y las correspondencias que hay de unos a otros. Yo le prometo que cuando se vea cargado de dos mil cuerpos de libros vea tan molido su cuerpo, que se espante, y más si el libre es un poco avieso y nonada picante.

16 Printers’ deceptions regarding the actual press runs of the editions they printed for the author are denounced in the first treatise on the typographic art, a work destined for confessors and written in Latin by Jean Caramuel Lobkowitz and published in his Theologia moralis fundamentalis, vol. 4, Theologia praeterintentionalis (Lyon: 1664), 185–200. For a recent edition of this text, which cites Cervantes in support of its condemnation, see Juan Caramuel, Syntagma de Arte Typographica, ed. Pablo Andrés Escapa (Salamanca: Instituto de Historia del Libro y de la Lectura, 2004), 134–43. 17 Miguel de Cervantes, Novela del licenciado vidriera, in Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares, ed. Jorge Garcia López (Barcelona: Crítica, 2001), 265–301: Arrimóse un día con grandísimo tiento, porque no se quebrase, a la tienda de un librero, y díjole: -Este oficio me contentara mucho, si no fuera por una falta que tiene. Preguntóle el librero se la dijese. Respondióle: -Los melindres que hacen cuando compran un privilegio de un libro y de la burla que hacen a su autor si acaso le imprime a su costa, pues en lugar de mil y quinientos, imprimen tres mil libros, y cuando el autor piensa que se venden los suyos, se despachan los ajenos. (285; quoted from Cervantes, Three Exemplary Novels, trans. Samuel Putman (New York: Viking, 1950, 73–121, esp. 100–1).

18 See Fernando Bouza, “Para que imprimir: De autores, públicos, impresores y manuscritos en el Siglo de Oro,” Cuadernos de Historia Moderna 18 (1997): 31–50. 19 Lope Felix de Vega Carpio, Fuente Ovejuna, ed. Donald McGrady (Barcelona: Crítica, 1993), ll. 901–8, p. 87: Barrildo: “Después que

190  Notes to pp. 63–64

20

21

22

23

vemos tanto libro impreso,/no hay nadie que de sabio no presume.” Leonelo: “Antes que ignoran más, siento por eso,/por no se reducir a breve suma;/porque la confusión, con el exceso,/los intentos resuelve en vana espuma;/y aquel que de leer tiene más uso,/de ver letreros sólo está confuso”; quoted from All Citizens are Soldiers: Fuente Ovejuna, trans. and adapted by Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 22–3. Francisco de Quevedo, Los sueños: Sueños y discursos de verdades descubridoras de abusos, vicios y engaños, en todos los oficios y estados del Mundo, ed. Ignacio Arellano and M. Carmen Pinillos (Madrid: Editorial Espasa Cape, 1998), 186; 131–2: “Yo y todos los libreros nos condenamos por las obras malas que hacen los otros, y por lo que hicimos barato de los libros en romance y traducidos del latín, sabiendo ya con ellos los tontos lo que encarecían en otros tiempos los sabios, que ya hasta el lacayo latiniza, y hallarán a Horacio en castellano en la caballeriza”; quoted from Quevedo, Dreams and Discourses, ed. and trans. R. K. Britton (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1989), 107. See Madeleine Alcover,“Critique textuelle,” in Savien de Cyrano de Bergerac, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Madeleine Alcover, 3 vols (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), 1: 101–42; Cyrano de Bergerac, L’Autre Monde ou les Empires et Estats de la Lune, édition diplomatique d’un manuscrit inédit, Margaret Sankey (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1995); Roger Chartier, Inscrire et effacer: Culture écrite et société (XIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2005), ch. 5, “Livres parlants et manuscrits clandestins: Les voyages de Dyrcona,” 101–25, trans. Arthur Goldhammer as “Talking Books and Clandestine Manuscripts: The Travels of Dyrcona,” in Roger Chartier, Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 63–82; and Miguel Bénitez, La Face cachée des Lumières: Recherches sur les manuscrits philosophiques clandestins à l’âge classique (Paris: Universitas; Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996). See The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe, ed. Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). See also Chartier, Inscrire et effacer, ch. 4, “Nouvelles à la main, gazettes imprimés: Cymbal et Butter,” 79–100, trans. Arthur Goldhammer as “Handwritten Newsletters, Printed Gazettes: Cymbal and Butter,” in Chartier, Inscription and Erasure, 46–62. For an example of the effect that typographical elements (format, page layout, punctuation) had on meaning, see the pioneering study of D.  R. McKenzie, “Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve,” in Buch und Buchhandel in Europa im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, ed. Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian (Hamburg: Houswedell, 1981), 81–125, reprinted in McKenzie, Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S.  J. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 198–236.

Notes to pp. 64–65  191 24 Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 7–8; Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer, “Fabriquer un livre au XVIe siècle,” in Histoire de l’Édition française, vol. 2, Le livre triomphant: Du Moyen Âge au milieu du XVIIe siècle, ed. Roger Chartier and HenriJean Martin (Paris: Fayard; Cercle de la Librairie, 1989), 336–69, esp. 345; and Pablo Andrés Escapa et al., “El original de imprenta,” in Imprenta y crítica textual en el Siglo de Oro, ed. Francisco Rico (Valladolid: Centro para la Edición de los Clásicos Españoles, 2000), 29–64, esp. 40. 25 Roger Chartier, “Paratesto e preliminari: Cervantes e Avellaneda,” in I Dintorni del testo: Approcci alle periferie del libro, ed. Marco Santoro and Maria Gioia Tavoni (Rome: Ateneo, 2005), 137–48, included below as ch. 9. 26 Gemma Guerrini, “Il sistema di communicazione di un corpus di manoscritti quattrocenteschi,” Scrittura e Civiltà 10 (1986): 122–97; Armando Petrucci, “Del libro unitario al libro miscellaneo,” in Società romana e imperio tardoantico, ed. Andrea Giardina, 4 vols (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1986), vol. 4, Tradizione dei classici, trasformazioni della cultura, 173–87; in English translation as “From the Unitary Book to the Miscellany,” in Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture, ed. and trans. Charles M. Radding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 1–18. 27 Peter Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare (Washington, DC: Folger Library, 1991); Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Roger Chartier, “Éditer Shakespeare (1623–2004),” Ecdotica 1 (2004): 7–23, which appears below as ch. 11. 28 David Scott Kastan, “Humphrey Moseley and the Invention of English Literature,” in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric Lindquist, and Eleanor Shelvin (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007) 105–24, and Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 29 Charles Sorel, La Bibliothèque françoise (1664), reprint, 2nd edn rev. and aug. (Geneva: Slatkine, 1970). 30 See the (at times bitter) exchange between Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns in “AHR Forum: How Revolutionary was the Print Revolution?”American Historical Review 107(1) (February 2002): 84–128. 31 Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 32 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth, Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

192  Notes to pp. 66–68 33 David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 34 Printed in the Thirteenth Parte of his comedias in 1620. 35 “Unos hombres que viven, se sustentan, y visten de hurtar a los autores las comedias, diciendo que las toman de memoria de sólo oirlas, y que éste no es hurto, respecto de que el representante las vende al pueblo, y que se pueden valer de su memoria.” Las Dedicatorias de Partes XIII–XX de Lope de Vega, ed. Thomas E. Case (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press; Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1975), Parte XIII (1620), 54–6. 36 “He hallado, leyendo sus traslados, que para un verso mío hay infinitos suyos, llenos de locuras, disparates et ignorancias, bastantes a quitar la honra y opinión al mayor ingenio en nuestra nación, y las extranjeras, donde ya se leen con tanto gusto.” Ibid. 37 José María Ruano de la Haza, “An Early Rehash of Peribañez,” Bulletin of the Comediantes 25 (1983): 6–29; Ruano de la Haza, “En torno a una edición crítica de La vida es sueño de Calderón,” in La Comedia, ed. Jean Canavaggio (Madrid: Collection de la Casa de Velázquez, 1995), 77–90. 38 Lope de Vega, El peregrino en su patria, ed. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1973), 57–64. 39 Here I am following the magnificent analysis of Daniel Fabre, “Le livre et sa magie,” in Pratiques de la lecture, ed. Roger Chartier (1985) (Paris: Payot, 1993), 231–63. For the magical powers of manuscript texts, see Bouza, Corre manuscrito, ch. 2, “Tocar las letras: Cédulas, nóminas, cartas de toque, resguardo y daño en el Siglo de Oro,” 85–108. 40 Giordana Charuty, Le couvent des fous: L’internement et ses usages en Languedoc aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: Flammarion, 1985). 41 See Samuel Tissot, De la santé des gens de lettre (1768), ed. François Azouvi (Geneva and Paris: Slatkine, 1981), in English translation as An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons (Dublin, 1769); and Roger Chartier, “L’homme de lettres,” in L’Homme des Lumières, ed. Michel Vovelle (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 159–209, esp. 196–9, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane as “The Man of Letters,” in Enlightenment Portraits, ed. Michelle Vovelle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 142–89. 42 Thomas Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003). 43 B. W. Ife, Reading and Fiction: A Platonist Critique and Some Picaresque Replies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 49–83. 44 Denis Diderot, Correspondance, ed. Laurent Versini (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1999), 348; Diderot, quoted from Diderot’s Letters to Sophie Volland: A Selection, trans. Peter France (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 93. 45 Denis Diderot, Éloge de Richardson, in Diderot, Arts et lettres (1739– 1766), Critique I, ed. Jean Varloot (Paris: Hermann, 1980), 181–208; quoted from Diderot, “In Praise of Richardson,” in Diderot, Selected

Notes to pp. 68–75  193

46 47

48

49

50 51 52

Writings on Art and Literature, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Bremner (London: Penguin, 1994), 82–97, esp. 94. Jean Starobinski, “ ‘Se mettre à la place’: (La mutation de la critique, de l’âge classique à Diderot),” Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto 38–9 (1976): 364–78, esp. 377. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, L’Apparition du livre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958, republished in 1999), trans. David Gerard as The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton (1976) (London: Verso: 1997). Guglielmo Cavallo, “Testo, libro, lettura,” in Lo spazio letterario di Roma antica, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, Paolo Fedele, and Andrea Giardina, 5 vols (Rome: Salerno, 1989–1991), vol. 2, La circolazione del testo, 307–34; and Cavallo, “Libro e cultura scritta,” in Storia di Roma, ed. Arnaldo Momigliano and Aldo Schiavone, 4 vols in 7 pts (Turin: Einaudi, 1988–1997), vol. 4, Caratteri e morfologie (1989), 693–734. See also Les débuts du codex, ed. Alain Blanchard (Turnhout: Brepols, 1989). Armando Petrucci, “From the Unitary Book to Miscellany,” in Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture, ed. and trans. Charles M. Radding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 1–18. Milad Doueihi, La Grande conversion numérique (Paris: Seuil, 2008); in English translation as Digital Cultures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Antonio R. de las Heras, Navegar por la información (Madrid: Los Libros de Fundesco, 199), 81–164. Michel Foucault, L’ordre du discours: Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 7, quoted from The Archaeology of Knowledge; and, The Discourse on Language, trans. A.  M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 215.

Chapter 5 1 Pierre-Marc de Biasi, La Génétique des textes (Paris: Nathan, 2000), 9. 2 Brouillons d’écrivains, ed. Marie-Odile Germain and Danièle Thibault (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2001), 18. 3 Michèle Sacquin, “Les Pensées de Pascal: Des manuscrits en quête d’une oeuvre,” in Brouillons d’écrivains, 22–3. 4 George Hoffmann, Montaigne’s Career (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 97–107. 5 Ignacio Arellano, “La edición de textos teatrales del Siglo de Oro (S. XVII): Notas sueltas sobre el estado de la cuestión (1980–1990),” in La Comedia, ed. Jean Canavaggio, Collection of the Casa de Velázquez 48 (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 1995), 36.

194  Notes to pp. 75–79 6 Margaret R. Greer, “Early Modern Spanish Theatrical Transmission, Memory, and a Claramonte Play,” paper presented at the conference, Producing the Renaissance Text, Duke University, February 3, 2007. 7 Lope de Vega, Rimas, aora de nuevo imprimidas, con el Nuevo arte de hazer comedias deste tiempo (Milan: por Ieronimo Bordo, 1611); in English translation as Lope de Vega, The New Art of Writing Plays, trans. William T. Brewster, with an introduction by Brander Matthews (New York: Printed for the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University, 1914). 8 Lope de Vega, El primero Benavides, edited from the autograph manuscript with introduction and notes by Arnold G. Reichenberger and Augusta Espantoso Foley (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973), and Lope de Vega, Carlos V en Francia, edited from the autograph manuscript with introduction and notes by Arnold G. Reichenberger (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962). 9 The Book of Sir Thomas More, ed. W. W. Greg, printed for the Malone Society by H. Hart (London: Oxford University Press, 1911); Scott McMillin, The Elizabethan Theatre and “The Book of Sir Thomas More” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Scott McMillin, “The Book of Sir Tomas More: Dates and Acting Companies,” in Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More: Essays on the Play and its Shakespearean Interest, ed. T. H. Howard-Hill (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 10 Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), “A Game at Chess: General Textual Introduction,” 712–873. 11 For a provisional list of Petrarch’s autographs, see Armando Petrucci, La scrittura di Francesco Petrarca, Studi e testi (Biblioteca apostolica vaticana) 248 (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1967). 12 Armando Petrucci, “Minute, Autograph, Author’s Book,” in Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy, Studies in the History of Written Culture, ed. and trans. Charles M. Radding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 145–68. 13 Armando Petrucci, “Il libro manoscritto,” in Letteratura italiana, gen. ed. Alberto Asor Rosa, 10 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), 2: 516–17. 14 Stefano Arata, Los manuscritos teatrales (siglos XVI y XVII) de la Biblioteca del Palacio (Pisa: Giardini, 1989). 15 Ben Jonson, Volpone, in Ben Jonson, Three Comedies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 42. 16 Harold Love, “Thomas Middleton: Oral Culture and the Manuscript Economy,” in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, 98–109. 17 See the census of printers’ copies in J.  K. Moore, Primary Materials Relating to Copy and Print in English Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), and

Notes to pp. 79–82  195 Paolo Trovato, L’ordine dei tipografi: Lettori, stampatori, correttori tra Quatro e Cinquecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1998). 18 Pablo Andrés et al., “El original de imprenta” and Sonia Garza Merino, “La cuenta del original,” in Imprenta y crítica textual en el Siglo de Oro, Estudios publicados bajo la dirección de Francisco Rico, ed. Pablo Andrés (Valladolid: Centro para le Edición de los Clásicos Españoles, 2000), 29–64 and 65–95, respectively; Francisco Rico, El texto del “Quijote”: Preliminares a una ecdótica del Siglo de Oro (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 2006), 55–93. 19 William Enfield, Observations on Literary Property (London, 1774). 20 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765–1769), 2: 405–6, quoted in Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), 89–90. 21

Quel est le bien qui puisse appartenir à un homme, si un ouvrage d’esprit, le fruit unique de son éducation, de ses études, de ses veilles, de son temps, de ses recherches, de ses observations; si les plus belles heures, les plus beaux moments de la vie; si ses propres pensées, les sentiments de son cœur; la portion de lui même la plus précieuse, celle qui ne périt point; celle qui l’immortalise, ne lui appartient pas? (Diderot, Oeuvres complètes, 15 vols (Paris: Le Club français du livre, 1969–1972), vol. 8, Encyclopédie IV (Lettres M–Z); Diderot, Lettre sur le commerce de la librairie, ed. John Lough and Jacques Proust. (Paris: Hermann, 1976, 509–10)

22 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Beweis der Unrechtmässigkeit der Büchernadrucks: Ein Räsonnement und eine Parabel (1791); Proof of the Illegality of Reprinting: A Rationale, and a Parable (1793), 227–8, quoted from Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 51–3, which see for commentary on this text. 23 Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published according to the True Originall Copies (London, 1623), A3 recto. 24 Patricia Pierce, The Great Shakespeare Fraud: The Strong, True Story of William-Henry Ireland (Stroud: Sutton, 2004); The Confessions of William Henry Ireland: containing the particulars of his fabrication of the Shakespeare manuscripts; together with anecdotes and opinions (hitherto unpublished) of many distinguished persons in the literary, political, and theatrical world (London: Printed by Ellerton and Byworth for T. Goddard, 1805). 25 An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments: Published Dec. 24, MDCCXCV, and Attributed to Shakspeare, Queen Elizabeth, and Henry, Earl of Southhampton: Illustrated by Fac-similes of the Genuine Hand-writing of that Nobleman, and of Her Majesty; a New Fac-simile of the Hand-writing of Shakspeare, Never before Exhibited; and Other Authentick Documents: in a letter addressed to the Right Hon. James, Earl of

196  Notes to pp. 82–85

26 27

28

29

30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Charlemont, By Edmond Malone, Esq. (London: Printed by H. Baldwin for T. Caddell, jun. and W. Davies (successors to Mr. Cadell), in the Strand (1796). See also Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 193–223; and Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 107–9. Vicki Mahaffey, “Introduction,” in Ulysses in Hand: The Rosenbach Manuscript, ed. Michael J. Barsanti (Philadelphia: Rosenbach Museum and Library, 2000), 8–10. Nathalie Ferrant, “J.-J. Rousseau, du copiste à l’écrivain: Les manuscrits de la Nouvelle Héloïse conservés à la Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale,” in Écrire aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Genèse de textes littéraires et philosophiques, ed. Jean-Louis Lebrave and Almuth Grésillon (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2000), 191–212. Karl-Heinz Hahn, Goethe-und-Schiller-Archiv: Bestandsverzeichnis (Weimar: Arion, 1961), 11, quoted in Klaus Hurlebusch, “Rarement vit-on tant de renouveau: Klopstock et ses contemporains: Tenants d’une ‘esthétique du génie’ et précurseurs de la littérature moderne,” in Écrire aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 169–89. “Pourvu que mes manuscrits durent autant que moi, c’est tout ce que je veux. Je les ferais enterrer avec moi, comme un sauvage fait de son cheval.” Jacques Neefs, “Gustave Flaubert: Les aventures de l’hommeplume,” in Brouillon d’écrivains, 68. Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” (1969) in Foucault, Dits et écrits, 1954–1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 789–821; in English translation as “What Is an Author?”, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 101–20, esp. 108, 110. See also Roger Chartier, “Foucault’s Chiasmus: Authorship between Science and Literature in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science, ed. Mario Biagioli and Peter Galison (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 13–31. Foucault, “What Is an Author?”, 103–4. Mazzino Montinari, La Volonté de puissance n’existe pas?, ed. with a postface by Paolo d’Iorio (Paris: L’Éclat, 1998). Annick Louis, Jorge Luis Borges: Oeuvre et manoeuvres (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997). Jose Luis Borges, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Pierre Bernès, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade 400 (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works, gen. eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare in Ten Volumes: Collated Verbatim with the Most Authentick Copies, and Revised: With the Correction and Illustrations of Various Commentators; to which are

Notes to pp. 85–88  197 added, an Essay on the chronological order of his plays; an Essay relative to Shakespeare and Jonson; a Dissertation on the three parts of King Henry VI; an Historical Account of the English State; and notes by Edmond Malone (London: Printed by H. Baldwin for J. Rivington and Sons, 1790). 38 The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare: With the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators; Comprehending a Life of the Poet and an Enlarged History of the Stage by the late Edmond Malone; with a New Glossarial Index (London: Printed for F. C. and J. Rivington et al., 1821). 39 De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim, 142.

Chapter 6 1 “Mortimer: The king must die, or Mortimer goes downe,/The commons now begin to pitie him,/Yet he that is the cause of Edwards death,/Is sure to pay for it when his sonne is of age,/And therefore will I do it cunninglie./ This letter written by a friend of ours,/Containes his death, yet bids them save his life./Edwardum occidere nolite timere bonum est./ Feare not to kill the king tis good he die./But read it thus, and thats an other sence:/Edwardum occidere nolite timere bonum est./Kill not the king tis good to feare the worst./Unpointed as it is, thus shall it goe,/ That being dead, if by chaunce to be found,/Matrevis and the rest may beare the blame,/And we be quit that caused it to be done”: Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, V, 4, in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2 vols (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 86. 2 “La ponctuation que dégage les articulations d’un texte, c’est celle que réclame la syntaxe, je suppose; et qui tend ainsi à coïncider avec les structures de la pensée. Tandis que celle qui aiderait la lecture serait là plutôt pour comprendre les besoins de la voix, ou mettre en évidence des rythmes, des sons: en somme, non pour penser mais pour séduire.” Yves Bonnefoy, La petite phrase et la longue phrase (Paris: La Tilv, 1994), 15–22. 3 “Tenemos de escrivir como pronunciamos: I pronunciar como escrivimos.” Elio Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática Castellana, ed. with Introduction, by Miguel Angel Esparza and Ramón Sarmiento, 3 vols (Madrid: Fundación Antonio de Nebrija, 1992), 158–9. 4 William Shakespeare, A pleasant conceited comedie called loues labors lost (London: By W. W. for Cuthbert Burby, 1598), V, 1; quoted here from Love’s Labour’s Lost in The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 777. 5 John Hart, An orthographie, conteyning the due order and reason, howe to write or paint thimage of mannes voice, most like to the life or nature (London: Henrie Denham (?) for William Seres, composed by I. H. Chester, Heralt, 1569); William Bullokar, Booke at large, for the

198  Notes to pp. 89–91

6

7

8 9

10

11 12 13

amendment of orthographie for English speech: wherein, a most perfect supplie is made, for the wantes and double sounde of letters in the olde orthographie . . . (London: Henrie Denham, 1580). “Quant à nostre escriture, elle est fort vicieuse et corrompue, & me semble qu’elle a grand besoin de reformation, & de remettre en son premier honneur, le K, & le Z, & faire des caractères nouveaux pour la double N, à la mode des Espagnols ñ, pour escrire Monseigneur, & une L double pour escrire orgueilleux.” Pierre de Ronsard, “Préface sur la Franciade touchant le poëme héroïque,” in Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager and Michel Simonin, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1993–1994), 1: 1177–80. “Tout argument, & discours de propos, soit oratoire, ou poëtique, est deduict par periodes. Periode est une diction Greque, que les Latins appellent clausula, ou compraehensio verborum: c’est adire une clausule, ou une comprehension de parolles. Ce periode (ou aultrement clausule) est distingué, & divisé par les points dessusdicts [poinct à queue ou virgule, comma, poinct rond]. Et communement ne doibt avoir que deux, ou trois membres; car si par sa longueur il excede l’aleine de l’homme, il est vicieux.” Étienne Dolet, La maniere de bien traduire d’une langue en autre. D’avantage de la punctuation de la langue Françoyse, plus des accents d’ycelle (Lyon: chés Dolet mesme, 1540). Olivétan, “Au lecteur,” in his Instruction des enfans (1533), in Susan Baddeley, L’Orthographe française au temps de la Réforme (Geneva: Droz, 1993), 433–6. “Je te supliray seulement d’une chose, lecteur, de vouloir bien prononcer mes vers & accomoder ta voix à leur passion, & non comme quelques uns les lisent, plustost à la façon d’une missive, ou de quelques lettres Royaux que d’un Poëme bien prononcé: & te suplie encore derechef où tu verras cette marque ! vouloir un peu eslever ta voix pour donner grace à ce que tu liras.” Pierre de Ronsard, La Franciade (1572), “Au lecteur,” in Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, 1: 1180–6, quoted from The Franciad (1572) by Pierre Ronsard, ed. and trans. Phillip John Usher (New York: AMS Press, 2010), 7–8. Georges Forestier, “Lire Racine,” in Jean Racine, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Georges Forestier, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1999–), vol. 1, Théâtre. Poésie, lix–lxiii; quoted in English from Jean Racine, Complete Plays, trans. Samuel Solomon, 2 vols (New York: Random House, 1967). Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683–4), ed. Herbert Davis and Harry Carter (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 216–17. Forestier, “Lire Racine,” 1: lxi, n. 4, Racine, Complete Plays, trans. Solomon, 2: 39. The chapter on Arrias, “De la Société et de la conversation,” provides an example of this. In what follows the differences between a modern edition, La Bruyère, “De la Société et de la conversation,” in La Bruyère,

Notes to pp. 91–92  199 Les Caractères de Theophrase traduits du grec avec les Caractères ou les moeurs du siècle, ed. Robert Garapon (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964), 150–1, and the 1696 edition as it is edited in La Bruyère, “De la Société et de la conversation,” in La Bruyère, Les Caractères (1696), ed. Louis Van Delft (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1998), 206, are indicated within square brackets, separated by a slash mark. Quelqu’un/quelqu’un] se hasarde de le contredire [, /] et lui prouve nettement qu’il dit des choses qui ne sont pas vraies [. / ;] Arrias ne se trouble point, prend feu au contraire contre l’interrupteur [: “Je / ; je] n’avance, lui dit-il, je ne raconte rien que je ne sache d’original: je l’ai appris de [Sethon, / Sethon] ambassadeur de France dans cette [cour / Cour], revenu à Paris depuis quelque jours, que je connais familièrement, que j’ai fort interrogé, et qui ne m’a caché aucune circonstance [.” Il / ; il] reprenait le fil de sa narration avec plus de confiance qu’il ne l’avait commencée, lorsque l’un des conviées lui dit [: “C’est /, c’est] Sethon à qui vous parlez, lui-même, et qui arrive de son [ambassade”. / Ambassade] [Somebody presumes to contradict him, and clearly proves to him that what he says is untrue. Arrias is not disconcerted; on the contrary, he grows angry at the interruption, and exclaims: “I say and recount nothing but what I know on excellent authority; I had it from Sethon, the French ambassador at that court, who only a few days ago came back to Paris, and is a particular friend of mine; I asked him several questions, and he replied to them without concealing anything.” He continues his story with greater confidence than he began it, till one of the company informs him that the gentleman whom he has been contradicting was Sethon himself, but lately arrived from his embassy.] La Bruyère, The “Characters” of Jean de la Bruyère, trans. Henri van Laun (New York: Brentanos, 1929), 66.

14 Malcolm Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 5. 15 This example is given in James Binn, “STC Latin Books: Evidence for Printing-House Practice,” The Library, ser. 5, 32(1) (March 1977): 1–27, citing John Chrysostom, Homiliae duae (London: Reginald Wolfe, 1543). See also “The Printer to the Reader,” in Abraham Hartwell, Reginae literata sive de . . . Elizabethae . . . Reginae . . . in Academiam Cantabridiensem adventu (London: Gulielmi Seres, 1565): Both the inversion and transpositions of letters is very frequent; and the punctuation marks are either wholly omitted or else badly placed. You should therefore attribute the errors which have crept in to my haste and to the poorness of my type. I have listed below the errors which spoil the meaning of the poem, so that you can excuse the smaller ones and correct those that are more serious.

16 “El componedor [debe] Hazer interrogacion, admiracion, y parentesis.” Melchor de Cabrera Núñez de Guzmán, Discurso legal, histórico y

200  Notes to pp. 92–95

17

18 19 20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

politico en prueba del origin, progressos, utilidad, nobleza y excelencias del Arte de la Imprenta (Madrid, 1675). “El corrector [debe] poner la apuntuacion legitima.” Alonso Víctor de Parades, Institución y origen del arte de la imprenta y reglas generales para los componedores (Madrid, ca. 1680), ed. Jaime Moll (Madrid: Calambur, 2002). Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, 211–12. Parades, Institución y origen del arte de la imprenta. Jeffrey Masten, “Pressing Subjects; or, The Secret Lives of Shakespeare’s Compositors,” in Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, ed. Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass and Nancy Vickers (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 75–107. Paolo Trovato, “Con ogni diligenza corretto”: La stampa e le revisioni editoriali dei testi letterari italiani (1470–1570) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991), and L’Ordine dei tipografi: lettori, stampatori, correttori tra Quattro e Cinquecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1998). Anthony Grafton, “Printers’ Correctors and the Publication of Classical Texts,” in Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 141–55, and The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe, The Panizzi Lectures 2009 (London: The British Library, 2011). Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470–1600 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Printers, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Camridge University Press, 1999). Hieronymus Hornschuch, Orthotypographia Hoc est: Instructio operas typographicas correcturis et Admonitio scripta sua in lucem edituris (Leipzig, 1608); quoted from Hornschuch’s Orthotypographia, ed. and trans., Philip Gaskell and Patricia Bradford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 29, 30. Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire Universel (The Hague, 1690), articles “Ponctuation: Observation grammaticale des lieux d’un discours, où on doit faire de differentes pauses, & qu’on marque avec des points & petits caracteres pour en advertir les lecteurs. Il y a plus de difficulté qu’on ne pense à faire bien la ponctuation. Ce Correcteur d’Imprimerie entend fort bien la punctuation” and “Virgule: Terme de grammaire. . . . L’exactitude de cet Auteur va jusques-là, qu’il prend soin des points et des virgules.” Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer, “À la recherche des ‘Précieuses,’ ” in VeyrinForrer, La lettre et le texte: Trente années de recherches sur l’histoire du livre (Paris: Collection de l’École Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles, 1987), 338–66. H. Gaston Hall, “Ponctuation et dramaturgie chez Molière,” in La Bibliographie matérielle, présentée par Roger Laufer, Table Ronde du C.N.R.S. organisée par Jacques Petit (Paris: Éditions du C.N.R.S., 1983), 125–41, reprinted as “Ponctuation et Dramaturgie,” in H. Gaston Hall, Comedy in Context: Essays on Molière (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 56–76.

Notes to pp. 95–99  201 28 Molière, Le Tartuffe ou l’Imposteur. Comedie (Paris: Jean Ribou, 1669); Molière, Le Tartuffe ou L’Imposteur. Comedie (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1673); Molière, Oeuvres complètes collationnées sur les textes originaux, ed. Louis Moland, 12 vols (Paris: Garnier, 1880–1885), 6:180. The latest edition of Molière’s plays respects the seventeenthcentury punctuation: Molière, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Georges Forestier and Claude Bourqui, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 2010). 29 Parkes, Pause and Effect, 210–11. 30 William Shakespeare, A Midsommer nights dreame (London, 1600). 31 William Nelson, “From ‘Listen Lordings’ to ‘Dear Reader,’ ” University of Toronto Quarterly, A Canadian Journal of the Humanities 46(2) (1976–7): 110–24. 32 Parkes, Pause and Effect, 88. 33 Philip Gaskell, “Milton, A Maske (Comus), 1634,” in Gaskell, From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1984), 28–61. 34 Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21–4. 35 Roger Chartier, “Hamlet 1676: Les temps de l’oeuvre,” in Le Temps des oeuvres: Mémoire et préfiguration, ed. Jacques Neefs (Vincennes: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2001), 143–54, in the present book as chapter 12. 36 “Despues de un largo exámen ha parecido a la Academia se pueda usar de la misma nota de interrogacion poniendola inversa antes de la palabra en que tiene principio el tono interrogante, ademas de la que ha de llevar la cláusula al fin de la forma regular, para evitar así la equivocacion que por falta de alguna nota se padece comunmente en la lectura de los periodos largos.” Ortografía de la Lengua española Castellana Compuesta por la Real Academia Española, Nueva edición corregida y aumentada (Madrid, 1754). 37 Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Noah Webster, Jr, December 26, 1789 (unpublished): Franklin Papers: www.franklinpapers.org., accessed March 22, 2013.

Chapter 7 1 Pierre Vilar, “Le temps du ‘Quixote,’ ” Europe (1956), 3–16, reprinted in Vilar, Une histoire en construction: Approche marxiste et problématiques conjoncturelles (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1982), 233–46, esp. 245, trans. as “The Age of Don Quixote” in Essays in European Economic History 1500–1800, ed. by Peter Earle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 100–13. 2 Ibid., 238. 3 “¿Verdad es que hay historia mía y que fue moro y sabio el que la compuso?” “Es tan verdad, señor, que tengo para mí que el día de hoy están impresos más de doce mil libros de la tal historia: si no, dígalo

202  Notes to pp. 99–101

4

5 6

7

8

9 10

11

Portugal, Barcelona y Valencia, donde se han impreso, y aun hay fama que se está impriendo en Amberes”: Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Instituto Cervantes/ Critica, 1998), II, 3: 647; quoted from Don Quixote, ed. and trans. Tom Lathrop, consulting eds Annette Grant Cash and Victoria Richardson (Newark, DE: Cervantes & Co., 2005), 441–3. Alonso Víctor de Parades, Institución y Origen del Arte de la Imprenta y Reglas generales para los componedores, ed, with a prologue, by Jaime Moll (Madrid: El Crotalón, 1984), 43v; new edition with a “Nueva noticia editorial” by Víctor Infantes, Biblioteca Litterae (Madrid: Calambur, 2002). “Y a mí se me trasluce que no ha de haber nación ni lengua donde no se traduzga”: Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, II, 3, 647–48; Don Quixote, trans. Lathrop, 443. The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997), 3109. See also Double Falsehood: Or, The Distrest Lovers, ed. Brean Hammond (London: Arden Shakespeare, Methuen Drama, 2010); Roger Chartier, Cardenio entre Cervantès et Shakespeare: Histoire d’une pièce perdue (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), trans. Janet Lloyd as Cardenio between Cervantes and Shakespeare: The Story of a Lost Play (Cambridge: Polity, 2013). See also The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes and the Lost Play, edited by David Carnegie and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). “Me parece que el traducir de una lengua en otra, como no sea de las reinas de las lenguas, griega y latina, es como quien mira los tapices flamencos por el revés, que aunque se veen las figuras, son llenas de hilos que las escurecen y no se veen con la lisura y tez de la haz; y el traducir de lenguas fáciles ni arguye ingenio ni elocución, como no le arguye el que traslada ni el que copia un papel de otro papel.” II, 62, 1144, Don Quixote, quoted from the Lathrop translation, 800–1. “Trasladar. Vale algunas veces interpretar alguna escritura de una lengua en otra; y tambien vale copiar.” Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española (Madrid, 1611), s.v. “Trasladar.” Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, II, 62, p. 1144; Don Quixote, trans. Lathrop, 801. “Pero dígame vuestra merced: este libro ¿imprímese por su cuenta o tiene ya vendido el privilegio a algún librero?” “Por mi cuenta lo imprimo y pienso ganar mil ducados, por lo menos, con esta primera impresión, que ha de ser de dos mil cuerpos, y se han de despachar a seis reales cada uno en daca las pajas.”: Don Quijote de la Mancha, II, 62, 1144; Don Quixote, trans. Lathrop, 801. “Yo no imprimo mis libros para alcanzar fama en el mundo, que ya en él soy conocido por mis obras: provecho quiero, que sin él no vale un cuatrín la buena fama.” Don Quijote de la Mancha, II, 62, 1144–15; Don Quixote, trans. Lathrop, 801.

Notes to pp. 101–108  203 12 This contract is published in Annie Parent, Les métiers du livre à Paris au XVIe siècle (1535–1560) (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 300–1. 13 Ibid., 301–2. 14 Ibid., 303–4. 15 Ibid., 221–50 and, for Spanish books, 246–7. 16 See Pedro Mexía, Silva de varia lección, ed. Antonio Castro (Madrid: Cátedra, 1989), “Introducción,” 52–9; and Dominique de Courcelles, “La Silva de varia lección de Pedro Mexía (Séville, 1540; Paris, 1552). Traduction et adaptation en Espagne et en France à la Renaissance,” in Traduire et adapter à la Renaissance, ed. Dominique de Courselles (Paris: École nationale des Chartes, 1998), 99–124. 17 Un sire de Gouberville, gentilhomme campagnard du Cotentin de 1553 à 1562, published by Abbé Allexandre Tollemer (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1972), 203–11; and Madeleine Foisil, Le sire de Gouberville: Un gentilhomme normand au XVIe siècle (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1981), 80–1; 231–4. 18 Pierre Corneille, L’Illusion comique, in his Oeuvres complètes, ed. Georges Couton, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 1: 622–3. 19 On French translations of Spanish picaresque works, see Rolf Greifelt, “Die Übersetzungen des spanische Schmelromans in Frankreich im XVIII Jahrhunderts,” Romanische Forschungen 50(1) (1939): 51–84. 20 Andreas Stoll, Scarron als Übersetzer Quevedo: Studien zur Rezeption des Pikaresken Romans “El Buscón” in Frankreich, L’Aventurier Buscon, 1633 (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1970). 21 Roger Chartier, “Figures littéraires et expériences sociales: La littérature de la gueuserie dans la Bibliothèque bleue,” in Chartier, Lectures e lecteurs dans la France d’Ancien Régime (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 271–351; trans. Lydia G. Cochrane as “The Literature of Roguery in the Bibliothèque bleue,” in Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 265–342. 22 See George Hainsworth, Les “Novelas ejemplares” de Cervantes en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1933; New York: B. Franklin, 1971). 23 Charles Sorel, La Bibliothèque françoise (1664), reprint (Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), 192–3. 24 Jean Chapelain, Opuscules critiques, ed. Alfred Hunter (Paris: Droz, 1936, 46–70. 25 Stoll, Scarron als Übersetzer Quevedo. See also Michel et Cécile Cavillac, “A propos du ‘Buscón,’ et de ‘Guzmán de Alfarache,’ ” Bulletin hispanique 75(1–2) (1973): 114–31. 26 “Yo .  .  . determiné, consultándolo primero con la Grajal, de pasarme a Indias con ella a ver si, mudando mundo y tierra, mejoraría mi suerte. Y fueme peor, come V. Md. verá en la segunda parte, pues nunca mejora su estado quien muda solamente de lugar, y no de vida y costumbres”: Francisco de Quevedo, La Vida del Buscón, ed. Fernando

204  Notes to pp. 108–110

27

28

29

30

31 32

33

34

Cabo Aseguinolaza (Barcelona: Crítica, 1993), 226, quoted from Quevedo, The Scavenger, trans. Hugh A. Harter (New York: Las Americas, 1962), 146. L’Aventurier Buscon. Histoire facétieuse composée en Espagnol par dom Francisco de Quevedo. Ensemble les Lettres du Chevalier de l’Epargne (Paris: Billaine, 1633): “Tout est sous la providence du Ciel, on ne peut prévoir l’avenir; mais maintenant je puis dire qu’il y a peu de personnes en l’Univers, de quelque condition qu’ils puissent être et quelque prospérité qu’ils puissent avoir, dont la félicité soit comparable à la mienne. Veuille le Ciel me la conserver longuement en la compagnie de ma chère Rozelle.” Miguel de Cervantes, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, ed. Carlos Romero Muñoz, (Madrid: Cátedra, 2003), III, 13, 567, quoted from The Tales of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story, trans. Celia Richmond Weller and Clark A. Colahan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 265. Henri-Jean Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et société à Paris au XVIIe siècle (1598–1701), 3 vols (Geneva: Droz, 1969), 1: 514; trans. David Gerard as Print, Power and People in Seventeenth-Century France (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1933). Antoine Coron, “ ‘Ut prosint aliis’: Jacques-Auguste de Thou et sa bibliothèque,” in Histoire des bibliothèques françaises, 4 vols (Paris: Promodis/Cercle de la Librarie, 1988), vol. 2, Les bibliothèques sous l’Ancien Régime 1530–1789, ed. Claude Jolly, 100–25, esp. 110. Jacqueline Artier, “La bibliothèque du cardinal de Richelieu,” in Histoire des bibliothèques françaises, 2: 126–33, esp. 129. Gabriel Naudé, Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (1627) (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1990), 41 (for “Bocace, Dante, Petrarque en Italien”) and 71 (for Ariosto and Tasso, who were shelved next to Homer and Virgil), trans. John Evelyn as Instructions concerning Erecting a Library (London, 1661). Jean Mairet, L’Auteur du vrai Cid espagnol à son traducteur français, in Armand Gasté, La Querelle du Cid (Paris: H. Welter, 1898; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), 67–9. See also Corneille, Oeuvres complètes, 1: 1517–21; Corneille quoted from Le Cid, trans. Vincent J. Cheng (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 184. Scudéry, Observations sur le Cid, in Corneille, Oeuvres complètes 1: 782–99: Le Cid est une Comédie Espagnole, dont presque tout l’ordere, Scène pour Scène, et toutes les pensées de la Française sont tirées: et cependant ni Mondory [le directeur de la troupe du Marias], ni les Affiches, ni l’impression, n’ont appelé ce Poème, ni traduction, ni paraphrase, ni seulement imitation: mais bien en ont-ils parlé comme d’une chose qui serait purement, à celui qui n’en est que le traducteur

and, soon after: “que j’entends aussi l’Espagnol.”

Notes to pp. 110–115  205 35 Guillén de Castro, Las Mocedades del Cid, ed., with prologue and notes, by Stefano Arata (Barcelona: Crítica, 1996), lxviii–lxxvii. First edition in Primera Parte de las comedias de don Guillem de Castro (Valencia: Felipe Mey, 1618). 36 Corneille, Lettre apologétique, in Corneille, Oeuvres complètes, 1: 800–3: “Vous m’avez voulu faire passer pour simple Traducteur, sous ombre de soixante et douze vers que vous marquez sur un ouvrage de deux mille, et que ceux qui s’y connaissent n’appelleront jamais de simples traductions.” 37 Les Sentiments de l’Académie française sur la tragi-comédie du Cid,” in Corneille, Oeuvres complètes, 1: 808–20: “Outre que nous remarquons qu’en bien peu de choses imitées il [Corneille] est demeuré audessous de l’original, et qu’il en a rendu quelques-unes meilleurs qu’elles n’étaient, nous trouvons encore qu’il y a ajouté beaucoup de pensées, qui ne cède en rien à celles du premier Auteur.” 38 “Avertissement de Corneille,” in Corneille, Le Cid: Tragi-comédie, ed. Jean Serroy, Folio Théâtre (Paris: Gallimard , 1993), 146–55. 39 Ibid., 152: J’oubliais à vous dire que quantité de mes amis ayant jugé à propos que je rendisse compte au public de ce que j’avais emprunté de l’auteur espagnol dans cet ouvrage, et m’ayant témoigné de le souhaiter, j’ai bien voulu leur donner cette satisfaction. Vous trouverez donc tout ce que j’en ai traduit imprimé d’une autre lettre [i.e. en italique], avec un chiffre au commencement qui servira de marque de renvoi pour trouver les vers espagnols au bas de la même page.

40 Anthony Grafton, Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 41 Bartolomé de Las Casas, Brevísima Relación de la Destruición de las Indias, ed. André Saint-Lu (Madrid: Cátedra, 1982, 1986, 2001); in English translation as A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, ed. and trans., Nigel Griffin (London and New York: Penguin, 1992). On this text, see the magnificent analysis of Alain Milhou, “Introduction historique,” in Bartolomé de Las Casas, La Destruction des Indes (1552), trans. Jacques de Miggrode (1579), with engravings by Theodor de Bry (1598); ed. and iconographic analysis by Jean-Paul Duviols (Paris: Chandeigne, 1995), 7–69. 42 The text of Jacques de Miggrode’s translation in its Parisian edition of 1582 is given in Las Casas, La Destruction des Indes. 43 Ibid., 78. 44 Richard Verstegan, Théâtre des cruautés des hérétiques de notre temps, ed. Frank Lestringant (Paris: Chandeigne, 1995). 45 Ricardo García Cárcel, La leyenda negra: Historia y opinión (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1992), 227. 46 On this text, see García Cárcel, La leyenda negra, 235–8, and Alain Milhou, “Introduction,” in Las Casas, La Destruction des Indes, 65–6.

206  Notes to pp. 115–125 47 Carlos García, La oposición y conjunción de los dos grandes Luminares de la tierra o la Antipatía de Franceses y Españoles (1617), ed. Michel Bareau (Alberta: Alta Press, 1979). On this text, see García Cárcel, La leyenda negra, 55–60; and Jean-Frédéric Schaub, La France espagnole: Les racines hispaniques de l’absolutisme français (Paris: Seuil, 2003), 160–6. 48 See Schaub, La France espagnole, 166–71. 49 Quotations are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 741–802. 50 See Schaub, La France espagnole, 173–215. 51 “Tendieron don Quijote y Sancho la vista por todas partes – vieron el mar, hasta entonces dellos no visto; precióles espaciosísimo y largo, harto más que las lagunas de Rudera que en la Mancha habían visto.” Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, II, 61, 1130; Don Qixote, trans. Lathrop, 791.

Chapter 8 1 Paul Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000); trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer as Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 2 “Autour de La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli de Paul Ricouer,” Le Débat 122 (November–December 2002): 3–61. 3 Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit (Paris: Seuil, 1983); trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer as Time and Narrative, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988). 4 Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 25–53; 112–163; Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Blamey and Pellauer, “On Memory and Recollection,” 21–44; “Forgetting,” 93–132. 5 “Apeándose de Rocinante, con gentil continente y donaire, le fue a abrazar y le tuvo un buen espacio estrechamente entre sus brazos, como si de luengos tiempos le hubiera conocido.” Cervantes, L’Ingénieux Hidalgo Don Quichotte de la Manche, in Cervantes, Oeuvres romanesque complètes, ed. Jean Canavaggio, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1: 585. For the text in Spanish, see Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Instituto Cervantes/ Crítica, 1998), II, 23, 260; quoted here from Don Quixote, trans. Tom Lathrop, consulting editors Annette Grant Cash and Victoria Richardson (Newark, DE: Cervantes & Co., 2005), 173–4. 6 “Si gustáis, señores, que os diga en breves razones la inmensidad de mis desventuras, habéisme de prometer de que con ninguna pregunta ni otra cosa no interromperéis el hilo de mi triste historia; porque en el punto que lo hagáis, en ese se quedará lo que fuere contando. . . . Esta prevención que hago es porque querría pasar brevemente por el cuento de mis disgracias, que el traerlas a la memoria no mi sirve de otra cosa que añadir otras de nuevo.” L’Ingénieux Hidalgo Don Quichotte de la

Notes to pp. 125–127  207 Manche, 578; Don Quijote de la Mancha, I, 24, 262; Don Quixote, trans. Lathrop, 175. 7 Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 97; Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Blamey and Pellauer, 88. 8 “Estas razones del Roto trujeron a la memoria a don Quijote el cuento que la había contado su escudero, cuando no acertó el número de las cabras que habían pasade el río, y se quedó la historia pendiente. Pero, volviendo al Roto, prosiguío diciendo . . .” L’Ingénieux Hidalgo Don Quichotte de la Manche, 587; Don Quijote de la Mancha, I, 24, 262; Don Quixote, trans. Lathrop, 175. 9 “Tenga vuestra merced cuenta en las cabras que el pescador va pasando, porque si se pierde una de la memoria, se acabará el cuento, y no será posible contar más palabra de él.” L’Ingénieux Hidalgo Don Quichotte de la Manche, 545; Don Quijote de la Mancha, I, 20, 214; Don Quixote, trans. Lathrop, 140. 10

Y sería bueno, ya que no hay papel, que la escribiésemos, como lo hacían los antiguos, en hojas de árboles o en unas tablitas de cera, aunque tan dificultuoso será hallarse eso ahora como el papel. Mas ya me ha venido a la memoria dónde será bien, y aún más que bien, escribilla, que es el librillo de memoria que fue de Cardenio, y tú tendrás cuidado de hacerla trasladar en papel, de buena letra, en el primer lugar que hallares donde haya maestro de escuela de muchachos o, si no, cualquiera sacristán te la trasladarás; y no se la de a trasladar a ningún escribano, que hacen letra procesada, que no la entenderá Satanás. (L’Ingénieux Hidalgo Don Quichotte de la Manche, 603; Don Quijote de la Mancha, I, 25, 282; Don Quixote, trans. Lathrop, 187–8)

11 Fernando Bouza, Palabra e imagen en la corte: Cultura oral y visual de la nobleza en el Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Abada, 2003), 48–58; Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, Franck Mowery, and Heather Wolfe, “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technology of Writing in Renaissance England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55(4) (2004): 1–41; and Roger Chartier, Inscrire et effacer: Culture écrite et littéraire, XIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2005), 44–50. English translation: Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture and Literature from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 2008), 21–6. 12 “Libro de memoria. El librito que se suele traher en la faltiquera, cuyas hojas están embetunadas y en blanco, y en él se incluye una pluma de metal, en cuya punta se inxiere un pedazo agudo de piedra lápiz, con la qual se annóta en el librito todo aquello que no se quiere fiar a la fragilidad de la memoria: y se borra despues para que vuelvan a servir las hojas.” Diccionario de la lengua castellana: Compuesto por la Real Academia Española 4(1734), 400. 13 Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 178; Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Blamey and Pellauer, 143.

208  Notes to pp. 127–131 14 La mémoire, 173; Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Blamey and Pellauer, 146, 414. 15 La mémoire, 570; Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Blamey and Pellauer, 440. 16 La mémoire, 573; Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Blamey and Pellauer, 442. 17 Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes ou la mémoire,” in Borges, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean-Pierre Bernés, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1933), 1: 510–17; “Funes el memorioso” (1944), in Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (Madrid: Alianza, 1971), 121–36: “Este [Funes], no lo olvidemos, era casi incapaz de ideas generales, platónicas” (134); “Le era muy dificíl dormir. Dormir es distraerse del mundo” (135); quoted here from Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes, His Memory,” in Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998), 131–7, esp. 137. 18 Ibid., 1584–5. 19 “Más recuerdos tengo yo solo que los que habrán tenido todos los hombres desde que el mundo es mundo.” Borges, “Funes el memorioso,” 131; “Funes ou la mémoire,” 510–17; “Funes, His Memory,” trans. Hurley, 135. 20 “Pensar es olvidar diferencias, es generalizar, es abstraer. En el abarrotado mundo de Funes no había sino detalles, casi inmediatos.” Borges, “Funes el memorioso,” 135; “Funes ou la mémoire,” 510–17; “Funes, His Memory,” trans. Hurley, 137. 21 Pedro Mexía, Silva de varia lección (1540), ed. Antonio Castro (Madrid: Cátedra, 1989), vol. 2, pt. 3, chap. 7: “Quán exelente cosa es la memoria. . . . Hombres de grandes memorias.” 22 Sigmund Freud, “Note sur le ‘Bloc magique,’ ” in Freud, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 18, Psychanalyse (1923–1925) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 137–43. The original text, “Notiz über den ‘Wunderblock,’ ” appeared in the journal, Internationale Zeitschrift für (ärztlicher) Psychoanalyse 11(1) (1925): 1–5. For a version in English, see “Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad,’ ”, in Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 19: 227–32. 23 Jacques Derrida, “Freud et la scène de l’écriture,” in Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 293–340. 24 Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 161; Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Blamey and Pellauer, 131. 25 Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 159; Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Blamey and Pellauer, 130. 26 “Llamó a Sancho y le dijo que se la quería leer porque la tomáse de memoria, si acaso se le perdiese por el camino, porque de su desdicha todo se podía temer. A lo cual respondió Sancho: -Escríbala vuestra merced dos o tres veces ahí en el libro, y démele, que yo le llevaré bien guardado; porque pensar que yo la he de tomar en la memoria es dis-

Notes to pp. 131–133  209

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

parate, que la tengo tan mala, que muchas veces se me olvida cómo me llamo. Pero, con todo eso, dígamela vuestra merced, que me holgaré mucho de oílla, que debe ir como de molde.” Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, I, 25, 286; L’Ingénieux Hidalgo Don Quichotte de la Manche, 607; Don Quixote, trans. Lathrop, 190. “Por Dios, señor licenciado, que los diablos lleven la cosa que de la carta se me acuerda, aunque en el principio decía: ‘Alta y sobajada señora.’ -No diría–dijo el barbero–sobajada, sino sobrehumana o soberana señora”: Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, I, 26, 296; L’Ingénieux Hidalgo Don Quichotte de la Manche, 615–16; Don Quixote, trans. Lathrop, 197. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Fernando Bouza, Comunicación, conocimiento y memoria en la España de los siglos XVI y XVII (Salamanca: Publicationes del Seminario de Estudios Medievales y Renascentistas, 1999); trans. Sonia López and Michael Agnew as Communication, Knowledge, and Memory in Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). “No poco gustaron los dos de ver la buena memoria de Sancho Panza, y alabáronsela mucho.” Don Quijote de la Mancha, I, 26, 296; L’Ingénieux Hidalgo Don Quichotte de la Manche, 616; Don Quixote, trans. Lathrop, 197. “Viendo, pues, que, en efecto, no podía menearse, acordó de acogerse a su ordinario remedio, que era pensar en algún paso de sus libros, y trújole a la memoria aquel de Valdovinos y del marqués de Mantua, cuando Carlota le dejó herido en la montiña, historia sabida de los niños, no ignorada de los mozos, celebrada y aun creída de los viejos, y, con todo esto, no más verdadera que los milagros de Mahoma. Ésta, pues, le pareció a él que le venía de molde para el paso en que se hallaba, y así, con muestras de grande sentimiento, se comenzó a volcar por la tierra y a decir con debilitado aliento lo mismo que dicen decía el herido caballero del bosque.” Don Quijote de la Mancha, I, 5, 71; L’Ingénieux Hidalgo Don Quichotte de la Manche, 433; Don Quixote, trans. Lathrop, 41. Jorge Luis Borges, “La memoria de Shakespeare,” in Borges, La memoria de Shakespeare (Madrid: Alianza, 1997), 61–82; in French translation as “La mémoire de Shakespeare,” in Borges, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean-Pierre Bernés, Bibliothèque de la Pléïade (Paris: Gallimard, 1933), 2: 982–90; “Shakespeare’s Memory,” in Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998), 508–15. “Tengo, aún, dos memorias. La mía personal y la de aquel Shakespeare que parcialmente soy. Mejor dicho, dos memorias me tienen” Borges, “La memoria de Shakespeare,” 69; “La mémoire de Shakespeare,” 985; “Shakespeare’s Memory,” trans. Hurley, 510. “Al cabo de unos treinta días, le memoria del muerto me animaba. Durante una semana de curiosa felicidad, casi creí ser Shakespeare. La obra se renovó para mí.” Borges, “La memoria de Shakespeare,” 76–7;

210  Notes to pp. 133–136 “La mémoire de Shakespeare,” 988; “Shakepeare’s Memory,” trans. Hurley, 513. 34 “En la primera etapa de la aventura sentí la dicha de ser Shakespeare; en la postrera, la opresión y el terror. Al principio las dos memorias no mezclaban suas aguas. Con el tiempo, el gran río de Shakespeare amenazó, y casi anegó, mi modesto caudal. Advertí con temor que estaba olvidando la lengua de mis padres. Ya que la identidad personal se basa en la memoria, temí por mi razón. . . . A medida que transcurren los años, todo hombre está obligado a sobrellevar la creciente carga de su memoria. Dos me abogiaban, confundiéndose a veces: la mía y la del otro, incommunicable.” Borges, “La memoria de Shakespeare,” 79–80; “La mémoire de Shakespeare,” 989; “Shakespeare’s Memory,” trans. Hurley, 514. 35 “Yo había imaginado disciplinas para despertar la antigua memoria; hube de buscar otras para borrarla. Una de tantas fue el estudio de la mitología de William Blake, discípulo rebelde de Swedenborg. Comprobé que era menos compleja que complicada. Ese y otro caminos fueron inútiles; todos me llevaban a Shakespeare.” Borges, “La memoria de Shakespeare,” 82; “La mémoire de Shakespeare,” 990; “Shakespeare’s Memory,” trans. Hurley, 515. 36 “Ya soy un hombre entre los hombres. En la vigilia soy el profesor emérito Hermann Soergel, que manejo un fichero y que redacto trivialidades eruditas, pero en el alba sé, alguna vez, que el que sueña es el otro. De tarde en tarde me sorprenden pequeñas y fugaces memorias que acaso son auténticas.” Borges, “La memoria de Shakespeare,” 82; “La mémoire de Shakespeare,” 990; “Shakespeare’s Memory,” trans. Hurley, 515.

Chapter 9 1 Gérard Genette, Seuils (1978), Points Essais (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987), 8–9; quoted from Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2–3; 13. 2 Genette, Seuils, 19; Paratexts, trans. Lewin, 13. 3 See Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 7–8: “The preliminaries were not included in the main signature series of new books because it was usual to print them last”; Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer, “Fabriquer un livre au XVIe siècle,” in Histoire de l’Édition française, vol. 1, Le livre conquérant: Du Moyen Âge au milieu du XVIIe siècle, ed. Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean Martin (Paris: Fayard/Cercle de la Librairie, 1989), 336–69, esp. 345: “It was usually with the principal text that the fabrication of a new book began, the preliminaries, titles, dedications, preface, and licenses and permissions being composed and printed at the end of the process, along with the final portions: tables, index, and, when necessary, errata.”

Notes to pp. 137–139  211 4 See Fermím de los Reyes Gómez, “Los preliminares en la identificación del libro antiguo,” in Comercio y tasación del libro antiguo: Análisis, identificación y descripción (Textos y materiales) (Saragossa: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2003), 201–25. 5 For examples of publishers who were the authors of prologues, see Mary Beth Winn, Anthoine Vérard, Parisian Publisher 1485–1512: Prologues, Poems, and Presentations (Geneva: Droz, 1997), 41–69; Aldo Manuzio editore: Dediche, Prefazioni, Note ai testi, Introduction by Carlo Dionisotti, 2 vols (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1975). 6 Pablo Andrés Escapa et al., “El original de imprenta,” in Imprenta y crítica textual en el Siglo de Oro, ed. Francisco Rico (Valladolid: Centro para la Edición de los Clásicos Españoles, 2000), 29–64, esp. 40: “Es frecuente que las dedicatorias o los poemas nuncupatorios que hallamos impresos al comienzo de los libros no figuren en el manuscrito original. Sabemos que estos inicios, junto con los textos legales, se imprimían en último lugar y se relegaban al primer pliego.” 7 For a recent edition and a Spanish translation of this text, see Juan Caramuel, Syntagma de Arte Typographica, trans. and ed., with glossary, by Pablo Andrés Escapa (Salamanca: Instituto de Historia del Libro y de la Lectura, 2004), 134–43, in Italian translation as Il “Syntagma de arte typographica” di Juan Caramuel ed altri testi secenteschi sulla tipografia e l’edizione, ed. Valentino Romano (Rome: Vecchiarelli, 1988). 8 Caramuel, Syntagma de Arte Typographica, 86–89. 9 Genette, Seuils, 8; Paratexts, trans. Lewin, 2. 10 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Edición del Instituto Cervantes, ed. Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Instituto Cervantes/Crítica, 1998), 1–34. 11 Cervantès, L’Ingénieux hidalgo don Quichotte de la Manche, trans. Louis Viardot (1837) (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), 1: 41–8. 12 Cervantès, L’Ingénieux hidalgo don Quichotte de la Manche, trans. Aline Schulman (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 1: 21–39. 13 Cervantès, L’Ingénieux Hidalgo Don Quichotte de la Manche, in Cervantès, Don Quichotte suivi de La Galatée, Oeuvres romanesques, I, ed. Jean Canavaggio, here with Claude Allaigre and Michel Moner (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 387–407. 14 This process is reconstituted by Francisco Rico in “Historia del texto,” in his edition of Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, cxcii–cxcv. See also Francisco Rico, “Don Quijote, Madrid 1604, en prensa,” in El Quijote: Biografía de un libro, 1605–2005 (Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional, 2005), 49–54; Fermín de los Reyes Gómez, “Leer los principios, saber los comienzos: El Quijote nos dice cómo se elaboró,” in La razón de la sinrazón que a la razón se hace (Burgos: Instituto Castellano y Leonés de la Lengua, 2005), 15–25; Víctor Infantes, “Don Quijote entró en la imprenta y se convirtió en libro,” in El Quijote 1605–2005 IV Centenario, ed. Jesús Menéndez Pelayo (Oviedo: KRK Ediciones, 2005), 191–202. After the writing of the essay here translated, Fernando Bouza

212  Notes to pp. 139–144

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17 18 19

20 21

22 23 24 25

discovered in the secretarial archives of Juan Gallo de Andrada Cervantes’s request for a privilege for his book and the approval of the chronicler Antonio de Herrera (which, contrary to custom, was not published in the work itself). See Fernando Bouza and Francisco Rico, “ ‘Digo que yo he compuesto un libro intitulado El ingenioso hidalgo de la mancha,’ ” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 29(1) (2009): 13–30, and, more generally, Fernando Bouza, “Dásele licencia y privilegio.” Don Quijote y la aprobación de libros en el Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Akal, 2012). Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Rico, 7–9; Francisco Rico, “Excurso 3, El primer pliego del ‘Quijote,’ ” in Rico, El texto del “Quijote”: Preliminares a una ecdótica del Siglo de Oro, Biblioteca Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 2006), 401–33. Roger Chartier, Culture écrite et société: L’ordre des livres (XIV–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996), 61–3, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane as “Figures of the Author,” in Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries between the Fourteenth and the Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 44–52. See also Agustin Redondo, “Acerca de la portada de la primera parte del Quijote: Un problema de recepción,” in Silva: Studia philologica in honorem Isaías Lerner, ed. Isabel Lozano-Renieblas and Juan Carlos Mercado (Madrid: Castalia, 2001), 525–34. Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Rico, 605–23. Cervantes, L’Ingénieux hidalgo don Quichotte de la Manche, trans. Schulman, 2: 7–12; Cervantes, L’Ingénieux Hidalgo Don Quichotte de la Manche, ed. Jean Canavaggio, 891–902. Here and below, the English versions of prefatory materials in Part II of Don Quixote are quoted from The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote, trans. Tobias Smollett, introduction and notes by Martin Battestin, text edited by O.  M. Brack, Jr (Athens GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 374, 375, 373, 374. Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Rico, 14; quoted from Don Quixote, trans. Tom Lathrop, consulting editors Annette Grant Cash and Victoria Richardson (Newark, DE: Cervantes & Co, 2005), 5. For a French example of privileges redacted in the form of praises of the author, see Nicolas Schapira, Un professionnel de lettres au XVIIe siècle: Valentin Conrart, Une histoire sociale (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2003), 98–151. Cervantes, The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote, trans. Smollett, 374. Anne Cayuela, Le paratexte au Siècle d’Or: Prose romanesque, livres et lecteurs en Espagne au XVIIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1996), 209–11. Michel Moner, Cervantès conteur: Écrits et paroles (Madrid: Casa de Valazquez, 1989), 37–38; Elias L. Rivers, “On the Prefatory Pages of Don Quixote Part II,” MLN (1960): 243–8. Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, El Ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Fernando García Salinero (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia,

Notes to pp. 144–155  213

26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

1971), trans. Alberta Wilson Server and John Esten Keller as Don Quixote de La Mancha (Part II): Being the Spurious Continuation of Miguel de Cervantes’ Part I (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 1980). Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Rico, 591; quoted from Don Quixote, trans. Lathrop, 411. This hypothesis is supported by Francisco Rico in his Visita de imprentas: Páginas y noticias de Cerantes viejo, Discurso pronunciado por Francisco Rico el 10 de mayo de 1996 en ocasión de su investidura como doctor honoris causa por la Universidad de Valladolid (Valladolid: En la casa del lago, 1996), 48–9. Avellaneda, El Ingenioso hidalgo, ed. Salinero, 195–201. Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Lathrop, 424. Ibid., 423, 421, 424. Ibid., 426. On Lerma, see Antonio Feros, El Duque de Lerma: Realeza y privanza en la España de Felipe III (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2002). Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Lathrop, 425. See Maria Gioia Tavoni, “Avant Genette fra trattati e ‘curiosità,’ ” in Sulle tracce del paratesto, ed. Antonio Biancastella, Marco Santoro, and Maria Gioia Tavoni (Bologna: Bononoia University Press, 2004), 11–18. Cayuela, Le paratexte au Siècle d’Or, 209. Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 7–16; trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky as Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).

Chapter 10 1 Francisco Rico, El texto del “Quijote”: Preliminares a una ecdótica del Siglo de Oro, Biblioteca Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 2006). See also Francisco Rico, Quijotismos (Aldea Mayor de san Martín: Pápeles de la Biblioteca Municipal, 2005) y Tiempos del Quijote (Barcelona: Acantilado, 2012). 2 Chapter headings are quoted from Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Tom Lathrop, consulting editors Annette Grant Cash and Victoria Richardson (Newark, DE: Cervantes & Co.: 2005), 69, 290, 254. 3 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Edición del Instituto Cervantes, ed. Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Instituto Cervantes/Crítica, 1998); Don Quixote, trans. Lathrop, 194. 4 Cervantes. Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Rico, n. 12, p. 292. 5 Francisco Rico, El texto del “Quijote”, 50. 6 Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Rico. 7 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Edición del Instituto Cervantes 1605–2005, ed. Francisco Rico and Joaquín Forradellas

214  Notes to pp. 156–158

8

9

10

11

12

(Madrid: Galaxia Gutenburg, Círculo de los Lectores, Centro para la Edición de los Clásicos Españoles, 2004). For a magisterial example of this procedure, see Jean Bollack, L’Oedipe roi de Sophocle: Le texte et ses interprétations, 4 vols (Villeneuved’Ascq: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1990), vol. 1, Introduction: Texte. Traduction, xi–xxi, 1–178. R. B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927); Fredson Bowers, Bibliography and Textual Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); Bowers, Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975). See also the twenty-one essays brought together under the title, “Anglo-American Scholarly Edition, 1980–2005,” Ecdotica 6 (2009). For examples of this approach, see Margreta De Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44(3) (1992): 255–83; Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlow, Milton (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Stephen Orgel, “What Is a Text?” in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 83–7. Among the works Francisco Rico has edited are: Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache (Madrid: Planeta, 1983); Lazarillo de Tormes (Madrid: Cátedra, 1987); Lope de Vega, El Caballero de Olmedo (Madrid: Cátedra, 1992). He also participated in the edition of La Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea by Fernando de Rojas (y “Antiguo Autor”) (Barcelona: Crítica, 2000). The reader will find published in the six excursos placed at the end of the book the various milestones of Francisco Rico’s erudite and innovative work on Don Quixote, including his studies of the typographic composition of the first edition in the print shop of Juan de la Cuesta and that of the Obras of Ludovico Blosio; on the first signature of the preliminary matter (with the dedication to the Duke of Béjar erroneously attributed to Cervantes); on the variations of the title of the work and the variants readings in its text, beginning with the dual reading of the princeps concerning the true name of the hidalgo, given as Quexana or Quixana.

Chapter 11 1 William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). See also Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 509–42; The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of

Notes to pp. 158–161  215

2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13

“King Lear”, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); William Shakespeare, The Complete King Lear 1608–1623, Texts and Parallel Texts in Photographic Facsimile, prepared by Michael Warren (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). The Three-Text Hamlet: Parallel Texts of the First and Second Quartos and First Folio, ed. Paul Bertram and Berenice W. Kliman (New York: AMS Press, 1991, new ed. 2003). See the series of first quarto titles published in the New Cambridge Shakespeare series (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press). For an exemplary demonstration regarding the three versions of Hamlet, see Leah S. Marcus, “Bad Taste and Bad Hamlet,” in Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 132–76, and Leah Marcus, “Qui a peur du grand méchant in-4°?” in Du spectateur au lecteur: Imprimer la scène aux XVIe et XVIIIe siècles, ed. Larry F. Norman, Philippe Desan, and Richard Strier (Fasano: Schena Editore; Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2002), 183–202. See the pioneering article of Margreta De Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44(3) (1992): 255–83. David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Ibid., 117. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, The Panizzi Lectures, 1985 (London: The British Library, 1986), 20. New edition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See the reviews of D. F. McKenzie’s “Panizzi Lectures” by Hugh Amory in The Book Collector 36 (1987): 411–18; T. N. Howard-Hill in The Library, 6th series, 10 (1984): 151–8; and G. Thomas Tanselle, “Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology,” Studies in Bibliography 42 (1991): 83–143. Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 11. Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, 4. Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Was the 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets Really Unauthorized?” Review of English Studies 34 (1983): 151–71. Out of an immense bibliography, see in particular Paul Werstine, “Narrative about Printed Shakespearean Texts: ‘Foul Papers’ and ‘Bad’ Quartos,” Shakespeare Quarterly (1999): 65–86; Laurie E. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The “Bad” Quartos and their Contexts (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Adele Davidson, “ ‘Some by Stenography’? Stationers, Shorthand, and the Early Shakespearean Quartos,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (1996): 417–49; Adele Davidson, “King Lear in an Age of Stenographic Publication,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (1998):

216  Notes to pp. 161–166

14 15

16 17 18 19 20

21

22 23 24 25

26

27

297–324. Recently, the idea that Shakespeare was indifferent about the print publication of his plays has been questioned by Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). John Webster, The White Divel, Or, The Tragedy of Paulo Giordano Ursini, Duke of Brachiano, Acted by the Queens Maiesties Servants. Written by JOHN WEBSTER, London, Printed by N. O. for Thomas Archer, 1612. See also John Webster, Three Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 33–166, esp. “To the Reader,” 37–8. Webster, “To the Reader” quoted here and below from Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House, 48, 15, 49. Ibid., 43–4. Ibid., 43, 64, 191. Philip Henslowe, Diary, ed. R.  A. Foakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Alfred Harbage, The Annals of the English Drama 975–1700: An Analytical Record of All Plays, Extant or Lost, Chronologically Arranged and Indexed, rev. Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). See also Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House, 176–8. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House. The table drawn up by Brooks indicates that unattributed plays represented 42 per cent of production in the decade 1580–1589, and 46 per cent in the decade 1590–1599: 176. Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury, ed. Arthur Freeman (New York: Garland, 1973), 282. Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, 48. Ibid., 23. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House, 172: “Of the some 1,200 listed [in The Annals of the English Drama], only forty percent – 469 complete plays out of 961 complete editions – are extant, and nearly ten percent of these extant plays survive only in manuscript.” Peter W. M. Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 383–422, esp. 387. Peter Blayney’s conclusions are disputed by Zachary Lesser and Alan B. Farmer, “The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2005), 1–32. See also Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press; New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989); Michael Dobson, The Making of the

Notes to pp. 166–169  217

28 29

30 31

32 33 34

35 36

37

National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). In 1620 Edward Blount published the translation of Part II of Don Quixote, which had been published in Madrid five years earlier. Charlton Hinman, The Printing and Proof-reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); Peter Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare (Washington: The Folger Library, 1991; Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). John Heminge and Henrie Condell, “To the great Variety of Readers,” in Mr. William Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (London, 1623), A3. See the brilliant and suggestive essay of Jeffrey Masten, “Pressing Subjects, or the Secret Lives of Shakespeare’s Compositors,” in Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, ed. Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy Vickers (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 75–107. See, for example, the first page of gathering L of the Folio edition, which bears the last page of Much Ado About Nothing, in Wells et al., William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, 44–5. Stephen Orgel, “The Authentic Shakespeare,” Representations 21 (1988): 1–25, and The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (New York: Routledge, 2002). Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, 93. See also Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Lewis Theobald, Shakespeare Restored (London, 1726). William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark (London, 1676). On this edition, see Hazleton Spencer, Shakespeare Improved: The Restoration Versions in Quarto on the Stage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927); Mongi Raddadi, Davenant’s Adaptations of Shakespeare (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Uppsalensis, 1979); and Roger Chartier, Publishing Drama in Early Modern Europe, The Panizzi Lectures, 1998 (London: The British Library, 1999), 62–8. A revision of this study of a copy from the 1676 edition used as a prompt-book and an acting copy during the 1740s appears below as Chapter 12. See G.  K. Hunter, “The Marking of Sententiae in Elizabethan Printed Plays, Poems and Romances,” The Library, 5th series, 6, nos. 3–4 (December 1951): 171–88; Francis Goyet, Le sublime du “lieu commun”: L’invention rhétorique dans l’Antiquité et à la Renaissance (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1996), 605–9 (for the first editions of the plays of Robert Garnier); Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008): 371–420.

218  Notes to pp. 169–173 38 John A. Hart, “Pope as Scholar-Editor,” Studies in Bibliography (1970): 45–59. 39 Peter Seary, Lewis Theobald and the Edition of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 40 Joanna Gonderis, “ ‘All This Farrago’: The Eighteenth-Century Shakespeare Variorum Page as a Critical Structure,” in Reading Readings: Essays on Shakespeare Editing in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joanna Gonderis (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses; Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 123–39. 41 Margreta De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. 48–93. 42 Katherine West Schell, “ ‘Rouz’d by a Woman’s Pen’: The Shakespeare Ladies’ Club and Reading Habits of Early Modern Women,” Critical Survey (2000): 106–27. 43 Dobson, The Making of the National Poet, 129–30. 44 Rowe, Pope, and Theobald are quoted from Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, 98, 99, and 102. 45 For contrasting views regarding the electronic editing of literary texts, see The Literary Text in the Digital Age, ed. Richard J. Finneran (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Peter S. Donaldson, “Digital Archive as Expanded Text and Electronic Textuality,” in Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 173–97; José Manuel Blecua, Gloria Clavería, Carlos Sanchez, and Joan Torruella, Filología e Informática: Nuevas tecnologías en los estudios filológicos (Bellaterra: Editorial Millenio y Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, 1999); Gary Taylor, “c:\wp\file.text 05:41 10-07-98,” in The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, ed. Andrew Murphy (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 44–54.

Chapter 12 1 The/ Tragedy/of/Hamlet/Prince of Denmark./As it is now Acted at his Highness the/Duke of York’s Theatre/By/William Shakespeare./London/ Printed by Andr. Clark, for J. Martyn, and H. Herringman,/at the Bell in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, and at the Blue/Anchor in the Lower Walk of the New Exchange, 1676 (Garret PO 2807. A2 1676). 2 Samuel Pepys, Passages from the Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed., with a preface by Richard Le Gallienne (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 52; August 24 1661: “To the Opera, and there saw ‘Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,’ done with scenes very well, but above all, Betterton did the prince’s part beyond imagination.” 3 Hazelton Spencer, “Hamlet under the Restoration,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 38 (1923): 770–91; Spencer, Shakespeare Improved: The Restoration Versions in Quarto and on the Stage

Notes to pp. 173–176  219

4

5 6 7 8 9 10

11

12

13 14

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 62–110, esp. pp. 66–70. See also Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, from the Restoration to the Present (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 7–51, esp. 46–51; Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 17–61. The Tragedy of Hamlet/Prince of Denmark/Newly imprinted and inlarged/according to the true and perfect Copy last Printed/By William Shakespeare/London/Printed by R. Young for John Smethwicke/and are to be sold at his Shope in Saint Dunstons Churchyard in Fleet-Street Under the Diall/1637. Quoted in Mongi Raddadi, Davenant’s Adaptations of Shakespeare (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1979), 67. Spencer, Shakespeare Improved, 174–87; Raddadi, Davenant’s Adap­ tations of Shakespeare, “The Language,” 49–63. Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 166–9. Raddadi, Davenant’s Adaptations of Shakespeare, “Cutting: Hamlet,” 64–78. See Francis Goyet, Le sublime du “lieu commun”: L’invention rhétorique dans l’antiquité et à la Renaissance (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1996), 605–9. G. K. Hunter, “The Marking of Sententiae in Elizabethan Printed Plays, Poems, and Romances,” The Library, 5th series, 6, nos. 3–4 (December 1951): 171–88; Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 59(4) (2008): 371–420. Margreta De Grazia, “Shakespeare in Quotation Marks,” in The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth, ed. Jean I. Marsden (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991), 57–71. See Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); and two articles by Paul Werstine, “The Textual Mystery of Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39(1) (Spring 1988): 1–26; and “Narrative About Printed Shakespeare Texts: ‘Foul Papers’ and ‘Bad’ Quartos,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41(1) (Spring 1990): 65–86. James McManaway, “The Two Earliest Prompt Books of Hamlet,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 43 (1949): 288–320. For the introduction in England of scene divisions in the printed editions of plays, see D.  F. McKenzie, “When Congreve Made a Scene,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, vol. 6, pt. 2 (1979): 338–42; McKenzie, “Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve,” Buch und Buchhandel in Europa im achtzehten Jahrhundert, ed. Giles Barber and Bernhard Dabian (Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1981), 812–26.

220  Notes to pp. 176–179 15 McManaway, “The Two Earliest Prompt Books,” 317. 16 On the editions of the early eighteenth century, see Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, 52–99; Dobson, The Making of the National Poet, 117–33; and Margreta De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York, Oxford University Press, 1991). 17 I have compared the text of the 1676 edition corrected by John Ward with that of the 1637 quarto and the Folio editions of 1623 and 1664 in the copies in the Lilly Library of Indiana University in Bloomington. See Ann Thompson, “ ‘I’ll have grounds/More relative than this’: The Puzzle of John Ward’s Hamlet Promptbooks,” The Yearbook of English Studies 29 (1999): 138–50. 18 On the punctuation of plays, see the pioneering studies of Percy Simpson, Shakespearian Punctuation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), which poses the question, “Is it possible to attach a significance to the commas?,” 8; and Raymond McDonald Alden, “The Punctuation of Shakespeare’s Printers,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 39 (1924): 557–80. See also Anthony Graham-White (a former actor), Punctuation and Its Dramatic Value in Shakespearean Drama (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press; Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, London: Associated University Press, 1995). 19 An example of oral punctuation indicated in a print publication can also be seen in the early editions of Racine’s plays: see Jean Racine, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Georges Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de La Pléïade, 1999), vol. 1, Théâtre-Poésie. For a parallel case, see also Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères, ed. Louis van Delft (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1998), see here chapter 6. 20 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 10–11. 21 This essential perspective is developed by D. F. McKenzie in the three lectures that make up his Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, The Panizzi Lectures 1985 (London: British Library) 1986; Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See also Margreta De Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44, no. 3 (1992): 255–83; Jeffrey Masten, “Pressing Subjects or, the Secret Lives of Shakespeare Compositors,” in Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, ed. Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy Vickers (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 75–105.

Index

Alemán, Mateo, 104 Alleyn, Edward, 96 Amadis de Gaule (chivalric romance), 101, 103 analysis principles, 22–4 anamnésis, 124, 133 Anne of Austria, 115–16 anomalies, 53 Ariès, Philippe, 32 Ariosto, Ludovico, 109 Aspley, William, 166 Aub, Max, 37 Audiguier, Pierre d’, 104 Audiguier, Vital d’, 99, 104–5 Auerbach, Erich, 15 Augustine, St., 130 authors: constitution of the oeuvre, 83–4; definition, 12–14; digital textuality’s effect on concept, 72; individualization’s emergence, vii–viii, 64, 79–82; literary biographies’ rise, 85–6; proving authorship before existence of literary property concept, 13–14; and punctuation, 88–91, 93–6; relationship with their books, 17–19, 150–7, 167–8, 179–80; see also intellectual property

L’Aventurier Nocturne (picaresque novel), 105 Ayala, Gonzalo de, 18 Aymard, Maurice, 55 Barberino, Francesco da, 77 Barthes, Roland, 19, 36 Beaumont, Francis, 64–5, 162 Beckett, Samuel, 73 Bel-vedere, or, The Garden of the Muses (commonplace book), 13 Bénichou, Paul, viii Benzoni, Girolamo, 115 Bergson, Henri, 124 Bernès, Jean-Pierre, 84 Berr, Henri, 47, 48, 50 Betteron, Thomas, 172 Biagoli, Mario, 32 Biasi, Pierre-Marc de, 74 Bible, 20–1, 67 bibliographical references, 41 biographies, literary, 85–6 Blackstone, William, 12, 80 Blake, William, 133 Blayney, Peter, 165 Bloch, Marc, vii, 38, 47, 48 Blosio, Ludovico, 214 Blount, Edward, 25, 166

222  Index Boccaccio, Giovanni, 109 Bodley, Sir Thomas, 64 Bonnefoy, Yves, 87 The Booke of Sir Thomas More, 76, 78 books: codices, viii, 5–6, 69; definitions, 11–12; digital textuality’s effects, x–xi, 5–7, 70–2; history of the book’s foundation as discipline, 3–5; manuscript books, 60–3, 64; materiality, ix–x, 4, 158–71; power of, 20–2, 67–8; preliminary matter, ix, 64, 135–49; relationship between author’s MS and printed book, 17–19, 150–7, 167–8, 179–80; relationships established by preliminary matter, 138; as a revolution in own right, 69; see also printing; texts Borges, Jorge Luis: apocryphal texts, 37; establishing his oeuvre, 84; “Funes el memorioso,” 128–9; on introductory matter, 64; on nature of literature, 14–15; on power of written word, 21; on relationship between reading styles and meaning, 20; “Shakespeare’s Memory,” 132–4; on universal libraries, 6, 7 Boswell, James, 85 Bourdieu, Pierre, 24, 26, 31, 51 Bouza, Fernando, 211–12 Bowers, Fredson, 159 Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de, 74–5 Braudel, Fernand: Les Ambitions de l’Histoire, 45–9; Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, 45, 48–9; collected edition, 44–5; continuing relevance, 44; on Golden Age Spain, x; on historians’ responsibilities, 7; and history as discourse and/or knowledge,

54–5; on history’s various levels, 50; “La longue durée,” 49, 52; La Méditerranée: L’espace et l’histoire, 54–5; La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranean, 45; and Michelet, 24; and microhistory, 52–4; most important works, 44–5; prison lectures, 47–8; on relationship between social science and history, 46–9 Brooks, Douglas, 161, 162, 165 Bry, Theodor de, 114, 115 Bullokar, William, 88 Burby, Cuthbert, 164 Butter, Nathaniel, 158, 164 Cabrera, Melchor de, 11, 18, 92 Cade’s rebellion (1450), 35–6 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 75 Canavaggio, Jean, 139, 140 capital letters, 90, 91 Caramuel Lobkowitz, Juan, 137–8, 189 casting off, 18–19, 92 Catach, Nina, 88 Cayuela, Anne, 143, 148 La Celestina (Tragicomedia de Calisto y Mélibea), 19 censors: and Don Quixote, 140–3; influence on works, ix; and preliminary matter, 138, 139, 140; and Shakespeare’s history plays, 35; and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dramatic works, 78, 79; Spanish Golden Age, 137, 140–1 Certeau, Michel de, 27, 29, 30–1, 32, 34, 37 Cervantes, Miguel de: Galatea, 143, 146–7; Novelas ejemplares, 62, 99, 104–5, 109, 143, 148; Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos, 143; Persiles, 99, 108–9, 118–19, 129, 143, 146, 147–8; Viaje del Parnasso, 143

Index  223 DON QUIXOTE: 1605 and 1608 editions, 18, 153–4; absence of autograph MS, ix; Aub’s references to, 37; author’s corrections, 152–5; Avellaneda’s sequel, 13, 144–8; Buscón’s references to, 107; censors, 140–3; contemporary writing practices, 8; dedications, 138, 139, 146, 147; early circulation, 98–9; as expression of Spain’s decline, 98; fragility of written word in, 16–17; Mayans y Síscar’s edition, 13; memory and forgetting themes, 124–6, 127, 129, 130–2; Part II, 144, 146–8, 155; plays inspired by, 25; preliminary matter, 138–49; princeps edition, 151–3; printshop scene, 17–18, 61–2, 100–1; reception in France, 142–3; reconstructing Cervantes’s text, 155–7; relationship between author’s MS and printed book, 150–7; Sancho’s donkey, 153–4, 155; setting, 118; Sierra Morena chapters, x, 16–17; Sorel on, 105; sources, 129; statements of approval, 141–4; textual appropriations, 25–6; title, 139–40, 155; title page, 139–40; translations, 25, 99–100, 138, 166; use of history of literary genres, 24 Chamberlain’s Men acting company, 162 Chapelain, Jean, 104, 105, 106, 111 Chapman, George, 162, 174 Chappuys, Gabriel, 104 Chauveton, Urbain, 115 Chettle, Henry, 76 Chioggia, 53 chivalric romances, 101–2, 103 Chrysostom, St John, 91–2

codices, viii, 5–6, 69; see also books Colet, Louise, 82 colons, 89 commas, 89 compositors: accuracy, 155; composition by “formes,” 18–19, 151; influence on works, ix; necessary skills, 18; and punctuation, 91, 92; role, 151; version of text used by, 78, 79, 150–1; see also printing Condell, Henry, 81, 166, 167 Contreras, Pedro de, 141 copy-editors see correctors copyists, ix copyright see intellectual property Corelli, Filippo, 55 Cormellas, Sebastián de, 144 Corneille, Pierre, 103, 109–13, 117 correctors: accuracy, 154–5; influence on works, ix; necessary skills, 18; and punctuation, 92–4; role, 79, 151 Courbé, Augustin, 111 Crane, Ralph, 78 Cuesta, Juan de la, 99, 139, 140, 150, 154, 214 culture: definition, 11 Curtius, Georg, 11 Cyrus the Great, Persian emperor, 129 Damilaville (friend of Diderot), 68 Dante Alighieri, 109 Darnton, Robert, 41 Daston, Lorraine, 32 Davenant, William, 168, 169, 172–4, 176–7, 180 Dekker, Thomas, 76, 162, 163 Delavault, Hélène, 41 Delumeau, John, 9 dependencies, 23 Derrida, Jacques, 127, 129

224  Index Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (Marbach Archive of German Literature), 73, 86 Diderot, Denis, 12, 68, 74, 80 differences, 23 digital textuality: and critical editions, 155; and editing texts, 170–1; effects on study of history, xi, 40–2; effects on texts, x–xi, 5–7, 70–2, 170–1; and falsification, 21–2 Dobson, Michael, 166, 170 Dolet, Étienne, 22, 89 dramatic works see plays Dryden, John, 168 editors and editing: critical v. reading editions, 155–7; role, 155; Shakespeare, 169–71; see also correctors Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 59 electronic textuality see digital textuality Elias, Norbert, 10 Elisabeth of Bourbon, 115–16, 142 Elizabeth I, Queen of England and Ireland, 81 emphasis, in texts, 89–91 energy, 35 Enfield, William, 79 England: spelling reformers, 88; theatre in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 172–80 England’s Parnassus (commonplace book), 13 epitext, 135 Erne, Lukas, 216 Escapa, Pablo Andrés, 211 Euripides, 162 events, 45–6, 50–1, 52 exclamation marks, 90; inverted, 96–7 fables, 36, 38 Fabriano, Roseo da, 102 facsimiles, 152

Febvre, Lucien: L’apparition du livre, 3, 69; and Braudel, 46, 47, 48; and École Pratique des Hautes Études, 53; on historians’ responsibilities, 7; on history’s dependence on texts, 9; and Martin, 3; and Michelet, 24 Fernández de Avellaneda, Alonso, 136, 144–8 Fforde, Jasper, 26 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 12, 80 fiction: establishing authenticity, 66; narrative structures shared with history, 123–4; physiological effects of reading, 67–8; and study of history, 8, 28, 34–8 Field, Richard, 160 first editions, 152 Flaubert, Gustave, 82 Fletcher, John, 25, 64–5, 99, 162 Florio, John, 25, 166 footnotes, 41 Forestier, George, 90 forgetting, 124–9, 133–4; reserved forgetting, 127–9 formes, 18–19, 151 Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth, 83–4 Foucault, Michel: on authorship, 6, 12, 13, 83; on events, 50–1; on representation, 23; on speech, 72 La Fouyne de Seville (picaresque novel), 105 France: academic monographs, 42; Don Quixote’s reception, 142–3; knowledge of Spanish language, 108–9; relations with Spain, 115–16; spelling reformers, 88–9; subversive songs in eighteenth-century Paris cafés, 41 Franklin, Benjamin, 97 Freud, Sigmund, 125, 129 full stops, 89

Index  225 funeral rites, 39 Furetière, Antoine, 8, 36, 89, 94 Gallo de Andrada, Juan, 212 García, Carlos, 104, 115–16 García Cárcel, Ricardo, 115 Garnier, Robert, 174 Gaskell, Philip, 96, 210 Gautier, Émile-Félix, 47 genetic criticism, 74 Genette, Gérard, 64, 135, 136 Gérard, Jean, 89 Germany: book piracy, 80 Giglio, Geronimo, 102 Ginzburg, Carlo, 28, 29, 30, 39, 52, 53 Girbal (Diderot’s scribe), 74 Giunta printing firm, 174 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 82 Gondomar, Conde de, 78 Gouberville, Sire de, 103 Grazia, Margreta de, 85–6 Greene, Robert, 96 Greg, Walter, 159 Gruget, Claude, 102 Guarini, Battista, 100 Guérin de Bouscal, Guyon, 25 Guevara, Fray Antonio de, 102 Guillén de Castro, 25, 110, 111 Gurvitch, Georges, 47 Gutierre de Cetina, Doctor, 140, 141 Guzman de Alfarache (picaresque novel), 104, 105, 106 Halbwachs, Maurice, 47, 130 Hart, John, 88 Hartwell, Abraham, 199 Hauser, Henri, 46–7 Heidegger, Martin, 127 Heliodorus, 118, 148 Heminges, John, 81, 166, 167, 168 Henry II (forged Shakespeare play), 81 Henslowe, Philip, 163 Herberay, Nicholas de, 101–2, 103 Herrera, Antonio de, 212

Herrera, Francisco de, 139 Herringman (publisher), 180 Heywood, Thomas, 76, 162–3 history, discipline of: comparative history, 39–40; dependence on written word, vi–vii, 7–9; digital textuality’s effects, xi, 40–2; as discourse and/or knowledge, 27–30, 54–5; fiction’s role, 8, 28, 34–8; Furetière’s definition, 8; global history, 38–40; the historian’s task, 7–9, 43; historical temporalities, 49–54; memory’s role, vi–vii, 8, 33–4, 124; microhistory, 51–4; narrative structures shared with fiction, 123–4; oral history, vi; social milieu’s effect on historians, 30–3; and social science, 44–55 Homer, 162 Horace, 162 Hornschuch, Hieronymus, 93–4 Husserl, Edmund, 130 identity construction: effect on history, 37–8 individuality: emergence of concept of individual authors, vii–viii, 64, 79–82; singular tense as an illusion, 26 Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), 73 intellectual property: and authenticity of the text, 66; copyright duration in eighteenth century, 79; development and effects, 12; and digital textuality, 6, 72; emergence of concept, 79–82; proving authorship before existence of concept, 13–14; role of Stationers’ Company, 161 International Congress of Historical Sciences, Sixth (Oslo), 38

226  Index International Congress of Historical Sciences, Nineteenth (Oslo, 2000), 38 inverted punctuation marks, 96–7 Ireland, William-Henry, 81 Italian Trecento, 76–7 italics, 90 Jaggard, Isaac, 166 Jaggard, William, 164, 166 Janot, Denis, 101–2 Jáuregui, Juan de, 100 Johns, Adrian, 65 Johns Hopkins University: John Work Garrett Library, 172, 175 Johnson, Samuel, 169 Jonson, Ben, 64, 78, 162, 166, 174 Joyce, James, 82 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 11 Kastan, David Scott, 159, 160, 163, 165, 166, 168, 171 Kemble, Roger, 175 Killigrew, Sir Thomas, 172–3 King’s Men acting company, 25, 99, 162 Kodama, Maria, 84 Koselleck, Reinhart, 29 La Bruyère, Jean de, 91 La Mothe Le Vayer, François de, 116 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de, 74 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, 9 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 113–15 Lavagnino, John, 84 Lazarilla de Tormes see La Vida de Lazarilla de Tormes Lemos, count of, 146, 147 la leyenda negra, 113–15 librillos de memoria, 16–17, 126–7 literary archives: autograph MSS before eighteenth century, 74–9; function, 73–4; influence on oeuvre and biography, 83–6; reasons for rise, 79–82

literary property see intellectual property literature: modern definition, vi; national literature collections, 64–5; relationship with the written word, 14–17; see also fiction; writing Locke, John, 130 Longis, Jean, 101–2 López de Ubeda, Francisco: La picara Justina, 104, 105 Louis XIII, king of France, 115–16 Love, Harold, 78 Low Countries, 113–15 Luna, Juan de, 104 magic blocks, 129 magic books, 21, 67 Magnus, Olaus, 118 Mahaffey, Vicki, 82 Mairet, Jean, 109–10 Malone, Edmond, 81–2, 85, 169, 170 Malpaghini, Giovanni, 77 manuscript books: in the age of printing, 60–3; and miscellanies, 64 manuscript writings, and printing, 68 manuscripts, autograph: before eighteenth century, 74–9; fair copies treated as, 82; reasons for preserving from eighteenth century onwards, 79–82; as scribal copies, 77 Marbach Archive of German Literature see Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach Marcos de Obregón see Relaciones de la vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón Marcus, Leah S., 215 Mariana, Juan de, 109, 111 Marin, Louis, 23, 31 Marlowe, Christopher, 87 Márquez Torres (licenciado), 140, 142–3

Index  227 Marston, John, 174 Marti, Juan, 104 Martin, Henri-Jean, 3–4, 69 Martyn (publisher), 180 Mary, Queen of Scots, 114 McGann, Jerome J., 160 McKenzie, Don, 4, 59–60, 159, 160, 190, 219, 220 McKerrow, R. B., 159 McManaway, James, 175–6 meaning: and punctuation, 96; readers’ role in establishing, 19–20, 22–3; and typographical elements, 22, 190 Medina, Francisco de, 139 memory: as distinct from recollection, 124–6, 133; librillos de memoria, 16–17, 126–7; modern fear of loss, 24–5; personal and collective, 129–32; and study of history, vi–vii, 8, 33–4, 124; and writing, 126–7 Meres, Francis, 164 Mesmes, Henri de, 109 Messie, Pierre, 103 Metrodorus, 129 Mexía, Pedro, 102, 118, 128, 129 Michelet, Jules, 24, 29, 48 Middleton, Thomas, 76, 77–8, 84–5 Miggrode, Jacques de, 113–14, 115 Mithridates Eupator, 129 mnémé, 124, 133 Molière, 22, 94–5 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 5, 25, 75, 166 Montinari, Mazzino, 83–4 Moseley, Humphrey, 25, 64–5, 99 Moxon, Joseph, 90, 92 Munday, Anthony, 76 national literature, 64–5 Naudé, Gabriel, 109 Nebrija, Antonio de, 17, 88

neo-Platonism, 171 Netherlands see Low Countries Nietzsche, Friedrich, 83–4 Norton, Thomas, 161 notarial minutes, 77 oral history, vi orality, nostalgia for, 22 originales, 78, 79, 150–1 Oudin, César, 99 Paredes, Alonso Víctor de, 11–12, 18, 61, 92, 99 paratext, 135 Parkes, Malcolm, 91, 96 Pascal, Blaise, 75 The Passionate Pilgrim (anthology), 164 Pepys, Samuel, 172 periods see full stops peritext, 135 Petrarch, Francesco Petrarca, 76–7, 109 Petrucci, Armando, 4, 14, 69, 76, 77 Philip, Spanish Infante, 115–16, 142 picaresque novels, 103–5; see also Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote Pichou (playwright), 25 Plato, 127 plays: authenticity of printed editions, 66–7; collaborative work, 163; percentage of plays performed that were printed, 165; performance of Shakespeare through the ages, 172–80; print publication of Shakespeare’s, 160–1, 163–5; Restoration conventions compared to Elizabethan, 173–5; Restoration reopening of theatres, 172–3; scene divisions, 176; scribal copies for censors, 78; title pages, 164–5; typographical devices

228  Index indicating lines to be omitted or retained, 174; value of reading text v. theatrical spectacle, 161–2, 163 Pliny the Elder, 128–9 poetry, and notarial minutes, 77 Pope, Alexander, 169, 170, 177 Pré, Galliot du, 102 Prince’s Men acting company, 162 printing: arrangement of text for, 18–19, 151; the authority of printed texts, 65–7; author’s corrections, 152–5; and beginning of collected works notion, 64, 69; invention of and its effects, viii, 5, 59–69; and national literature notion, 64–5; non-book printed items, 68; order of printing, 136–7; print publication of Shakespeare’s works, 160–1, 163–5; printers and punctuation, 89, 91–4; printers’ control over preliminary matter, 137–8; process in Spanish Golden Age, 17–18, 78–9, 150–5; relationship between author’s MS and printed book, 17–19, 150–7, 167–8, 179–80; seventeenth-century process, 150–5; Shakespeare’s First Folio, 167–8; Spanish Golden Age prejudice against printers, 11, 17–18, 61–3; typical seventeenth-century print runs, 61, 99; typographical devices indicating play lines to be omitted or retained, 174; see also compositors pronunciation, 88–9 proofreaders see correctors public sphere: writing’s role in emergence, 10 punctuation, 22, 87, 89–97, 178–9 punctuation poems, 95

question marks, 90, 97; inverted, 96–7 Quevedo y Villegas, Francisco Gómez de: Historia de la vida del Buscón, 104, 105–6, 106–8; on past poets, vi, 3; El sueño del inferno, 21, 63; Visions, 105 Quilici, Falco, 55 Quinn, John, 82 quotations, 41 Racine, Jean, 90, 220 reading: digital texts, 5–7, 70–2; history of, 5; influence of form of text on, 5–6; lag between technological innovation and change in reading habits, 42; physiological effects, 67–8; role in establishment of meaning, 19–20, 22–3 reality effects, 36, 37 referential illusions, 36 Relaciones de la vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón (picaresque novel), 104, 105 religion: Protestant v. Catholic wars, 114–15; writing’s role in religious experience, 10 representation concept, 23, 33–4 Revel, Jacques, 53–4 Richardson, Samuel, 68 Richelieu, Cardinal, 109, 110 Rico, Francisco, 19, 24, 150, 151, 152–7, 213, 214 Ricoeur, Paul: on events, 50; on memory and forgetting, x, 8, 33–4, 124–6, 127–32; and study of history, 33–4, 123–4 Roberto, Felipe, 144 Robles, Francisco de, 99, 139, 140, 152 Roche, Daniel, 9, 24 Rojas, Fernando de, 19 Ronsard, Pierre de, 22, 88–9, 90 Rosenbach, Dr, 82 Rosset, François de, 104–5

Index  229 Roupnel, Gaston, 47 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 74, 82 Rowe, Nicholas, 13, 85, 169, 170, 177 Sackville, Thomas, 161 Sade, Marquis de, 74 Saint-Pierre, Jacques Henri Bernardin de, 74 Sandoval y Rojas, Cardinal don Bernardo, 140, 142, 143, 146 Sansovino, Francesco, 102 Scarron, Paul, 104, 105–6, 106–8 Schaffer, Simon, 32 Schaub, Jean-Frédéric, 116 Schulman, Aline, 138–9, 140 Schwob, Marcel, 37 science, history of, 32 scribes, 77–8 Scudéry, Georges de, 110–11, 112 semicolons, 89 Seneca, 174 sentences, 89 Sertenas, Vincent, 101–2 Shakespeare, William: acting companies associated with, 162–3; anachronisms in, 35–6; autograph MSS, ix; biographies, 85–6; and The Booke of Sir Thomas More, 76; canonization process, 166–70; and Cervantes, 99; collaborative works, 85, 163, 166–7; contemporary writing practices, 8; early circulation of his texts, 13; establishing authoritative texts, 84, 158–71; First Folio, 64, 81, 166–7, 170; forged autograph MSS, 81–2; handwriting, 76; history plays as history, 8, 35–6; Malone’s chronology, 85; and The Passionate Pilgrim, 164; performance history, 172–80; portrayal of

Spaniards, 116–18; on power of written word, 21; print publication of plays, 160–1, 163–5; promptbooks, 172–80; publishing history, 13, 166–70; and punctuation, 95–6; reprints, 165; signatures, 81; stage adaptations and rewritings, 168–9; textual appropriations, 25–6; Webster on, 162 works: Cardenio, 25–6, 99; Edward III, 166; Hamlet, 35, 158, 165, 169, 172–80; Henry IV, Part I, 164, 165; Henry VI, Part II, 35–6; Henry VIII, 166; King Lear, 84, 158, 164, 172; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 88, 116–18, 163, 164; Macbeth, 85, 172; Measure for Measure, 85; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 95–6; Much Ado About Nothing, 217; Pericles 164; The Rape of Lucrece, 13, 160; Richard II, 35, 164, 165, 168; Richard III, 164, 165; Romeo and Juliet, 164, 165; Sir Thomas More, 166; Sonnets, 160; The Tempest, 21, 172; Timon of Athens, 85; Titus Andronicus, 164, 165; Troilus and Cressida, 167; The Two Noble Kinsmen, 166; Venus and Adonis, 13, 160 Shapin, Steven, 32 Shelton, Thomas, 25, 99, 166 signatures, 81 Simiand, François, 47 Simonides, 129 Smethwick, John, 166 social control, writing’s role in, 10 social science, and history, 44–55 Solarzano (Spanish writer), 106 Sorel, Charles, 65, 105 Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of, 81, 160

230  Index Spain: colonial behaviour, 113–15; decline, 98; relations with France, 115–16; stereotypical portraits of Spaniards, 116–18 Spanish Golden Age: authenticity of printed plays, 66–7; censorship and printing process, 17–18, 78–9, 137, 140–1, 150–5; characteristics of works, 15–17; extant autograph MSS, 75–6; influence abroad, 105–19; metaphors for books, 11–12; non-autograph MS copies, 78; punctuation, 92; reasons for importance to this book’s theme, x; works in translation, 101–8; see also Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote Spanish language, 108–9 spell books see magic books spelling, 88–9, 92 Starobinski, Jean, 68 state: writing’s role in state construction, 10 Stationers Company, 161 Suárez de Figueroa, Cristóbal, 100 tasas, 141 Tasso, Torquato, 100, 109 Tate, Nahum, 168 Taylor, Gary, 84, 158, 166 temporality see time texts: circulation discontinuities, vii–viii; digital textuality’s effects, x–xi, 5–7, 70–2, 170–1; disseminating as extracts/quotations, 13; establishing authoritative, 65–7, 79–82, 84–5, 150–80; history’s dependence on, vi–vii, 7–9; materiality, ix–x, 4, 158–71; and temporality, 24, 172–80; see also books textual criticism, 150–71, 179–80 Theagenes, 118

Theobald, Lewis, 168, 169, 170, 177 Thou, Jacques de, 109 time: historical temporalities, 49–51; texts and temporality, 24, 172–80 Tirso de Molina, 75 title pages, 139–40, 164–5 Torquemada, Antonio de, 118 Tragicomedia de Calisto y Mélibea see La Celestina translation: ambivalent status, 106; and plagiarism, 109–13; profits to be made, 100–1; of Spanish works, 25, 99, 101–8, 138, 166; translators’ influence on works, ix Trovato, Paolo, 93 typographers see compositors universal libraries, 6–7 University of Reading: Archive of British Publishing and Printings and Authors’ Papers, 73 USA: academic monographs, 42 Utrecht, Union of, 114 Valdivielso, Josef de, 140, 141–2, 143 Vallejo, Hernando de, 141 Van Delft, Louis, 91 Vega, Lope de, 62, 66–7, 75–6, 142, 145–6 Velpius (publisher), 154–5 Verdier, Antoine du, 102 verisimilitude, 36 Verstegan, Richard, 114 Veyne, Paul, 27 Veyrin-Forrer, Jeanne, 210 Viardot, Louis, 138 Vico, Giambattista, 20 La Vida de Lazarilla de Tormes (picaresque novel), 103–4, 105, 106 Vidal de la Blache, Paul, 47 Vilar, Pierre, 98 Voltaire, 74

Index  231 Vortigern and Rowena (forged Shakespeare play), 81 Wahl, Jean, 46 Ward, John, 96, 175–80 Webster, John, 161–2 Webster, Noah, Jr, 97 Wells, Stanley, 158 White, Hayden, 27, 28 Wright, John, 164 Wright brothers, 170 writing: circulation discontinuities, vii–viii; collaborative writing and print publication, 13; collective dimension, viii; fragility of written word, 16–17; history as discourse, 27–30, 54–5;

individualization’s emergence, vii–viii, 64, 79–82; and memory, 126–7; modern definition of literature, vi; power of written word, 20–2, 67–8; relationship between written word and literature, 14–17; role in emergence of public sphere, 10; role in religious experience, 10; role in social control, 10; role in state construction, 10; see also authors; books; texts Yerushalmi, Yosef, 8 Zayas, María de, 106 Zeno, Niccoló, 118