Women Editing/Editing Women : Early Modern Women Writers and the New Textualism [1 ed.] 9781443804226, 9781443801782

Citation preview

Women Editing/Editing Women

Women Editing/Editing Women: Early Modern Women Writers and the New Textualism

Edited by

Ann Hollinshead Hurley and Chanita Goodblatt

Women Editing/Editing Women: Early Modern Women Writers and the New Textualism, Edited by Ann Hollinshead Hurley and Chanita Goodblatt This book first published 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2009 by Ann Hollinshead Hurley and Chanita Goodblatt and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book 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 copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-0178-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0178-2

To my mother: Jean Wells Hollinshead, M.D. Ann To my grandmothers: Devorah-Rivkah Lichtenshtein Goodblatt and Devorah Fineroff Brown

Chanita

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... ix Preface ........................................................................................................ xi Ann Hurley and Chanita Goodblatt Studying and Editing Early Modern Englishwomen: Then and Now.......... 1 Narrative Introduction Betty S. Travitsky and Anne Lake Prescott Chapter One............................................................................................... 17 Editing the Women Writers of Early Modern England Josephine Roberts Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 25 Why Should a Woman Edit a Man? Suzanne Gossett Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 35 The Countess of Pembroke and Gendered Reading Gary F. Waller Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 55 The Monk and the Giants: Textual and Bibliographical Studies and the Interpretation of Literary Works Jerome M. McGann Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 75 Textual Scholarship Leah S. Marcus Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 103 From Text to Book Zachary Lesser

viii

Table of Contents

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 131 To be “A Man in Print” Wendy Wall Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 155 Editing Perdita: Texts, Theories, Readers Jonathan Gibson and Gillian Wright Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 175 Editing Anonymous Erin Henriksen Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 189 Editing the Unknown: Writing an Introduction to Two Plays by Elizabeth Polwhele Ann Hollinshead Hurley Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 203 The Canonized Mary Astell: Gender, Canon, Context Michal Michelson and William Kolbrener Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 227 “By No Means In A Liberal Style:” Mary Morris Knowles versus James Boswell Judith Jennings Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 257 “The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are There”: Evelyn Mary Spearing Simpson Chanita Goodblatt Contributors............................................................................................. 285 Index........................................................................................................ 291

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) and its 2006 Conference in Leiden and Amsterdam, where many of these essays were originally presented as papers, and to the organizers of that conference who selected our panel, where the conceptual framework for this collection was initiated. We are also much indebted to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for a summer stipend grant to Ann Hurley that supported the research on early modern women writers that also contributed to this volume. The Faculty Personnel Committee of Wagner College provided ongoing financial support through various phases of this project, and we are grateful to its members for that. Our publishers, Cambridge Scholars Publishing have been both patient and supportive, and we thank them fully. We also owe much to Timothy Hickey, of Wagner College, who provided essential technical support in formatting the text and generating the Index for two scholars lamentably lacking in such skills. Most importantly, we, the editors, also wish to thank Betty Travitsky and Anne Lake Prescott for their generous and eloquent contribution to this volume and for their confidence in us and in our project. Their support is gratefully appreciated. Finally, we take great pleasure in dedicating this book to the most important early modern women in our own lives. To Chanita’s grandmothers, Devorah-Rivkah Lichtenshtein Goodblatt and Devorah Fineroff Brown, who moved their families to a new land in the hopes of a brighter future, gave little quarter to the dishonesty of others, and who – particularly Devorah Brown – persisted in providing an education for herself and her daughters. And to Ann’s mother, Jean Wells Hollinshead, MD., who as one of the early women graduates of Yale University Medical School (1937), as the first female Chief of Pediatrics at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, and as a practitioner of pediatrics for fifty years, has inspired three generations of her descendents to follow her example of dedication and fortitude. We cherish and celebrate these three women here.

x

Acknowledgements

Permission has been kindly granted for reproduction of the following: Chapter One: Josephine A. Roberts, “Editing the Women Writers of Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Studies 24 (1996): 63-70, used by permission of the publisher, Associated University Presses. Chapter Two: Suzanne Gossett, “Why Should a Woman Edit a Man?” Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies 9 (1996): 111-118, used by permission of the publisher, Indiana University Press. Chapter Three: Gary F. Waller, “The Countess of Pembroke and Gendered Reading,” in Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky, eds., The Renaissance English Woman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, 1990, pp. 327-345. Copyright © by University of Massachusetts Press and published by University of Massachusetts Press. Chapter Four: Jerome McGann, “The Monks and the Giants: Textual and Bibliographical Studies and the Interpretation of Literary Works,” in Jerome McGann, ed., Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, 1985, pp. 180-199, used by permission of the publisher, University of Chicago Press. Chapter Five: Leah S. Marcus, “Textual Scholarship,” in David G. Nicholls, ed., Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, 2007, pp. 145-159, used by permission of the publisher, The Modern Language Association of America. Chapter Six: Zachary Lesser, “Introduction—From Text to Book,” in Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade, 2004, pp. 1-25, used by permission of the author and the publisher, Cambridge University Press. Chapter Seven: Wendy Wall, “To Be ‘A Man in Print,’” from The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Copyright © 1993 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the author and the publisher, Cornell University Press. .

PREFACE ANN HURLEY AND CHANITA GOODBLATT

This book began as a problem: the problem of editing early modern women writers for whom there was little biographical data. As all of us who work in this period well know, the records of early modern women’s daily lives, relative to those of their male counterparts, are scant, and records of their intellectual and emotional lives are even rarer. Consequently, editing the works of early modern women is particularly challenging, given that the standard format of “works and life” is problematical from the start. A second problem, related but slightly different, also exists. Although we know that there were women who edited, we know little about them as well. Often in the early modern period, their activities that we now describe as editing were subsumed under other categories, as widows running a husband’s printing business, for example, and thus relying on his name to carry on the endeavor. Later in the centuries the work of women editors continued to be carried on either in tandem with a male editor or, again, as completing work that would otherwise have been discontinued after he died. Because women were denied academic appointments until late in the 19th century, or because when they did hold these appointments, they were forced out of them if they married, they lacked the status of male editors even when they were essentially doing the same work. This kind of forced obscurity makes it difficult to trace their influence and their contributions. Problems do have solutions, however, and one such solution provides the context for a set of essays in this volume that traces the history of the editing practice known as “the new textualism.” Rather than emphasizing an author’s life as a context for editing her manuscript or providing arguments for authorial intention, the new textualism focuses on the material properties of the manuscript or book, its print or performance history, and records of its dissemination. At the same time, the new textualism also seeks to retrieve the sociology of texts; that is, the culture in which they were originally situated, which provides a different kind of agency behind the text. By emphasizing the social, political, economic, class, gender and cultural positioning of a text, this approach resituates its

xii

Preface

author as only one among the many ways through which a text is constituted as it interacts with its social and cultural locations. Authorial agency, the new textualism argues, is diffused, and recognition of this fact gives us a fuller picture of the origins and directions of a given text. Thus what our whole collection of essays seeks to provide is a fusion of the research field of retrieving early modern women writers with the practices of new textualist editing. The first set of essays has been selected as seminal in the field of editing from a new textualist position. They include essays that made the original arguments for the necessity for a new approach to editing women: those by Josephine Roberts, Suzanne Gossett and Gary Waller. They also include representative essays that establish the parameters of this new approach and provide a detailed overview of it: by Jerome McGann and Leah Marcus, respectively. Finally, they include two essays, by Wendy Wall and Zachery Lesser, that apply new textualist methods to topics other than the works of single authors. These two essays thus provide illustrative examples of what can be achieved in the field of editing when this new approach to texts is put into practice In some obvious ways, and particularly with reference to the early modern period, our fusion of the research field of early modern women writers with the editing field of the new textualism thus makes sense. Again, the women writers of that period, unless they were unusually assertive members of the aristocracy, led such anonymous lives that often nothing is known of them other than a name. Thus editorial practices that accentuate resources other than those that are authorial based are methodologically useful. Equally pertinently, the conventional binary mode of looking at literary production as an engagement between author and reader is now giving way to a third area of textual agency—editing. Although our focus here is on editing women, quite obviously, we are also arguing for an awareness of the greater agency of the editor, since editors along with authors and readers are also responsible for the ways in which we receive texts. Hence, while the concerns of this collection are addressed to one particular period, the early modern, its approach is not limited to that one period, but can be extended to all areas of editing that concern women. Lastly, too frequently essays focused on women can be too narrowly focused on gender issues and become a little like laments about victimization. We see this collection as a departure point from this phase of thinking to a series of meditations on what the linking of women and editing can add to current scholarship on our understanding of the nature of the reception of texts and the power of the written word. Thus we hope that our collection will open the door to new and productive

Women Editing/Editing Women

xiii

methodologies and to resources that build on and extend what we have learned from the past. Our collection of essays begins, most appropriately, with a retrospective look by Betty Travitsky and Anne Prescott, entitled "Studying and Editing Early Modern Englishwomen." Having been general editors of the Ashgate Press series of early modern texts (by or concerning women) as well co-editing the anthology Female and Male Voices in Early Modern England, they build on their ongoing professional and scholarly relationship to provide a fascinating window into the development of the new scholarship on women. The interweaving of their respective personal and scholarly journeys from the late 1960s onwards reverberates with the revelations—the "coming to my senses"—of a generation of scholars in tension with the prevailing schema of canons, conventions and agendas. Taking as their goal the "sounding [of] silent voices," Travitsky and Prescott do a valuable service in reminding us of the challenges in the editorial reconceiving of the literary text written by early modern women, as well as the varied circumstances of its creation and dissemination. The first set of essays, that group that provides context for the thinking of the second set, is led by “Editing the Women Writers of Early Modern England,” by Josephine Roberts. Her essay is one of the first to point out the usefulness of the social history of the text as a corrective to the assumption that because we could not initially locate women’s lives, we were thus rather circumscribed in retrieving and editing their work. She argues here that “the social history of women’s writing is often crucial to its interpretation” and summarizes some of the editions then in press that use that approach. While at the time that she was writing (not so very long ago, in the 1990s) the process of preparing scholarly editions of women’s writing was, as she acknowledges, “only at a beginning stage” nonetheless, the series of questions she raises and the particular editions that she cites to substantiate the argument she is making, make this essay a particularly provocative starting point for any number of discussions on the related topics of women writers and editing. Suzanne Gossett’s essay, “Why Should a Woman Edit a Man,” is notable for her discussion of the “significant differences” that editing done by women editors can make. At the same time, however, she points out how an earlier generation of women editors not only edited texts by men but also edited texts like men. That is, starting from the, possibly unconscious, assumptions that there were no “women” editors other than themselves, they often commissioned only men to edit volumes in a series over which they themselves were the general editors. Gossett, like other

xiv

Preface

writers in our collection, calls attention to the areas in which the gender of a particular editor might make a difference. Her essay concludes with a series of suggestive examples of such differences and with the insightful point that most frequently these differences are not necessarily corrections but important additions to our understanding of particular texts. Gary Waller’s discussion of a “Gendered Reading” of Mary Sidney’s works also engages the question of male vs. female editing, but from the point of view of the man editing the works of a woman. He argues that there are few studies, which take sufficient notice of how a gender-specific awareness of the production of Sidney’s writing, coupled with a similar awareness of the gender-specific biases of her readers, work together to construct the meaning of her texts. “Both text and readers are situated within history,” he stresses, and both are in turn “appropriations from the general and literary ideology” of their respective societies and ideologies. We can “avoid the essentialism” of reading “as a man” or “as a woman,” he concludes, not through a formalist suppression of that essentialism, but only by acknowledging that gender, like the larger ideology of which it is a part, has also “produced what we are as readers.” The essay by Jerome McGann, “The Monk and the Giants: Textual and Bibliographical Studies and the Interpretation of Literary Works,” was selected from his many works as the one most frequently cited in discussions of McGann’s role in establishing what has come to be called the “new textualism.” Here he provides an extensive review of the work of the previous generation of editors that the new textualists to some extent position themselves against, while at the same time making a strong case for the point that textual and bibliographical studies are essential to literary interpretation. While that point may no longer be as radical as it seemed to the earlier generation, McGann’s careful documentation of how that revision in thinking came about is the essential foundation to any study of contemporary editing. As he argues in his conclusion, “the rich analytic resources of textual and bibliographical analysis” are potentially fruitful for literary criticism and are only waiting to be used. That so many of our essays here begin by citing McGann makes it clear that this generation of editing scholars have taken up his challenge. Leah Marcus’s essay on “Textual Scholarship” is also essential to our understanding of the development and potential in the “new textualism.” Here she states explicitly the fundamental premise of that approach to editing, that “textual scholarship is itself a form of interpretation,” a premise that provides the departure point for all of the essays in this collection. Her essay complements McGann’s in its careful explication of the new textualism and of the recent effort, led by McGann and Donald

Women Editing/Editing Women

xv

McKenzie, to rehistoricize editorial practices. Her essay adds to McGann’s in her discussion of the ways in which feminist scholarship has interacted with such editorial practices, and she also provides a discussion of the wide array of textual presentations, from facsimiles to hypertext, that are now available to readers. Her survey of how electronic influences have shaped our editing of literary texts is also a helpful contribution to any discussion of current aspects of editing. The last two essays in the first section of our collection, those by Wendy Wall and Zachary Lesser, are included as persuasive and detailed examples of new textualist approaches in which a reader’s attention is directed toward the production and dissemination of literary texts rather than to the lives of authors or authorial intentions. Wall, for example, in her chapter titled “To Be ‘a Man in Print,’” looks at early modern conceptions of authorship as they emerged from the social controversies surrounding print. More specifically, she looks at the numerous prefaces, dedications and commendatory poems of the period to see how the developing concept of authorship became “masculinized,” noting how specific genres, strategies, and gestures combined to produce a sense of authorship that was not inevitably male but became so. In calling our attention to the social construction of print, she points to many of the same conditions of contingency, historicity and instability that new textualist editing practices also acknowledge and attempt to come to terms with. Zachery Lesser, in his essay, “From Text to Book,” also widens the frame of our thinking about the intersection of editors and literary texts by looking at the publishers, rather than authors, of early modern drama. He argues that these publishers, in thinking about plays as commodities, may have changed our thinking about the ways in which we read these plays. His essay, the opening chapter of his book on the “politics” of publishing early modern drama, thus extends our frame of reference to the awareness that publication is not simply a neutral mode of textual transmission but that techniques of presentation and marketing also influenced the reading of these texts by contemporaries and, eventually, by ourselves. Hence he too, like Wendy Wall, enlarges our field of reference beyond the familiar author-reader transmission to include editorial decisions of a wide variety of kinds and effects. The next set of essays begins with two essays that turn their respective attention to the issues of editing texts by unpublished and/or anonymous early modern women. In their essay, "Editing Perdita," Jonathan Gibson and Gillian Wright take care to set out the structure and content of their anthology, Early Modern Women's Manuscript Poetry. Each of their fourteen sections is based on a single manuscript by a named woman poet,

xvi

Preface

providing an extensive selection of poems as well as both textual and explanatory notes. The authors explain that this organization integrates feminist and bibliographical imperatives, engaging as well with two principal trends of modern editorial theory: the author-centered approach of the "new bibliography" (proposed by Greg and Bowers) and McGann's "social approach." Finally, Gibson and Wright provide an intriguing look at how their anthology adumbrates the area of electronic publication, in the shared foregrounding of materiality, the visibility of editorial process and the granting of access to heretofore unavailable texts. Erin Henriksen obtained her first experience in editing texts by women under the auspices of Travitsky's and Prescott's Ashgate Press series, most specifically by working on "Fiction of Questionable Attribution." In her essay, "Editing Anonymous," she therefore focuses on texts that are examples of "gender-specific anonymity," in other words that are marked as written "by a young lady" or " by a woman of quality." As editor, Henriksen consequently reconceives the issue of authorial anonymity within a focus on the process of composition and the relationship between the work and its text(s). She thereby fore-fronts what Josephine Roberts has discussed as "the debate over gender relations"—in this instance, the tensions between the notions of disguise and duplicity, and those of liberty and counterargument. The essays by Ann Hurley, and by Michal Michelson and William Kolbrener, move us from a concern with the problematics of anthologies and textual series, to a focus on editing specific authors. Ann Hurley, in her essay entitled "Editing the Unknown," discusses the difficulties of writing an introduction to the works of a named, but highly elusive dramatist, Elizabeth Polwhele, acknowledged author of two extant Restoration plays. Hurley proposes that the solution to this biographical crux lies in positioning her editorial process within the context of the "new textualism," thereby turning to focus instead on the "social, cultural and political location of a given text." Taking advantage of these various aspects offers Hurley the rich opportunity to re-evaluate Polwhele's status as dramatist. Thus she discusses Polwhele's professionalism, as well as ability, to utilize the specific nature of early Restoration drama—its elaborate scenery and staging innovations, and its incorporation of female actresses. Hurley's discussion of this single instance illuminates, on a more general level, how female playwrights negotiated the various cultural constraints and liberating forces of late 17th-century England. In the essay entitled "The Canonized Mary Astell," Michelson and Kolbrener focus on their editorial conceptualization of their recent volume of essays—Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith—as an attempt to rectify

Women Editing/Editing Women

xvii

"the prevalent compartmentalization into distinct and consequently isolated categories and readerships." Michelson and Kolbrener demonstrate how editing such a volume must necessarily discuss Astell's responses to a broad range of contemporary audiences (e.g., political, philosophical, educational, gender). What is more, they obliquely edit Astell's texts in two primary ways: through the organization of the volume's essays into a chronological discussion of these works, thereby providing "a schematic treatment of her intellectual development"; and by elucidating the very debates, which engendered Astell's written responses. In doing so, Michelson and Kolbrener provide a unique way of addressing the issue of editing an early modern woman. The final two essays in this volume extend the previous discussions by addressing particular instances of women editing. In her essay, "By No Means in a Liberal Style," Judith Jennings examines Mary Morris Knowles's resolute attempt to gain (and maintain) an advantage, both in her 1778 dispute with Samuel Johnson and in the subsequent struggle over its printed account – a struggle begun with James Boswell and continuing well into the 21st-century. Jennings provides her own detailed biographical, historical and bibliographical account of Knowles, particularly positioning her regarding the major controversies in England over Quakerism, slavery and the French revolution. Furthermore, Jennings uses her discussion to raise crucial points involved in a woman's insistence upon her "right of self-representation": the gendered struggle for editorial control; reception by contemporary readers; and the tension between a canonized and marginalized text. The essay concludes with a reprinting of Knowles's first published account of her dialogue with Johnson. Chanita Goodblatt's essay, entitled "The University is a Paradise," completes this set by examining the case of Evelyn Simpson, co-editor with George Potter of the University of California edition of John Donne's Sermons. She demonstrates that the details of Simpson's life align this woman editor with significant changes transpiring in contemporary English academic life and English Renaissance studies. Tracing out the different venues of Simpson's life—Cambridge, London, World War I hospitals and battle fronts, Oxford—Goodblatt proposes that we should view this career in terms of Simpson's continuous engagement with the transformation of women's roles in the academic and scholarly worlds: beginning with the first generations of women's colleges in England, and enveloping the struggle for positions, grants and editorial authority in the 20th-century re-conceptualization of the early modern English canon. What is more, Goodblatt forefronts the complicated dynamics of this struggle,

xviii

Preface

which cross both familial, collegial and gender lines. The essay also provides a complete bibliography of works by Evelyn Simpson.

STUDYING AND EDITING EARLY MODERN ENGLISHWOMEN: THEN AND NOW BETTY S. TRAVITSKY AND ANNE LAKE PRESCOTT

The following essay is, in effect, a dialogue, the reminiscence by a pioneer and the confession of a self-described convert. The two wrote their parts separately and then, because they are co-editors of an anthology, Female and Male Voices in Early Modern England: A Renaissance Anthology (Columbia University Press, 2000) and of two series for Ashgate of texts by or relevant to women, they thought it might be fitting to merge what they remember of how they came to this field: what it was like for Betty to help initiate the later twentieth century’s interest in recovering lost or unheard women’s voices and what it was like for Anne to realize, belatedly, the value of such a recovery. We have identified each of their voices by initials. —The Editors

B.S.T. “A bore is a man, who, when you ask him how he is, tells you.” With that bit of folk wisdom in mind, I found the remit for this essay tricky: to produce “a narrative, recalling the struggles in getting the larger academic community to see the value of early modern women’s writing, in getting publishers . . . interested in investing in such writing, and in juggling your own academic interests with your increasing involvement with women’s writing and with the evolution of interest in early modern women’s writing and with editing and publishing that.” In trying to provide a pertinent narrative without narcissistic overindulgence, I hope that I’ve avoided sounding like that bore. My reminiscences begin with a term paper assigned in September 1968, the first semester of my graduate training at Brooklyn College (CUNY), following by just a few weeks, as it happens, the very overdue arrival of my third child. That conjunction of events proved an unintentional but powerful spur to years of study of what we now call early modern women and their writings. “Pick a passage in The Faerie

2

Studying and Editing Early Modern Englishwomen: Then and Now

Queene that speaks to you, find and summarize everything that’s been written about it, and pull the commentaries together with your own thoughts about the passage.” The passage that spoke to me at that perhaps auspicious but certainly vulnerable moment was Cymoent’s lament for her son, Marinell (FQ.III.4.36-39). And what I discovered—in what we can certainly term those early days of the new scholarship on women—was that the mother’s grief evoked so movingly by Spenser just before Cymoent’s lament, His mother swowned thrise, and the third time Could scarce recouered be out of her paine; Had she not bene deuoyd of mortall slime, She should not then haue bene reliu’d againe (III.4.35.1-4),

had quite escaped the notice of centuries of male commentators. Unable to cite the commentaries about other passages in Spenser that presumably filled the papers of my classmates, I earned my instructor’s praise for originality. Emboldened by this early approbation, I proposed in the mid-seventies, for my doctoral dissertation, to explore thinking about and the position of the mother in what we then called Renaissance England. This time around, convincing an advisor that I was on to something was not easy: “But there were always mothers, no? Always were, always will be. What could you possibly say about mothers in the English Renaissance?” Of the many pointed objections I had to counter while formulating what would eventually become the proposal for “The New Mother of the English Renaissance” (St. John’s University, 1976), this one, posed by a Yaletrained literary scholar with strong feminist inclinations who was also the mother of young children, stands out in my mind as epitomizing the paucity of information about, the invisibility of, the lack of interest in, and even the resistance to the new scholarship on women, particularly to domesticated women, in those early days. After convincing a committee that I was on to something, I proposed initially to write on Shakespeare’s treatment of the mother, or, rather, his failure to portray the newly developed Renaissance type of mother. My first stab at a dissertation topic, “Shakespeare’s Treatment of the Mother, Viewed in the Context of Renaissance Thought,” posited a negative, and on this proposal I yielded to the hardheaded advice that I avoid a negative thesis since it would be particularly difficult to publish. We were “a long way, Baby” from Mary Beth Rose’s sophisticated study, “Where Are the Mothers in Shakespeare? Options for Gender Representation in the English Renaissance” (Shakespeare Quarterly 42 [1991]: 291-314).

Women Editing/Editing Women

3

A.L.P. I myself had never thought much about such matters. As the daughter and granddaughter of women with careers, and thanks to teaching at a college that valued women, I had never personally run into a sexism that I could at the time identify as such. True, a “section man” helping with Harvard’s course on the history of science had answered my inquiry about majoring in the topic by saying that my A on the exam didn’t mean I could compete with young men in that field—but I was not troubled into thought, feeling only a dull gratitude for being spared the potential humiliation of revealing my inferiority concerning science to myself and to others. That was then. Now when Harvard presidents even hint at such thinking they “resign.” It was during my time at Harvard, though, that I was given and declined a chance to venture into what would later be called women’s studies. In a course on medieval European history one of our proposed term paper topics, designed in part to provide a taste of primary research and also, I suspect, to make Radcliff students feel more welcome, was the situation of women in some walk of life (I forget which). I was irritated to find that the teaching assistant had simply assumed I would choose that assignment, but I had rejected it precisely because of that assumption: I wanted to study real history, not to write about girl stuff just because I was a girl. It would be almost three decades before I came to my senses. B.S.T. Continuing to read about early modern mothers while pregnant with my fourth (and last) child, I followed up references to texts that they and other early modern women had written, and my dissertation gestated into an opening section isolating and documenting early modern ideas about the “new” mother and a second section considering writings by early modern mothers. This early work, in turn, initiated a thirty-year engagement with texts by early modern women, an engagement contemporaneous but not necessarily in agreement with such scholarly developments as gendered analysis, interdisciplinarity, the canon wars, deconstruction, social history, and post-colonialism, as well as with shifts in editorial theory and methodology. Then, as now, my focus was archaeological—sounding silenced voices by recovering texts and information about authors and their circumstances; I remain challenged by that ongoing archaeological task and convinced that it is far from complete. But I anticipate. During a conversation in her office soon after I had defended my dissertation, my department chair suggested that I develop an anthology of writings from my completed dissertation. That suggestion evolved into The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance, published in hard cover by Greenwood Press in 1980 and reprinted in

4

Studying and Editing Early Modern Englishwomen: Then and Now

paperback by Columbia UP in 1989. Paradise, organized by subject, rather than by genre to illuminate patterns in the writings of early modern Englishwomen, is an early example of gendered analysis and of interdisciplinarity that has seen the inside of many classrooms, I am told. Quite a remarkable run for a book that was submitted to at least half a dozen presses before it found a home. And equally remarkable when I consider that my mentions of those writings, before its publication, had invariably led to another memorable question, posed even by sympathetic scholars, “Were there women writers in the English Renaissance?”—a question, in turn, evocative of the title of Joan Kelly’s famous essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” (Becoming Visible, 1977). A.L.P. If a fortuneteller had prophesied to me in the early 1980s that I would spend some of my happiest hours co-editing early modern women writers with Betty Travitsky, I would have suggested that she seek psychiatric help or find another line of work. In around 1980 I had looked at Betty’s Paradise of Women with cold dislike (the outside reader for Greenwood Press had shown me a copy even before its publication). In the first place, I thought to myself, these are not the big guys I want to teach, not big like Chaucer, Spenser, Sidney. Not even big like Samuel Daniel or Joshua Sylvester. In the second place, if women want to join the canon club, I thought, well . . . all right. But why isolate them in their own ladies’ room or at the back of the gender bus? After all, if they were any good, and by my unconsciously masculine literary standards few in England were, they’d have to present the same credentials as male applicants. (I say “in England” because thanks to my work on Anglo-French relations in the Renaissance I was dimly aware of Marguerite de Navarre and Louise Labé and knew I was supposed, sort of, maybe, to take them seriously, although I remained quite ignorant of the excellent Italian women poets whom I now teach.) Looking back, I am not sure what first made me realize how wrong I had been about Betty’s anthology, to say nothing about that Harvard history assignment, and on how many counts. Probably it was in the mid 1980s, when Margaret Hannay asked me to contribute to a large panel at the MLA that then became a book: Silent but for the Word (Kent State University Press, 1985). Later I came to see that women had not in fact been as silent, even in England, as Hannay’s title implies, but the experience was nevertheless transforming (not least because the male respondent spent his time telling us where women studies ought to go next and opining that in an age of postmodern theory archival research was not where the excitement would now be; for the first time I felt the stirrings of quasi-feminist anger). My own essay was on Elizabeth’s girlhood

Women Editing/Editing Women

5

translation of Marguerite de Navarre’s Miroir de l’ame pecheresse, and since I focused on the manuscript version I had to begin noticing some of the issues that editors must consider. I was only edging into women’s studies, for I could tell the skeptic in me, if she (he?) were to complain, that although having female bodies my royal subjects nevertheless had the hearts and stomachs of kings, ones that probably deserved to be examined in a modern scholarly book. B.S.T. Books are just one part of the publication story, though admittedly its high-end in terms of publisher investment—especially in pre-electronic, pre-publication-on-demand publishing days. Therefore, despite my initial difficulties in getting Paradise into print—the most dreadful instance, the dismissal of my submission by a university press that had sent me glowing readers’ reports and had then unexpectedly returned the manuscript, three months later, with just a curt rejection—I did not find publication of and about women’s writings a particularly onerous process, on the whole. If anything, the new scholarship on women held a bit of an advantage, I believe, in attracting the notice of journal editors and their referees. And I think that editors of that pioneering time should be commended for their willingness to entertain and print unfamiliar materials. Definitely their willingness constitutes an advance over the judgment of John Pinkerton, say, an eighteenth-century editor of the Maitland Quarto Manuscript (c. 1586; PL 1408, Pepys Library), who omitted “MQ #49,” the earliest erotic love poem to a woman by a woman that I know of in any form of English, from the selections he included in his partial edition of the manuscript, terming it “[a] song of friendship from one lady to another of sufficient insipidity” (Ancient Scottish Poems, 1786). Or, a bit more than a century later, over that of the first editor of the full manuscript, W. A. Craigie, who—though Marie Maitland’s autograph appears in two places on the title page, though she is commonly credited with transcribing the entire manuscript, and though she is named as a poet in two other poems in it—considered the grounds for ascribing the poem to her “plainly insufficient” (Maitland Quarto Manuscript, 1919-20). How indeed could Cymoent’s lament have attracted scholarly interest given that sort of mindset? In contrast, in those early days, Paradise and a number of my early essays did find quite respectable publishers. Indeed, in some ways the late-twentieth-century academy and many individual academics were supportive of the new scholarship on women. In the early 1980s, though my academic career had been cut short by family illness, I was awarded a number of grants in support of my research that allowed me to continue it. On the very day I first visited the Furness Shakespeare Library at the University of Pennsylvania as what Penn called

6

Studying and Editing Early Modern Englishwomen: Then and Now

a ‘Mellon Post-doc’, I was shown a copy of the newly published Paradise on the desk of Georgianna Ziegler, then assistant curator there. In 1982, while participating in a summer seminar at the hospitable Folger Shakespeare Library, I had many pleasant conversations about early modern women writers with Betty Hageman, a summer habitué at the Folger, who was then preparing the first of her bibliographies on early modern English women writers for English Literary Renaissance and was perhaps already laying the groundwork for the monthly evening colloquia on early modern women that would meet there for several years and for Renaissance Women Online. In the spring of 1987, after several years as a “creature of Amtrak” (to appropriate Werner Gundersheimer’s term for himself in the year he spent commuting from Penn to the Folger while arranging his move to the library), as, that is to say, a commuter to Folger colloquia while holding a 9 to 5 job in New York City, a conversation about that difficulty while en route with Margaret Mikesell, who had become a fellow (Amtrak) traveler, encouraged me to pull together a number of scholars to create a discussion group parallel to that of the Folger. That May, Patrick Cullen, Margaret Ferguson, Joan Hartman, Anne Haselkorn, Margaret Mikesell and I met at the CUNY Graduate Center to brainstorm on logistics for the group—a meeting place, a meeting time, a list of potential members, the mechanics of sending meeting notices and mailings. SSWR, or the Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance, as Joan would later name us, has met since the fall of 1987 at the Graduate Center, at first unofficially; I well remember lugging heavy batches of mailings to the post office, scampering about the Graduate Center searching for a vacant room, and even moving chairs from one location to another in our early years. Ah, but the glory, despite our gypsy status, of inviting and listening to such eminent speakers as Leeds Barroll, Irene Dash, Margaret Hannay, Katherine Henderson, David Kastan, Margaret King and Carole Levin—among many, many others! Joan, then chair of the English Department and later a dean at CUNY’s College of Staten Island, eventually found clerical assistance for the mailings, and in the spring of 1997, at the invitation of Electa Arenal, director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center, and through the authorization of Alan Gartner, Dean for Research and University Programs there, SSWR became officially affiliated with the Graduate Center. Official stationery, assistance with mailings, and no more scrounging around for chairs or rooms! Though I was working, by then, as a librarian, I myself was appointed an affiliated scholar of the Center, an appointment that led to some funding and to essential library privileges to

Women Editing/Editing Women

7

further my research. I resigned from the SSWR planning committee in the fall of 2004, having coaxed Susan O’Malley to take my place, but I spoke there this spring, and I know that Susan has established a new planning committee to continue to lead the group. A.L.P. Certain conversations I recall from the 1980s and even earlier, casual at the time, have since seemed crucial. What is worth editing and by what criteria? Catherine Stimpson, herself a pioneer in making women’s studies more visible and at that point a colleague, spent some friendly time one day trying to persuade me that my literary preferences were the result of cultural conditioning, so to speak. Columbia had just expelled Rabelais from its Literature and Humanities course, in part because some female students objected to the scene in which Panurge wants to build city walls of vulvas—I still think they were misreading the passage (there are male genitalia there too) and missing the point (make love not war, reproduction is better urban defense than ramparts). Columbia’s more significant agenda, however, was to make room on the syllabus for a woman writer. Perhaps some of those responsible had heard that Patrick Cullen, Betty’s first co-editor for her Ashgate series, had told students when he was a visiting professor at Columbia to look at the great names engraved under the roof of Butler Library and note the absence of women. We should add Sappho, he suggested (and, at least as I heard the story, was rewarded by a student complaining to the dean that he was promoting lesbianism). Loving Rabelais, I had been bemoaning his loss and had said something slighting about Marguerite de Navarre. You must see, said Kate, laughing, that you just think him greater than Marguerite because that’s what you’ve been taught. Canon essentialist that I was I stuck to my phallocentric Rabelaisian guns, and indeed I continue to think him the greater writer— but the conversation made me look again at Marguerite, and although I have not yet edited her I have now written extensively on her and hope at some point to help get early modern English translations of her and of her granddaughter-in-law Marguerite de Valois into a modern edition. At about that time my college roommate’s daughter, Julia Flanders, was chatting with me at a conference and mentioned that after working for a while with the Brown University Women Writers’ Project she had come, not always consciously, to sense in some of the texts themselves not a lower but a different aesthetic, a different voice, and perhaps a different position in our definitions of periodization. This is of course a complex matter and luckily not one I need sort out for myself in order to edit women writers. Whether, how, and to what degree a female voice is, when most female, inherently different has been subject to research with both double—blind tests and the occasional MRI. (In one experiment, for

8

Studying and Editing Early Modern Englishwomen: Then and Now

example, male and female students considered whether a pair of words rhymed or not and investigators looked to see which bits of the brain blazed with electrochemical thought; as I recall, the female brains lit up in two places and the male brains in one, although what that means is anybody’s guess.) Perhaps so long as we live in a still to some degree sexist world the neurological and stylistic truth does not matter as much as our assumptions. Some years earlier B. J. (Joy) Chute, the author of Greenwillow had told me that a book review she wrote for the New York Times had been sent back heavily edited because it “sounds feminine.” “Please inform the editor,” Joy had replied, “that I am a woman; the revisions go.” The revisions went, but the issue remains. A few years after I had become involved with the Attending to Women series of conferences at the University of Maryland, and had begun my collaboration with Betty, I was team—teaching a course on women writers in the Renaissance, still somewhat naive about the theory part, which I left to my colleague in the classroom, Paula Loscocco. Often when we looked at a metaphor or conceit I would remind students that it was also found in male poets, offering juxtapositions that in a small way anticipated the anthology that Betty and I would put together, Female and Male Voices. Once, when I mentioned that an Italian poet who compared herself to a foundering ship probably meant us to remember Petrarch, Paula replied, with an exasperation that made the moment both memorable and instructive, “But the same image can mean something different when a woman says it.” In terms of resonance and the implied subjectivity it of course does. How could I have been so deaf? B.S.T. I dredged through my SSWR correspondence files to reconstruct its capsule history because it seems to me, in retrospect, that it demonstrates both the evolving scholarly commitment to early modern women’s studies and the slowness, often the failure, of the established academy—perhaps because of other, simultaneous scholarly developments—to institutionalize scholarship on and editing of early modern women, in those early days, as a significant or respected niche in early modern literary studies; while articles and books about these women and their writings were increasingly accepted and published, they remained “a curiosity rather than a contribution,” to adopt Ruth Hughey’s description of Mary Fage’s admittedly curious Fames Roule (“Cultural Interests of Women in England from 1524 to 1640. Indicated in the Writings of the Women. A Survey.” Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1932). In particular, such scholarship—celebrating the newly recovered writer along with her text—was at odds with the tendency to

Women Editing/Editing Women

9

eliminate the author, indeed, with the death of the author. Scholarly play with the text, with the document, with the material object was and is hot, but interest in the author not. Unlike the newer and in some ways parallel field of book history, scholarship on women’s texts has remained on the margins; in other words, it was and is unlikely—unless it is subsidiary to scholarship in a more established niche—to lead to a tenured position in a college or university. This failure is perhaps especially problematic because the new scholarship on women seems particularly inviting to younger scholars, though it is possible that the relative inexperience and powerlessness of these scholars in the academic world may have contributed to the failure. Certainly, I was not alone in hearing the sirens’ call, and I think it’s fair to say that Paradise contributed to the developing groundswell. Among milestones along the way was an Renaissance English Text Society session at MLA in 1986 titled “Editing Women Writers of the Renaissance,” a sign, surely, of growing institutional interest. The networking effected by the Folger and Graduate Center colloquia led to two important academic developments. The first was the organization, led by the planning committee of SSWR together with some members of the Folger colloquium, of a multi-session and interdisciplinary forum, “New Directions for the Study of Women’s Texts and Genres,” hosted in 1989 by MLA, and resulting in a special issue of Women’s Studies that Ann Rosalind Jones and I co-edited. In turn, through the good offices of Virginia Beauchamp of the University of Maryland, one of the planners of the forum, and the energetic sponsorship of Adele Seeff of the Centre for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at Maryland, the planning committee created “Attending to Women in Early Modern England,” an event that attracted over 300 scholars to the University of Maryland at College Park in 1990 in what was to be the first of triennial, three-day Attending conferences memorialized in conference proceedings that are edited by a member of the planning committee. Terrific work, and terrific fun! I still chuckle when I remember Adele’s confiding to me that her husband, aghast at witnessing her on the telephone with me at 6 a.m., the only hour when both she and I were able to make contact, asked her, “Is there really another human being at the end of that line?” That first conference was a stirring event, important in establishing a sense of community among students of early modern women. I’ll confess, on a personal note, that I was taken aback when I exchanged names with a graduate student with whom I was strolling on the campus and she told me: “Paradise of Women—that’s my bible.” A.L.P. It was in around 1990 that Hugh Maclean asked me to join him in

10

Studying and Editing Early Modern Englishwomen: Then and Now

preparing a new edition of Spenser’s poetry for W. W. Norton, and I leapt to agree. The technical details of editing fascinated me: Spenser’s views on gender or his treatment of figures such as Cymoent, seemed less significant than the challenge of knowing which words to gloss, which allusions to explain, and how, without betraying the last edition published in Spenser’s lifetime, to punctuate his love poems so students would not be distracted by the 1595 printer’s lunatic way with colons and commas. What is the balance between wanting a text to be available to modernity and wanting to remain loyal to the author’s intentions. Or did that sometimes mean, rather, the printer’s intentions? Or did a printer even have definable intentions as he reached for a y rather than an i? And, of course, what is an Author? While Betty was thinking deeply about such matters I was at least discovering, for example, that when you look up even slightly puzzling words in the Amoretti you find the (to me) surprising degree to which Spenser’s vocabulary and metaphors, like Shakespeare’s in his Sonnets, glance sidelong at legal matters and exploit legal discourse. That these lexical overtones gave the love poetry, even when addressing a lady, a more complex implied readership was not something I noticed. But, once more, that was then, and after a few years of editing early modern women with Betty I know that the next edition of the Norton Spenser will do well to heed such matters if only so as to remind students that Spenser’s was not a disembodied and ungendered voice. Does this sort of issue matter to editing women? It does if we think of the early modern women whose voices we want to recover and whose texts we want to make available in editions or in the classroom as people with bodies and minds (to use a modern dichotomy). As Betty has mentioned, the surge of interest in such recovery came at just the time when capital A authorship was subjected to intense interrogation and skepticism. The respected scholar Mireille Huchon recently argued that one star of the French Renaissance, Louise Labé, was a “paper creation” by a group of male poets, a literary hoax. While walking to a panel discussion of the matter I told a friend of my distress. “Don’t worry,” she said consolingly. “You still have a female author position.” Not good enough, I said. “You mean you need a female body?” she asked. I said yes, yes, yes—feeling old fashioned. For editors of books by or related to women the issue is not minor. Should we edit author-positions? Or should we include texts by men, or possibly men, that take up room in volumes largely by women? The issue is all the more vexing because of the early modern taste for pseudonyms, anonymity, joint authorship, and in-family editing.

Women Editing/Editing Women

11

B.S.T. Also in 1990, in further evidence of this still off-center but undoubted groundswell, Sara Jayne Steen affirmed in “Voices of Silence: Editing the Letters of Renaissance Women,” another RETS session at MLA, that “[w]omen scholars want to bring women from behind the arras of a male-dominated canon”; “that women, long silenced, must be enabled to speak”; and that there is a “disjunction between an emphasis among editors on the text as a cultural and historical document and an emphasis among women’s scholars on the writer and the reader” (Hill, 1993, 23031). This disjunction, to which I referred earlier, is a crucial one, and I’ll confess that I have based my own efforts at editing on an attempt to capture authorial intention, the ‘authoritative word’ (Smith, Poetics, 39), efforts that take into account the circumstances of the author and of the production of her text, that attempt—and often succeed—in providing for the author a local habitation as well as a name. An avalanche of text publication followed this initial groundswell of interest, first in hard copy and later in electronic form. Quite apart from individual, often crucially important editions like the late Josephine Roberts’ The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1995), texts have been published in series like Oxford University Press’s Women Writers in English, 1350-1850, co-edited by Susanne Woods and Betty Hageman and Ashgate Press’s Early Modern Englishwoman, the brainchild of Patrick Cullen who coaxed me to co-edit the series with him for several years till he retired and Anne, happily, took his place. As interest has grown in integrating newly recovered women’s texts with the texts by male writers—otherwise known as the traditional canon—these texts have been included increasingly in anthologies. But while some changes in the literary landscape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries can be attributed to developments in women’s studies and to general scholarly trends, the groundswell of interest in women’s writings that I have been describing did not, of course, occur in a technological vacuum. I can remember moving repeatedly from one end to the other of the New York Public Library’s card catalog room in search of women’s variant names in different parts of the alphabet, a search that can be conducted today much less strenuously from a single computer terminal. Digitization has enhanced access to information in all fields with tools like the online public access catalog; it has accelerated the study of early modern women’s texts with specialized catalogs like Perdita and with electronic archives like Brown University’s Women’s Writers Project and Emory University’s Women Writers Resource Project; it has transcended the miracle of microfilm—in its day a democratizing agent of access for scholars who could not afford travel to distant archives—

12

Studying and Editing Early Modern Englishwomen: Then and Now

providing access to selected documents not only in the local library, but on the screen of the personal desktop computer. To inject a personal note, again, I vividly recall that the first time I read texts on EEBO, I sat transfixed at the computer for hours, calling up one text after another, unable to believe that this material had been made available in my own study. A.L.P. I hardly need say that the major turning point in my life as an editor and scholar interested in female voices, or at least voices/texts from females or people claiming to be female, was Betty’s invitation to join her in doing our anthology and in co-editing two series for Ashgate (or, more precisely, overseeing the individual volume editors). When I said yes, my inner skeptic’s conversion was complete. The invitation came just as there was a surge of interest in what my former colleague David Kastan calls the New Boredom (he is entitled—he helped make it fashionable) and what others call the material history of the book. One series comprises straightforward editions and the other offers facsimiles. Why facsimiles? Not everyone has physical or electronic access to the texts as they first appeared, of course, and yet presentation in print, as in manuscript, is a currently fashionable topic because so culturally revealing. The study of early modern women surely should include how they were metaphorically escorted into printing houses, into the street, and into libraries. Facsimile editions, for all their bibliographical ambiguity, enable such research. There is more to be done here, of course, and more consciousnesses to raise. A dean at a distinguished women’s college, for example, not too long ago confessed himself put off by the less than stellar letterheads of some recommendations for an assistant professor in women’s studies, finding it hard to remember that with some notable exceptions most senior scholars in the field had not climbed an ivy-league ladder. And a fine recent book on the physical presentation of early modern books, Michael Saenger’s The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance (Ashgate 2006) has ample illustrations but none of a text ascribed to a woman. Are women presented differently in early modern books? One female almanac writer at least had the advantage of appearing on her title page with a lovely pair of breasts beneath her pretty smiling face, something her male colleagues in the trade could not do. One advantage of our facsimile series is to enable such investigation. When discussing this and related editorial matters with students, I sometimes cite Gaspara Stampa’s poetry as an example of how editorial choices can relate to gender. Shortly after Stampa died, her sister published the first edition of her poetry; including amatory and religious lyrics, it ends with a few poems on fame and glory. Stampa’s nineteenth-century (male) editor,

Women Editing/Editing Women

13

though, whether with Petrarch as a model or simply thinking it unseemly for female verse to culminate in narcissism, moved the poems around so that the ones to God conclude the volume. Alas, the edition I use in my course does the same, but once when teaching at the Folger Library I was able to show students a copy of the original edition and its lovely terminal blaze of pride. B.S.T. As I mentioned earlier, those early days of the new scholarship on women coincided with other scholarly developments. Late twentiethcentury literary scholars participated, admittedly with initial reluctance on the part of some, in a revolutionary expansion of the traditional literary canon, in part spurred by the recovery of women’s writings, and in tandem, certainly, with their willingness to entertain scholarship about those women. Works in recognized genres, like the prose romance by Lady Mary Wroth and the poems of Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Sidney Herbert and Mary Stuart, came increasingly in view on their radar screens. At least as significantly, scholars interested in social history began to study the primarily private forms that many early modern women— reduced by contemporary mores to silence and refused entry to the public world of publication—had fallen back on: diary keeping and letter writing, to take two prominent examples. Scholars began to give attention, in the printed translations by early modern women, to the prefaces penned by these translators, passages that sometimes opened windows into the translators’ minds and souls more explicitly than their choices of texts for translation. They began, also slowly, to consider in their own right such types of writings as advice to children, a focus incidentally of my dissertation, a genre that had certainly not been considered significant enough for literary study by past generations of scholars (unless the advice was addressed to princes), and one that, I discovered, was resisted as insufficiently feminist by the earliest women’s studies scholars. More recently, but significantly for the study of women writers given the especial stigma of print for women, literary scholars have expanded the conception of early modern publication to include manuscript circulation within literary coteries (Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History, 1993). In the early twenty-first century, early modern women’s silenced voices continue to become audible. A.L.P. Such silenced voices do indeed continue to do just that. Yet questions remain for us (and for any publisher). How far do we go before we reach the bottom of the barrel? Or does this barrel have a bottom? At some point, in no small part thanks to enterprises such as the Brown University database, the Perdita project, and Betty’s research for her forthcoming website, we will have found all the extant writings of early

14

Studying and Editing Early Modern Englishwomen: Then and Now

modern women living in the British Isles. Are they all worth editing? Betty and I have already overseen one Ashgate volume that includes material at first neither printed or passed around in manuscript but embroidered—the pillows may not have circulated much beyond chair to chair, but to put words on a hanging or chair back is one way to go public, to publish, at least to friends and family and perhaps also to literate servants or visiting ministers or doctors. Can textile be text? Of course, and such texts—those by Mary Stuart, for example—can be important. What of tombstone poetry? Scratched verses on a window? Posies on rings? I would be in favor of editing everything available. In the first place, now that we have the Internet, there need be no limit to our bookshelves and hence no good reason to ration ourselves. Even if publishers eventually say “Enough!” edited texts can be posted on-line. Second, whatever one thinks of the not just minor but minimal texts that still sometimes show up, and whatever the influence of those who prefer their canons major and largely male, the project of recovering female voices is as much history and cultural studies (and justice) as it is the search for lost literary achievement. Helping edit such discoveries or recoveries has become for me an enterprise to be located somewhere between panning for gold and time travel. It is hard to imagine a text that would not interest someone for some reason at some point, even texts by those whose names will not, or not in my lifetime, be inscribed on Butler Library’s facade. B.S.T. From my perspective, from this assigned narrative position that is, I believe that despite our advances and despite these tools the recovery of early modern women’s writings is still in its infancy. Over the last few years I have unearthed information about hundreds of (mainly noncanonical) early modern English women writers and have included listings of their writings and of past notices about them in “Earlywomen,” an online bibliography to be mounted in the near future on MRTS Online: Bibliographies of Early English Writers, the Iter/MRTS website (http://www:itergateway.org/mrts/earlywomen). I have also identified vast numbers of documents that remain to be examined and charted, and I have compiled lists of hundreds of additional names for future investigation. It seems to me that the social- or material-based editing that has become popular among editors of the better-known parts of the traditional canon may well be appropriate to some early modern women writers whose texts have become well-explored (who might even be considered semicanonical), but that a shift to the wholesale use of such techniques for early modern women writers would be better left to a future in which recovery of the canon of their writings is closer to complete.

Women Editing/Editing Women

15

A.L.P. May that day come soon, and may all of us long enjoy listening to the once inaudible.

CHAPTER ONE EDITING THE WOMEN WRITERS OF EARLY MODERN ENGLAND JOSEPHINE ROBERTS

In the final scene of Much Ado about Nothing, Hero waves before the audience a sample of Beatrice's verse, "writ in my cousin's hand, stolen from her pocket" (5.4.89). Although the paper quickly drops from view as the lovers engage in their marriage dance, Shakespeare provides a brief, often overlooked glimpse of the manuscript culture in which women participated as readers and writers. Over the past twenty years, the recovery of works by early modern women has become one of the most important developments in the field of bibliographical and textual studies. Earlier literary historians traditionally acknowledged a handful of women authors, such as Elizabeth I, Margaret Roper, and Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, but they treated them as exceptional women or privileged bluestockings, memorialized in Virginia Woolf's portrait of "the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers" (113). Indeed Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) was so influential in its argument that Aphra Behn marked the beginning of professional writing by women that most scholars were discouraged from exploring the archives for earlier writings until the 1970s. Since that time, there has occurred a phenomenal growth of interest not simply in editing women's published works, but in identifying and recovering previously unknown writings surviving in manuscript form. One of the most significant discoveries that has emerged so far is that despite cultural prohibitions against publication, many women actively circulated their writings among family members and friends. A significant example is Elizabeth Cary's Mariam, written after her marriage in 1602 and probably before the birth of her first child in 1609 (Weller and Ferguson, 5). The play itself was not published until 1613, but we know that it was read in manuscript by Cary's former tutor, John Davies of Hereford, who complained in his dedication to The Muses Sacrifice (1612) that Cary (along with Lucy Harington, Countess of Bedford and Mary

18

Chapter One

Sidney, Countess of Pembroke) sequestered their writings from public view: "you presse the Presse with little you have made." Davies's dedication also provides confirmation that Cary had written an earlier tragedy set in Syracuse, which is now lost. The verse dedication to Elizabeth Cary (probably the author's sister-in-law), found in only two copies of Mariam, alludes to this earlier play, which was most likely dedicated to her husband ("consecrated to Apollo"). How broad a circle of friends and associates had access to Cary's plays in manuscript? Were her plays read by some of the male dramatists, such as Samuel Daniel and Fulke Greville, who in the early years of James's reign were composing their own closet dramas dealing with potentially dangerous subjects such as tyranny and abuses of kingly power? Was the circle of readers wide enough to include Shakespeare or Middleton, Ben Jonson or Mary Wroth? These are questions which we are beginning to explore now that the texts have become more widely available. Davies's dedication chiding the women writers for refraining from publication has often been understood to refer to the "stigma of print," whereby aristocratic authors abstained from public exposure of their works (Saunders, 139). In the past manuscript circulation was understood primarily in negative terms, as a means of exclusion and restriction for a literary elite. But more recently, especially beginning with the publication of the first two volumes of Peter Beal's monumental Index of English Literary Manuscripts (1980), it has become clear that manuscript circulation was practiced by a much broader spectrum of writers, both men and women of varying social classes. Through Beal's careful and painstaking collation of manuscript commonplace books, we are now able to see how the poems of certain writers were copied by professional scribes and amateurs into collections that might pass from hand to hand, and be recopied and altered in the process. Even after a printed text became available, scribal copying of poetry and plays continued to coexist with more public means of circulation. In a newly published study, Herbert Love argues convincingly the case for what he calls "scribal publication" as an alternative to print throughout the seventeenth century, and he shows how it might be chosen by authors "without any sense of its being inferior or incomplete" (35). Scribal publication had many advantages for women, where the very act of publishing a work was often equated to prostitution (as Wendy Wall has shown in her recent study of the ideology of the "press," 219-20). In theory, the author could exercise a degree of control over her initial choice of readership. In some cases, such as the religious meditations of Elizabeth Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater, the work may have remained

Editing the Women Writers of Early Modern England

19

exclusively within the intimate family circle, although Egerton's husband apparently supervised the preparation of at least three manuscript copies. Indeed, as Betty Travitsky has shown, John Egerton may have seized upon the role of editor and scribal publisher of his wife's work partly as a means of reshaping and regulating the text after her death. Scribal publication also offered the author the opportunity to revise and polish her own text over a period of many years. Perhaps the most impressive example is that of the Sidney/Pembroke Psalter, surviving in at least sixteen different manuscripts, categorized by Noel Kinnamon into two main groups. After Philip Sidney's death in 1586, his sister Mary Sidney revised her brother's verse translations of the first 43 psalms and completed the rest of the collection of 150 poems. She apparently kept master copies in London, as well as Wilton, into which she inserted changes and revisions, later copied out by scribes in a series of successive manuscripts. Among the early readers were John Donne and Sir John Harington, who sent copies of some of the psalms to the Countess of Bedford. Interestingly, Harington felt that Mary Sidney was being too restrictive in limiting access to her poems, which he compared to "prisoners" within Wilton's walls. Yet despite the survival of so many manuscripts of the psalms, Mary Sidney's own master copies have disappeared. In fact, one of the most important extant manuscripts of the Psalter was rescued only at the last minute by Bishop Samuel Woodford's brother when he bought it "among other broken books to putt up Coffee pouder" (Waller, 24). Thus the very advantages of scribal publication—the selectivity of readership and the ability to create successive versions for different audiences—often meant that the texts themselves were highly vulnerable commodities, easily subject to loss, theft, or what was worse, recycling. One of the frustrations in recovering the texts of early women writers is that we have no way of knowing the extent of what has been destroyed. Ben Jonson in his Conversations with Drummond is recorded as praising Sir Philip Sidney's daughter, Elizabeth Manners, Countess of Rutland, as "nothing inferior to her Father" in poetry (Works, 1 : 138). Yet none of her writing has yet been identified. Only one poem survives of Lucy Harington's verse, although her surviving prose letters give testimony of her remarkable wit and literary ability. The conjunction between manuscript and print in women's writings is a subject deserving continued investigation. Certain genres, particularly the mother's book of advice, became enormously popular, and many underwent numerous printed editions. The authors ranged widely in social station from middle-class to aristocratic women, but they wrote from the common perspective of imminent mortality associated with childbirth in

20

Chapter One

the early modern period. The defenses of women comprised another highly popular printed genre, with Rachel Speght's A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617) as one of the few texts that can be ascribed with certainty to an identifiable woman author. Because so many of the earlier defenses were signed with pseudonyms (such as Jane Anger or Ester Sowernam), the question of authorship is subject to debate, and in some cases, such as The Worming of a Mad Dogge (1617), seems most likely to involve a male author ventriloquizing a woman's voice for satirical purposes. One of the most positive effects of poststructuralist theory on the recovery of women's writing is that the issue of uncertain or unknown authorship no longer stands in the way of considering how these works (written either by men or women) contribute to the debate over gender relations. Furthermore, the impact of poststructuralist theory in breaking down the barriers between what was once narrowly defined as "literature" in opposition to popular culture has also helped broaden the scope of the recovery of works by women. The Brown Women Writers Project set as its ambitious goal the preparation of a full text database of all work written by or ascribed to women in the period 1330-1830, including manuals on sewing, gardening, cookery, and medicine. This inclusiveness will make possible future research projects that are broadly interdisciplinary in scope. The poststructuralist shift in emphasis away from the author to the reader may also be seen in the editorial methodology used to present the texts of women authors. Under the influence of Jerome McGann's Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, there is greater interest in the social history of the text from its original moments of production through all of the subsequent transformations in the process of printing, editing, and interpretation by successive generations of readers. Applications of McGann's ideas to Renaissance texts have been suggested by the editors of the Donne Variorum, who print alternative versions of poems (and lines from poems) found in the numerous manuscript texts of the verse compiled by Donne's seventeenth-century contemporaries (see the rationale offered by Pebworth and Sullivan). Similarly, Arthur J. Marotti has argued persuasively for the value of editions of poetical miscellanies that reproduce the entire collections as they stand, without regard to the puzzling or spurious attributions, the seeming lack of order, and the nonauthorial variants in the texts. Since the social history of women's writing is often crucial to its interpretation, it is not surprising that many of the editions now in preparation reveal the influence of this approach. Sr. Jean Klene's forthcoming edition of the Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book

Editing the Women Writers of Early Modern England

21

(Folger MS. V.B.198) is a good example: this manuscript includes the poems of Lady Anne Southwell, together with a collection of letters, aphorisms, inventories, receipts, a mini-bestiary, and scriptural commentary. The manuscript itself bears the evidence of at least nine different hands, including Southwell's as well as that of her second husband, Captain Henry Sibthorpe. If the Folger manuscript had been edited in the first half of the twentieth century, it is likely that the poems, and possibly the letters, would have been extracted from the manuscript and presented as a critical edition (following the principles of W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers) entitled The Works of Lady Anne Southwell. Yet such an approach would eliminate the cultural context in which Southwell's writings were preserved, much of it quite valuable and unique material. For example, the study of the manuscript reveals some of the receipts date back to 1587 and were signed by Sibthorpe's father, John. It is likely that the commonplace book passed from father to son to wife shortly after Lady Anne's second marriage in 1626. Following her death ten years later, her husband reclaimed the manuscript and appears to have inscribed several testimonials in her honor, including his description of her as "Darlinge of the Nine" (fol. 73). Unlike John Egerton, who had his wife's writing arranged and recopied in multiple texts for preservation, Henry Sibthorpe seems to have been content with the single, original copy containing his wife's poems in her own hand with her numerous revisions. He may not have been as active a scribal publisher as Egerton, but Sibthorpe certainly felt entitled to serve as critic, for he wrote in the margin next to one of his wife's poems: "wyfe/lyfe to ofte" (fol. 49), perhaps in hope that she might alter the passage. Sibthorpe also included his own handwritten "A List of my Bookes," an inventory which is of considerable interest because it provides insight into the types of reading material that were likely available to Southwell (although some of the books listed were not published until after her death). Even the miscellaneous receipts reveal personal connections that exercised influence over her writing; the couple rented a home from Robert Johnson, the distinguished composer and court lutenist, and Southwell inscribed a poetic eulogy in his honor. In short, the manuscript provides a finely detailed record of the social and cultural milieu from which Southwell's poems, letters, and meditations evolved. Since the Southwell-Sibthorpe commonplace book has never been previously edited, Sr. Jean Klene decided to provide an oldspelling transcription with extensive paleographical notes and facsimile reproductions of selected folios. Her edition will preserve as accurately as possible the original moment of composition, as well as the successive

22

Chapter One

stages of revision. Particularly for unpublished holograph manuscripts, this approach provides the reader with much more information than any photo facsimile would offer. A similar example is the Newberry manuscript of Part Two of The Countess of Montgomery's Urania (Case MS. fY1565.W95), where Wroth inserted corrections using different shades of ink, which may not be distinguishable even in the best reproductions. An oldspelling transcription also has the advantage of preserving the author's own spelling and punctuation, which may reveal puns and rhetorical emphasis within the text. Editions of women's writing have already appeared in a broad spectrum of formats, with some intended primarily for the classroom and others for a scholarly audience. In addition to its full text database of women's writing, soon to become selectively available online via the World Wide Web, the Brown project has already issued a number of hardbound volumes, beginning with Susanne Woods's edition of The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer (1993). The Oxford series is primarily in oldspelling, but individual volumes vary in their editorial procedures. Another newly published series is The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, edited by Betty S. Travitsky and Patrick Cullen, which will make available photo facsimiles of a broad selection of works. A notable exception to the emphasis on women's texts in their original spelling is the recent edition of Mariam by Weller and Ferguson. Because the play is already available in a Malone Society edition (published in 1914 and reprinted in 1992), they provide an alternative text for students and scholars with modernized spelling and punctuation. What is especially interesting is their foregrounding of textual decisions in the commentary, to make their audience aware of the constructed nature of the text. This decision seems fully in keeping with a poststructuralist emphasis on the reader and the multiplicity of reader response. The recovery of women's texts has already begun to exercise influence on studies of the early modern period, including Shakespeare. It is very likely that both Cary and Wroth were among the "privileged playgoers" described by Ann Jennalie Cook and Andrew Gurr, but more research is necessary to determine the extent to which women may have composed the audience for the Globe or Blackfriars. Mariam reveals a knowledge of stagecraft that suggests Cary's familiarity with popular as well as closet drama, just as Wroth's Urania is replete with allusions to the boy actors, the popular stage, and the court masque. Although earlier scholars have described Shakespeare's impact on women's writing (especially in the case of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle), it is certainly possible that

Editing the Women Writers of Early Modern England

23

the influence worked in the opposite direction as well, with the examples of Mary Sidney's verse translation of Antonie and Cary's Mariam as possible candidates. In larger terms, sociocritical treatments of Shakespeare's drama have begun to situate the plays in the context of the rapid increase in women's writing in the early seventeenth century, as well as in relation to the key issues concerning women debated by the pamphleteers. Continuing research is needed on Shakespeare's relationship as poet and playwright to the larger manuscript culture in which he actively participated. Francis Meres's well-known reference in 1598 to Shakespeare's "sugared sonnets among his private friends" suggests that his poems were circulating in handwritten copies for a decade before their publication. To what circles of readership did Shakespeare belong, and did they include women? Heminge and Condell's account of the "diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies" of the plays may suggest that Shakespeare experienced some of the same vulnerabilities of manuscript copy as did his character Beatrice. In a recent essay W. Speed Hill has described the editing of women's writing in these terms: "feminist scholars are actively engaged in recovering texts by and about women, scaling the very intentionalist mountain the other side of which their male confreres are descending" (23). Hill raises a legitimate concern that in the flurry to edit these texts, some scholars may simply rely upon older methodologies that privilege authorial voice without considering other alternatives. He is also correct that the process of preparing scholarly editions of women's writing is only at a beginning stage. On the other hand, the mountain is certainly not limited to women alone, as demonstrated by the recent discoveries of poems by Robert C. Evans, Donald Foster, and Steven May. As the foregoing survey suggests, the project of recovering women's writing involves more than simply the process of editing individual authors; it is ultimately an attempt to reconstruct a lost manuscript culture.

CHAPTER TWO WHY SHOULD A WOMAN EDIT A MAN? SUZANNE GOSSETT

In 1918 there appeared from Cambridge University Press a small book called The Patrimony of the Roman Church. The book was by Edward Spearing, killed in action September 11, 1916, and it was edited by a Miss Evelyn Spearing. The editor describes her work thus: “The book as it stands consists entirely of my brother’s work, but in a somewhat shortened form, and my own share in it has been confined to this compression, and to the addition of a certain number of references and notes.” Due to her “present duties in a military hospital,” Miss Spearing has been unable to do the proofreading herself, and she thanks the press for undertaking this task.1 Thirty-four years later, in 1952, the same lady was herself thanked in an editorial preface thus: “The Junior Editor has rendered continuous service in verifying, collating, and correcting, and in addition her written work has been used in the commentary.” 2 By this time, however, Miss Spearing had been for over thirty years Mrs. Percy Simpson; her name had appeared as a collaborator on the title pages of the great Oxford Edition of Ben Jonson beginning, in 1938, with Volume Five. Furthermore, C. H. Herford, whose name continued to appear first among the three editors through the final eleventh volume published in 1952, had been dead since 1931.3

1

Edward Spearing, The Patrimony of the Roman Church, ed. Evelyn Spearing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1918), ix-x. 2 Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1925-1952), 11: xi. 3 Among Evelyn Simpson’s “written work” for the commentary is a note to Underwood XXXVIII-XLI entitled “A Question of Authenticity” (11: 70). Here Simpson challenges Herford’s earlier assignment, in Volume 2: 383-84, of the three “Elegies,” Underwood XXXVIII, XL, and XLI, to Donne. Although the note uses an authorial “we,” it acknowledges that the material “followed and quoted

26

Chapter Two

Percy Simpson, acknowledger of the junior collaborator, was twenty years older than his wife Evelyn; indeed, when she dedicated the tenth and final volume of the University of California edition of Donne’s Sermons to him in 1961, he was ninety-six years old. On the Donne edition, too, Evelyn, though her name appears second on all ten volumes, had again found herself abandoned to major and unexpected responsibilities; in 1954, her collaborator George R. Potter, ten years younger than she, died after completing only two of the five volumes assigned to him in their initial division of the work. We might say, then, that one of the great reasons why women have edited men in the past was, figuratively, to pick up after them. Fathers, brothers, and husbands have been the beneficiaries of female editing; the list includes such luminaries as Percy Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Stuart Mill. Jack Stillinger says that Harriet Taylor Mill’s editorial function was that of “Mother-Protector” of Mill’s image.4 Furthermore, Stillinger’s list of authors who benefited from unacknowledged collaborators includes quite a few whose work was “changed significantly by a trade editor,” an editor whose sex he does not identify but who, given the demographics of the profession, is today increasingly likely to be a woman cleaning up text for the public.5 here”-indeed often quoted verbatim-is Evelyn Simpson’s article, “Jonson and Donne,” which had appeared in RES 15 (1939): 274-82. 4 Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991), 56. Commenting on the many women historians who edited letters and calendars of documents, Joan Thirsk writes: “It is plainly a mistake for women to show themselves good editors, for they may never emerge from that role. This was the fate of other nineteenth-century women historians who became the amaneuses of their fathers or husbands, and who are hardly ever discernible behind the more bulky masculine presence of their literary partners.” (“Forward,” Women in English Society 1100-1800, ed. Mary Price [London and New York: Methuen, 1985], 4). 5 Stillinger (210) uses this phrase in reference to works by Dashiell Hammett, E.E. Cummings (sic), and John Dos Passos; his source is James L.W. West III, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace Since 1900 (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1983). Three of the female editors Stillinger mentions by name in his chapter on “American Novels: Authors, Agents, Editors, Publishers” were, in the case under discussion, working with women authors: Leona Nevler, a “freelance sender,” and Kitty Messner, president and editor-in-chief of Julian Messner, Inc., with Grace Metalious on Peyton Place (141-143); Helen Wolff with an unidentified woman writer (133-154). Yet Stillinger also notes that one reason for Joseph Heller’s change of publishers was to continue working with Faith Sale (154). The list of “distinguished twentieth-century American editors” on pp. 152153 includes two women, Sale and Betty A. Prashker.

Why Should a Woman Edit a Man?

27

Of course there are other reasons, varying from the pragmatic to the aesthetic, why a woman might choose to edit a man. No matter what historical or psychological explanations we wish to offer for the deficiency, the fact remains that there are few, or at least fewer, female authors of the earlier periods to edit. As a scholar of Renaissance drama, I am unwilling to confine either my editing or my reading to Elizabeth Cary’s Mariam and Mary Sidney’s translation of Antonie. Then there is the intractable problem that Potter and Simpson, praising Donne’s sermons, refer to as “Literary Value.”6 I have argued elsewhere that students specialize in literature not only for its social and historical importance but also—even in 1996—because they are moved by the aesthetic and imaginative structures they find in certain texts.7 It is to such values that Potter and Simpson refer. Surely women are still broadminded enough to enjoy the aesthetic and imaginative when embodied in texts created by men; should some of these women be nascent textual scholars, they may even be inclined to undertake the editing of the male-authored texts which have given them pleasure. No invidious comparison need be implied. A final motivation is discernable in the tantalizing, if not titillating, comment which concludes Evelyn Simpson’s Preface to the last volume of the Sermons. Here she conflates literary and erotic pleasures and acknowledges that incentives romantic and professional may commingle. Looking back half a century, she writes: “My love of Donne has grown through the years, and it has brought me many friends. It was through my early attempts to write something on Donne that I first made the acquaintance of my husband, Percy Simpson, to whom I now dedicate this volume in love and gratitude.” 8 Of course, no woman really edits a man; she edits a man’s text, and the real question we need to address is whether, or what, difference this makes. D. C. Greetham writes scornfully of a mere affirmative action adjustment of the “demographics of editing,” one that would insure a balance between editions of the great white fathers of female historical figures while checking that the editorial staff had a few women on it. But he reports that his proposal for a “Kristevan” edition, in which repressed or rejected variants reappear to subvert the authority of the central intentionalist—and implicitly phallic—text squarely in the middle of the 6 The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Porter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1953), 1: 83-103. 7 “Reimaging English Departments: What is our Future,” ADE Bulletin 108 (1994): 33. 8 Sermons (1962), 10: xiii.

28

Chapter Two

page, met with mute incomprehension from historians of the Association for Documentary Editing.9 Therefore, I will try to suggest some significant differences that female or feminist editing can and does make, even when approaching familiar texts and employing methods less alien than the Kristevan. First, a caveat. As Gary Taylor has noted, there is no assurance that a woman—especially a woman before 1970—editing a male text will take what we might call a feminist position;10 indeed, Esther Cloudman Dunn’s Introduction to her edition of Eight Famous Elizabethan Plays defines drama as showing “men doing and feeling” and condemns Webster’s creation of the “sentimental” Duchess of Malfi because with “this sort of character, Webster forfeits that integrity which keeps Jonson’s [Volpone] virile and credible.”11 Dunn spent most of her professional life teaching at two women’s colleges, Bryn Mawr and Smith, and she shared her life with Marion E. Dodd, a bookstore owner who edited The Trollope Reader with her and would celebrate the publication of each of Dunn’s books by “launching the book with the ringing of a ship’s bell.”12 Yet I doubt that Dunn would have been offended by the unconscious sexism of Clifford Leech’s “On Editing One’s First Play,” where he comments that “a general editor must scrutinize the typescript as fully as a man can” and assumes a male quadrilateral of author, editor, general editor, and publisher that would have excluded Dunn’s work.13 Women of the older generation actually had female mentors (Dunn herself went to England to study alongside Una Ellis-Fermor with Caroline Spurgeon; Simpson thanks Spurgeon and Muriel St. Clare Byrne in her first published work), but they did not stress or publish these relationships. Under the general editorship of Ellis-Fermor from 1946 to 1958 the second Arden edition of Shakespeare included only one volume, As You Like It, edited by a woman (Agnes Latham), and Ellis-Fermor, who refers in one preface to a mysterious friend to whom she owns a debt “as difficult to define as it is fully to acknowledge,” published her own poems in 1937 under the

9

“The Manifestation and Accommodation Theory in Textual Editing,” in Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory, ed. Philip Cohen (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1991), 78-80. 10 “Textual and Sexual Criticism: A Crux in The Comedy of Errors,” Renaissance Drama n.s. 19 (1988): 298. 11 New York: Modern Library, 1932. Viii, xi. 12 Obituary, Daily Hampshire Gazette, August 2, 1977. 13 Studies in Bibliography 23 (1970): 69.

Why Should a Woman Edit a Man?

29

pseudonym Christopher Turnley.14 But today, through her choice of text to edit, her introduction and commentary notes, and even, though more rarely, through her textual decisions, a feminist editor can do a great deal to affect what we think we know about the literature(s) of our tradition(s). As Jerome McGann says: “To edit a text is to be situated in a historical relation to the text’s transmission, but it is also to be placed in an immediate relation to specific cultural and conceptual goals.”15 One of my goals, influenced no doubt by the culture of the academy and the world of Anglo-American scholarship, is to alter the range of teaching materials available; it outrages me that in 1995 I cannot obtain classroom-priced, paperback editions of The Maids Tragedy or The Roaring Girl, though these have become central texts in a feminist revision of the canon of Jacobean drama. I also look forward to the availability of Middleton’s No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s,16 a text that belongs in the center of debates on cross-dressing but is unknown to all but a few scholars. Publication choices among the works of a male author are often as telling as the suppression of female-authored text like Miriam. Introductions and notes are obvious places for revisionism. Some comments from the past simply cry out for female editorial intervention, like Fraser and Rabkin’s dismissive justification of the misogyny of Bussy D’Ambois and The Widow’s Tears merely as “a feature of private theatres.”17 But to see if the differences are consistent, I have been comparing Renaissance plays, by Shakespeare and others, which have benefited from recent editions by both men and women. Let me give two examples. Especially clear distinctions occur between two excellent editions of Taming of the Shrew, Ann Thompson’s 1984 New Cambridge and Brian Morris’s 1981 Arden. Morris repeatedly reduces the treatment of Kate to 14

Una Ellis-Fermor, Christopher Marlowe (London, 1927), x. The Turnley reference is from Who Was Who, 1951-1960 (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1961), 346. Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989), 260, points out that Alice Walker was “The first woman to make any appreciable contribution to the history of Shakespeare editing.” Walker was a student of McKerrow, and her most important work was Textual Problems of the First Folio (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1953). 15 “Literary Pragmatics and the Editorial Horizon,” Devils and Angels,18. 16 Since this paper was delivered, Oxford UP has announced publication of Middleton’s A Mad World, My Master and Other Plays, ed. Michael Taylor, which includes No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s. 17 Drama of the English Renaissance II: The Stuart Period, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin (New York: MacMillan, 1976), 303.

30

Chapter Two

one among several illustrations of the play’s larger structure; that contrasting physical violence with the eloquence of persuasion; or the process of taming, teaching, and testing; or the recurrent images of shrew and hawk; or the themes of education and metamorphosis. He accepts the final speech as “a solemn affirmation of the great common-place,” justified because we know that “she is in love with him as he is with her.”18 Thompson’s introduction instead concentrates directly on the problem that the play’s “‘barbaric and disgusting’ quality has always been an important part of its appeal,” and examines how adapters and directors have dealt with this quality.19 She also analyzes the effect of the play on its editors, who usually try to explain away their discomfort, and discuss specific peculiarities like Kate’s abnormal isolation from female friends. Thompson concludes with a direct statement almost inconceivable for earlier editors of either sex: “The real problem lies outside the play in the fact that the subjection of women to men, although patently unfair and unjustifiable, is still virtually universal. It is the world which offends us, not Shakespeare” (41). Variations between the notes, too, are revealing. Thompson dislikes Bianca; at 1.1.81 she calls her profession of obedience, “ostentatious,” while Morris has no note; at 3.1.39-42 she links Bianca’s skill at holding men off to Cressida’s knowledge of such techniques, while Morris has no note; at 5.2.40-48 she sees Bianca’s skill in bawdy repartee as “out of key with her image as the stereotype romantic heroine.” Most strikingly, at 4.2.54, after Tranio claims Hortensio has left for “the taming-school,” Thompson’s note builds from a discussion of the inconsistencies in Hortensio’s role, through acknowledgement of the folklore originals, to a full reception analysis, concluding that the very notion of such a taming school “implies that the sympathetic scholar or playgoer is likely to be male” (147; 122). Morris makes no comment. Comparing J. R. Mulryne’s 1975 edition of Women Beware Women with Roma Gill’s edition of 1988, I find similarly suggestive contrast in the notes to the song Isabella sings to demonstrate her endowments for marriage. Both editors explain that in the quarto the song was printed side by side with the Ward’s speech. Mulryne, however, deals only with the possible textual sources of this anomaly, whereas Gill also considers content and performance practice. She suggests that the unusual format was intended to indicate that song and speech take place simultaneously, 18

The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Brian Morris (London and New York: Methuen, 1983), 146-47. 19 The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Ann Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), 17.

Why Should a Woman Edit a Man?

31

and she proposes a dramatic justification for the peculiarity. Speaking himself, “the Ward does not hear the coarse insult” of Isabella, who is bemoaning her impending marriage to a “thing for no use good, / But to make physical work.”20 Mulryne, though he almost always has more and longer notes, carefully ignores Isabella’s unfeminine indelicacy. Upon beginning this paper I did not anticipate finding that actual texts would vary with the sex of their editors, and in general, of course, they do not. But not always. Is it accidental that Thompson leaves the Folio’s “happily to wive” (1.2.53), but Morris emends to “haply to wive” at 1.2.55, thus correcting the scansion and retaining the primary meaning (“by chance”), but eliminating overtones from the secondary meaning, “with mental pleasure or content” (OED 4)? That Thompson follows the folio’s “Mistress” at 1.2.18, where Morris emends to “master”? That Mulryne accepts Dyce’s emendation of “never was man’s misery so soon sowed up” to “so soon summed up” (2.1.17), where Gill leaves sow and notes that it is a regular variant for sew? That Mulryne follows the Quarto in Leantio’s death speech, when he says “False wife! I feel now th’hast prayed heartily for me” (4.2.42), but that Gill, who believes that the whole play is about the cruelties of an acquisitive society, emends “False wife, I feel now th’hast paid heartily for me,” thus including women among the purveyors of commodity circulation? In editing A Fair Quarrel for the Oxford Collected Middleton I found that in all of my choices, from which play to edit to the introduction, notes, and text, it did make a difference that I am a woman. I chose A Fair Quarrel because I am interested in the representation of family relations and of pregnancy on the Jacobean stage, and also because I am actively intrigued by, rather than repelled by, the drama as collaborative work. It has been my observation that women’s issues go with the subplot, with the collaborator, with the parts of plays often ignored, and I wanted to make an argument that the collaboration of Middleton and Rowley in this play was close and productive, with neither consistently occupying the feminized, subordinate position. In fact, I concluded that the play’s structure centers on Jane, the citizen-heroine of the second of the three plots, who is largely Rowley’s creation, thus implicitly inverting the usual hierarchies of class and authorship. In a similar inversion of critical expectation, Middleton will imitate one of Rowley’s scenes for Jane in writing the famous confrontation between Bianca and DeFlores in a later Middleton-Rowley collaboration, The Changeling. 20

Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women, ed. J.R. Mulryne (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1975), 98, note to 3.3.343-52; Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women, ed. Roma Gill (London: A & C Black, 1988), 68, note to 3.2.146-153.

32

Chapter Two

In general, notes for my edition were not significantly altered by my gender, unless one attributes to female delicacy my failure to include several obscene phrases which the male general editor, Gary Taylor, added—for instance, “pun on fuck us” as an additional gloss for focus, or, for callicut, “pun on cunt” where I had coyly written “with obscene pun on cut as in Twelfth Night.” But there was one instance of genderbased disagreement that affected both text and commentary. As part of the general reconciliation at the end of A Fair Quarrel, Captain Ager attempts to return the will by which the Colonel, apparently dying, gave everything to his sister, provided she “forthwith tender both herself and all these infeoffments” to the Captain. The recovered and repentant Colonel, in turn, sends the will back by an intermediary, saying: “Since this will was made there fell to me / The manor of Fitzdale; give h’um that too.” In Roger Holdsworth’s edition of the play he emended h’um to ‘em, with a note that emendation to him is “inappropriate: the Colonel’s sister is on stage as well as Ager, and it is she who is the nominee of the will.” Holdsworth explains the Q1 reading as a confusion of ‘um and ‘hem, both “current forms of the contraction”21 and was irate that in a paper for the Shakespeare Association, later published, I disagreed.22 Under Jacobean law, “the married woman could own no personal property…[and] she lost all power over her realty during the marriage.”23 Her husband gained complete control over any land she might possess, though he could not alienate it without her consent. Once the Sister has given herself to the Captain, the property in all is effectively his, as was the Colonel’s intention. I have no doubt that the Colonel’s additional gift is to the Captain; the silent Sister’s role in this male-male transaction is revealed clearly in the full passage: Give him that too. He’s like to have charge, there’s fair hope Of my sister’s fruitfulness.

In correspondence Holdsworth objected on textual grounds and demanded that I indicate that “him is a more extreme and interventionist emendation

21

London: Ernest Benn, 1974. 130. “Sibling Power: Middleton and Rowley’s A Fair Quarrel,” Philological Quarterly 71 (1991), 437-57. Holdsworth expressed his irritation in personal correspondence. 23 W.S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law (London: Methuen, 1909), 3: 415. For a fuller analysis of this scene, see “Sibling Power.” 22

Why Should a Woman Edit a Man?

33

than ‘em, whatever its interpretive benefits.”24 And this I am willing to do. I am willing to set as a “cultural and conceptual goal” a few extreme and interventionist emendations that traditional single-sex editing has not attempted. Interpretive benefits are not the only ones possible. The most important benefit of all will be to see more women in the editorial ranks, editing both women and men.

24

Private correspondence, 23 November 1992.

CHAPTER THREE THE COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE AND GENDERED READING GARY F. WALLER

The discussions of “femmeninism,” of men reading “as a woman,” between Elaine Showalter and Jonathan Culler, Stephen Heath, Peggy Kamuf, Paul Smith, and others have focused on the questions of whether and, if so, how men can read women’s writing outside the seemingly gender-neutral but (in fact) predominantly masculinist discourse of traditional criticism and scholarship.1 There seems to be no commonsense reason why male readers cannot ask the same questions of a text as a female reader (“How do I respond?” “What are the effects of this text on me?” “Which of its textual strategies are especially powerful?”). Yet, one can counter, are those questions really the “same”? Are they asked from the “same” position—that defined by being the body-of-a-woman, and of having distinctive demands made on and for that body? What gendered reading (as opposed to textual) strategies, in short, are operative in any particular reading situation, in the “matching of repertoires” that occurs whenever we read? That “we,” of course, is a large part of the problem. Can men—today, at all—have the “grain of the voice,” the “intonation” or “syntax” that would otherwise distinguish a woman’s expression of the same concepts and discourses? (Ross 87).2 If, as Foucault has taught us, to exercise power is to figurate “the real” in the details of discourse, then is it crucial that women readers not only stake out their “own” distinctive place of power but even exclude men from standing with them? And is such a move particularly crucial when dealing with women writers? These are 1

On this point, this essay has also benefited from comments from members of my graduate seminar on the Sidneys at Carnegie Mellon, notably by John Timmons and Craig Dionne, and from comments by and conversations with Naomi Miller and Janice Holm. 2 The term “marching of repertoires” comes from Waller, McCormick, and Fowler 5-15, and from McCormick, Waller, and Flower 19-27.

36

Chapter Three

hard questions—not just intellectually but also experientially difficult. For those of us who are men, they challenge us to rethink many of the practices we have comfortably taken for granted most of our professional (and, longer, our personal) lives. At the very least, the extent to which readings of women writers have in the past been (and are now being) affected by gender-specific factors is a crucial question in the contemporary critical climate. The rediscovery of Mary Sidney’s work this century—from Frances Berkeley Young onward—has been shared by both men and women scholars, but until very recently the terms in which this rediscovery has been set out were innocent (or, more accurately, ignorant) of any self conscious consideration of gender except in the most obvious terms. Seen within the history of criticism, its terms were predominantly formalisthistoricist; it was concerned primarily with reviewing Mary Sidney’s work for its “own” intrinsic interests or as part of gaining a fuller picture of her historical setting. As the area of gender studies has gained more prominence, her life and work have also been seen in terms of her status as a woman writer. But until recently such a consideration has existed mainly on the level of the commonplace. If we examine the critical context in which Mary Sidney’s work has been largely put—if, in short, we analyze the general and literary repertoires of the critics—we find a blindness to the gender-related particulars of both her writings—and (even more interestingly) their own situatedness. This is not to say that there have not been scholars and critics who have focused on the countess as a woman as well as a writer. Young’s biographical study (1912) was unquestionably one such pioneering work. But her critical stance, while acknowledging (obviously) that the countess’s roles as daughter, sister, wife, and mother were not without interest, never treats them as occupying socially constructed gender roles. Her approach is not only belletrist and impressionistic, but also coyly sentimental. In discussing the countess’s marriage, for instance, Young conjures up the specter of a lustful ogre, the middle-aged Henry Herbert, second earl of Pembroke, and invites her reader to imagine “the probable emotions” of a pious maiden ravaged by “a man more than twenty-five years older than herself and infinitely more experienced, for good and evil, in worldly affairs” (34). In the same tradition, equally sentimental though more overtly salacious, was Rudolf Holzapfel’s Shakespeare’s Secret (1961), which has the “vivacious Mary Sidney” shortly after her marriage becoming (of all people!) Shakespeare’s mistress, and then (as a consequence) the mother of his illegitimate son, William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets are supposedly

The Countess of Pembroke and Gendered Reading

37

addressed. Holzapfel admits (undoubtedly correctly): “I may be ridiculed by layman and expert,” but nonetheless goes indefatigably on: “yet I must tell you: William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, poet, courtier, Knight of the Garter and Lord Chamberlain . . . was Shakespeare’s own son” (xi). Shakespeare’s sonnets are then interpreted in terms of this supposed relationship. On the whole, especially since J. C. A. Rathmell’s pioneering edition of Psalms (1963), traditional historicist scholars and critics who have focused on the countess as a writer rather than as a woman have produced the more interesting work. Yet, as we have learned in the past two decades, such a stance of gender neutrality is deceptive. To focus on merely “literary” questions and values is to be blind to such aspects of a text’s, a writer’s, or a reader’s repertoire as gender or class—in short, it is to be blind to the historical situatedness from which any reading is made. Hence, to acknowledge (as Young did) that Mary Sidney was a woman, and therefore of interest to modern readers, may in fact establish a useful basis for a new consideration of her work. But unless what it is to be a woman reader is problematized for both the writer and the critic, then such criticism remains within a paradigm that is inherently limiting, whether it is written by a woman or (as Culler would argue) a man reading “as a woman.” Likewise, unless a male critic—or a woman reading “as a man”—problematizes what it is to read Mary Sidney’s work as a man, he (or she) takes both her work and its reading out of history. In such cases, the result is a reification of a culturally archaic fall-back position in which reading strategies are simply allowed to be written by the dominant masculinist scholarly discourse, one that assumes that a text is, in a simplistic way, a “reflection” or (contradictorily) an “expression” of its author or its society (Belsey, chap. I). In such a paradigm, the situatedness of the historian or critic is not seen as problematic, since it is assumed that it is the reader’s role to be as “objective” as possible and to let the text speak “for itself.” Surveying the work on the countess of Pembroke before the 1980s (including my 1977 edition of her poetry and my 1979 critical study of her “life and milieu”), this is largely what I now observe—a general blindness to the received, seemingly gender-independent criteria of traditional scholarship and criticism in which we were all working. The countess and her work were interesting to us because she was a woman, certainly; but we had not gone on to problematize the gender-specific categories within which we read her life and works. The “we” here is a gender-blind collective voice, a dehistoricized masculinist discourse that has tried to embrace both men and women. Increasingly in the past decade, criticism has become sensitive to the

38

Chapter Three

fact that a reader must be accountable for and implicated in his or her own readings. Just as texts are produced in history, increasingly it is realized, so too are readers. Every reader brings a different set of experiences, concerns, knowledge, and expectations to bear on a text. No reader can pretend to be neutral or universal in his or her questions. We (a different collective voice here) acknowledge that, in Althusserian terms, no reading is innocent: we are required only to say what reading we are guilty of. Until recently, however, such acknowledgments, and the criticism they imply, have remained marginal to the dominant formalist critical models built ultimately on the Cartesian distinction of subject and object and the positivistic assumption that language is a neutral, value-free tool. Yet over the past twenty years such a model of the reading situation has been radically challenged. Just as texts are inextricably connected with the age in which they were written, so readers, too, are implicated in the particular sociocultural formations in which they live; they are produced by their society’s ideology, both literary and general. Like a text, every reader operates within a particular literary and general repertoire. Different readings arise in part because different readers bring to their reading different repertoires—a set of culturally conditioned expressions, beliefs, knowledge, expectations, literary preferences, and life-styles. That is not to say that a particular society will produce a standardized and agreed upon reading. Within any society, quite different reading formations can be observed. But the dominant ideology of any period makes some beliefs more plausible than others, while marginalizing still others (McCormick, Waller, and Flower 10). When a text is read, therefore, quite diverse matchings of repertoires can occur between text and reader. The text invariably tries to privilege a particular range of readings, offering clues by which readers are encouraged to construct readings. But the process of reading is affected equally strongly by the distinctive cognitive styles and the overdetermined enculturation of the text’s readers: reading is not something that occurs either independent of the ordinary processes of cognition or outside the distinctive constraints of a culture. “Gender” itself is, of course, a culturespecific category: there may be still some argument about biologism, whether there are inherent or “natural” categories distinctive to each gender, but such arguments smack of an essentialism that most feminist (and other literary) theorists are today trying to avoid, except (and admittedly this is not a trivial exception) as a political stance or tactic. The fundamental and, let us hope, uncontroversial point is that the practice of reading is not something we do outside a historically and culturally created situation. All readings are made from and on behalf of particular positions;

The Countess of Pembroke and Gendered Reading

39

a strong reading makes these positions as explicit as possible. Patriarchal society has tended to marginalize certain kinds of readings, and as gender awareness and feminism in particular have decentered men’s dominate place in discourse, we (this we is “men” or “male critics”) have had to learn the implications of our gendered assumptions—and, clearly, not only about reading, although “reading” broadly considered is certainly central to that process of learning.

II Such a theorization of the reading situation provides the basis for explaining what occurs when a male critic reads the texts of a woman writer. I want next to exemplify some of these theoretical concerns in relation to the readings of the countess of Pembroke—including some of my own previous relatively untheorized readings, however (always, of course, the exploiter’s plea) well intentioned they may have been. As Stephen Heath puts it, “Men have a necessary relation to feminism; the point after all is that it should change them too” (I). This essay is record of such (if as yet partial) change. There is always the excuse of tradition. Such is the weight of the residual paradigm in which the countess’s work has been put, that it can be traced as far back as her own time. Given the general history of women’s writing and its readers, that is not a surprising observation, but the particular terms in which the countess has been praised from her own time to ours are especially revealing. As Mary Ellen Lamb has shown, the place of the woman-as-reader is carefully proscribed in Renaissance texts. Women are written as potential readers into texts by a dominant male discourse. A woman is interpellated to fulfill a limited number of roles: as a skilled humanist pupil, subservient to the text; as a Protestant, subservient to the male god of theology; or as the gentlewoman reader, flirted with, frivolous, but still essentially under male authority.3 This process of proscription in which, as a woman, the countess was simultaneously lavishly praised and given strictly delimited roles, all subservient to a dominant male discourse, can be seen from those works in which she is directly addressed. In works by Nicholas Breton, Thomas Moffett, Edmund Spenser, Nathaniel Baxter, and Abraham Fraunce, the countess plays a major role. As well, there is a host of incidental 3

Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Countess of Pembroke's Readers,” forthcoming. I am grateful to Mary Lamb for allowing me to read her essay and to cite her on this point.

40

Chapter Three

references, such as the famous epitaph by William Browne of Tavistock. From these works, a symbolic system emerges by which the countess, as a socially powerful woman, is positioned and controlled as a reader by her male followers and poets. If humans acquire individuality only as a condition of being inserted into the “réel” which governs and defines what it is to be human (Jameson 384), a woman—whether as writer or reader— is traditionally outside the symbolic in this sense, and it has been the role of masculinist critical discourse to define under what conditions she may be afforded such a place. Mary Sidney was not silenced, but in her lifetime and after she was awarded a place within discourse only as an object of representation or on condition of her subservience. She is primarily, in Browne’s words, “Sidney’s Sister, Pembroke’s Mother,” not just as the subject of biological and legal discourses, but as a reading and writing subject. Just as for Browne she is defined by her roles in relation to her brother and son, so too for Spenser she is “sister unto Astrofell,” and for Nashe “the Fayre sister of Phoebus.” She is thereby accorded power—but it is the power of the pedestal. She is free to move only by standing still. In such works, insofar as Mary Sidney is a writer or a reader, her role is that of the apprentice, the pupil, and the approving patron, and her language is given to her by her masters.4 The most substantial texts in which the countess is addressed are those by two of her proteges, Nicholas Breton and Abraham Fraunce. Fraunce’s Countesse of Pembrokes lvychurcb (1591), in which a hunt in Tasso’s tale of Amyntas is freely adapted—complete with a gratuitous (and fortuitous) bear who obliges by being slain by “Pembrokiana”—gives us a view of how Fraunce saw the countess presiding, as “the Matchless Lady regent,” over what Breton called her “little court” at Wilton. As the “brave Lady Regent of these woods,” Pembrokiana is depicted as being in control of the pastimes and the “solempne great hunting,” but the terms in which she is described are a revealing mixture of worship and fixity. Her role is to preside, to bless (by her presence and presumably her purse) the activities of her followers especially her poets. She is the inspiring monarch, but she lacks a monarch’s power. More revealingly, in The Pilgrimage to Paradise (1592), a work by Nicholas Breton, we can start to see 4

Waller, Mary Sidney, 2. For further references by contemporaries to the countess's patronage and reputation, see also 67-73. The revisionist views of Mary Ellen Lamb provide, however, a useful corrective in that, clearly, not all those who commented on the countess's bounty or talent were members of her circle. See Lamb, "The Countess of Pembroke's Patronage," English Literary Renaissance 12 (1982): 162-79, and "The Myth of the Countess of Pembroke," YES I I (1981): 194-202.

The Countess of Pembroke and Gendered Reading

41

something of the ideological contradictions by which she was positioned. Breton compares the countess at Wilton with Elizabeth Gonzaga at Urbino, describing her role and thereby interpellating her as the subject of a contradictory discourse that is at once courtly, autonomous, and beneficent and at the same time fixes her as powerless to move except within the role of patroness and the unmoving inspiration to her male writers. She is a “right noble Lady, whose rare vertues, the wise no lesse honour, then the learned admire, and the honest serve.” He is “the abject of fortune” where she is the “object of honour.” Knowing her is an inspiration to write for her followers, servants, and those who fall “at the feete of” her favor, offering to celebrate her with their own writing. Despite the fact that by 1592 the countess had completed the bulk of her own writing—a play, a prose translation, nearly two hundred psalms and some of her incidental verses, including the translation of one of Petrarch’s Trionfi, Breton describes her not as a writer but as a reader. She is the “favourer of learning” and “the mainteiner of Arte,” whereas he is “your poore unworthy named poet.”5 Positioned thus primarily as a woman and a reader (rather than as a writer), the countess can be denied the activity of a subject position in the discourse of poetry. Her writing career, of course, reflects such a placing of her and her work: she is autonomous only to the extent that she encourages and rewards her (male) poets. In her own work, that autonomy is denied. The extensive and increasingly confident experiments in verse form, meter, and stanzaic pattern that distinguish her versions of the psalms were made with her brother’s translations before her. They were probably started shortly after his death in 1586 and when finally completed and assembled, the collection was dedicated to his memory. She completed the translation of her brother’s friend Philippe de Mornay’s Discourse de la Vie et de La Mort before 1590 (it was published that year), and about the same time she completed another translation in accord with her brother’s principles of drama, the Marc-Antoine by Robert Garnier. In her other incidental writings too, the presence of her brother is paramount. Such observations are by now commonplace enough: Mary Sidney was a widely admired patroness and a highly competent, even original, translator of her brother’s and other (men’s) works. But such a reading of Mary Sidney and her work as that I am attempting, stressing both the gender-specific production of her writings and the gender-specific bias of her readers, involves a greatly expanded range of questions and issues 5

Abraham Fraunce, The Countesseof Pembrokes lvychurch (London, I 591), sigs. BZV, EIV, E2v; Nicholas Breton, The Pilgrimage to Paradise (Oxford, 1592), 18.

42

Chapter Three

from that assumed by traditional formalist or historicist observations. It involves, first, reading her work in relation to the general and literary ideology of her time, focusing on the particular repertoires appropriated by her work and articulated in it. It involves in particular focusing on the powerful ideological absences of work—many of which are, indeed, gender specific. But as well, second, it involves becoming conscious of the different reading formations in which her work has been and can be read subsequently: it thus focuses on the general and literary repertoires of her readers, which are in turn appropriations from the general and literary ideology of their society. Both text and readers are situated within history, products of different social formations. As Tony Bennett puts it, reading “takes place not within texts but between texts, and between texts and readers: not some ideal, disembodied reader, but historically concrete readers whose act of reading is conditioned, in part by the text it is true, but also by the whole ensemble of ideological relationships which bear upon the incessant production and reproduction of texts” (174-75).

III I wish now to exemplify some of these theoretical principles in more detail. Piety, literary fashion, and subservience to her brother certainly consciously motivated most of Mary Sidney’s writings. Three poems are direct tributes to her brother Philip: the so-called Doleful Lay of Clorinda, included in Spenser’s Colin Clout and described by the countess as her “certain idle passion”; a dedicatory poem to Queen Elizabeth; and “To the Angell Spirit of the most excellent Sir Phillip Sidney,” both the latter found in one of the manuscripts of her Psalms.6 The last is especially interesting in its direct statement of the countess’s motive for writing, which is to express her grief at her brother’s death and her desire to dedicate her own poetical skills to his memory: It has, she says, “no further scope” but to “honor” him, to “pay the debt of infinits” she owes to his memory. The poem is conventional enough, typical of the praises a generation of fellow poets gave to Sidney—apart from a few highly personalized lines. Sidney is not only her poetic inspiration—“what is mine / inspired by thee, thy secret power imprest”—and the embodiment of heaven’s grace, but something more personal and disturbing that is hinted at when she writes of the “so strange passions” that strike her heart when she thinks of him. Is 6

The texts may be found in Waller, Triumph of Death, 87-95, 176-79.

The Countess of Pembroke and Gendered Reading

43

the tone of adulation in such phrases something more than conventional? Is there something in (or, more accurately, in the vicinity of) this poem that could provoke comments like those of Ben Jonson on Donne’s “Anniversary” poems as “profane and full of blasphemies . . . if it had been written of the Virgin Mary it had been something.” Is the countess describing the “idea” of Sidney, not (as Donne replied to Jonson when accused of blasphemously idealizing a mere mortal woman) “as he was.” Here a manuscript revision may be revealing. The line “my thoughts, whence so strange passions flowe” is not found in an earlier, rough draft of the poem that was printed mistakenly in the 1623 edition of the works of Samuel Daniel: it was added in a later revision, as if an affirmation beyond the hopes of idealization was trying to force itself through (Waller, Triumph of Death, 97-102). When I first published and commented on these two versions of the countess’s poem ten years ago, I, perhaps no less than Mary Sidney herself, was reaching for some way of articulating my unease with the strange feeling many readers sense lie behind those lines. Indeed there is perhaps not a little prurience in the remarks about what I perceived as a missed beat, a tremor, in the poem—a moment at which something more than I could then articulate needed to, be said. There was, of course, an existing discourse into which my remarks fitted. It was the male-created discourse of the gaze, spying on and anatomizing women as objects and so placing them under male control. More than half a century after her death, John Aubrey had remarked of Mary Sidney that “there was so great love between” Sidney “and his faire sister that I have heard old gentlemen say that they lay together.”7 My response in the late 1970s was to fit comfortably and unselfconsciously into the same mode of discourse and to draw (or, rather, pretend not to draw) an analogy between Mary Sidney and Dorothy Wordsworth. It was, it might be said again, well-intentioned even though intentions do not count for much in such matters. Yet, unbeknown perhaps, it was not an entirely inappropriate analogy, since in the past decade we have learned to understand Dorothy Wordsworth, Fanny Brawne—and, for that matter, Mary Sidney—much better as gendered subjects, positioned within ideology, and so we can place Aubrey’s remark in a tradition of men constituting women by the gaze or of controlling their sexuality by marginalizing it as salacious or improper. We have also been faced by larger questions of how women struggle to constitute themselves as writing or sexual subjects. Instead of focusing on what I then rejected as “the perils of historical psychoanalysis” (Waller, 7

John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. 0 . L. Dick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948). 220.

44

Chapter Three

Mary Sidney,100) we can now focus powerfully on revealing the cultural unconscious of a text like “To the Angell Spirit.” We can note the systematic subordination of the countess to her roles as wife, mother, sister, and writer, and so to a number of masculinist discourses. We can also note the masochism with which she embodied her permission to speak, verbally and bodily, in the “spirit” of her dead brother. We can speculate on how much of her experience, given to her by her culture and gender both, must have been “other” to her. In Lacan’s terms, she can be seen as restricted to the Oedipal “wave of passivity,” which traditionally is alone “capable of introducing the subject to the ideals of his or her sex” (Mitchell and Rose 109). We can also speculate on how much her subjection enables her to achieve a measure of autonomy and agency. The family, of course—and informing that, a powerfully interconnecting set of myths of patriarchy, political power, and lineage—helped to determine both the ways Mary Sidney was subjected to powerful discourses outside her control, how she struggled as a gendered subject to make her mark on the world, and therefore the extent to which she was able to challenge these myths. The Sidney family—especially in the century before the Civil War—was not merely a collection of individual men and women linked by kinship, but also a major site of contradictory cultural forces, a discursive formation in miniature in which the broader conflicts of the age were being enacted. We cannot talk about the Sidney family “itself” any more than we can talk about Mary Sidney “herself” or the texts she wrote in “themselves.” Both Mary Sidney and her writing are fascinatingly dense transfer points for the operation of power in a wider cultural framework. Even more, we can use what we have learned about the psychological structure of early modern family relations, especially in relation to the production of gender roles, to elucidate Mary Sidney’s significance and our own places in relation to it. Even studying the records of an Elizabethan family, one can identify a whole series of double binds, relationship traps that arose from the interacting strains of class, gender, and social roles within the family structure produced by patriarchal culture. Mary Sidney was the daughter of an ambitious, nervous, upwardly mobile father, the devoted sister of two powerful brothers, Philip (who died young but whose influence and power over her increased after his death) and Robert, and she was the mother of one of the most brilliant, aggressive womanizers in the Jacobean Court, William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke. In addition, if almost incidental to her literary life, her husband the second earl was a remote, elderly figure whose economic (if not intellectual) power over her was not to be discounted, even if (as

The Countess of Pembroke and Gendered Reading

45

traditionally has been argued) her position as countess of Pembroke gave her the scope to preside over Wilton House and Baynard Castle, the London home of the earl of Pembroke, which was shared with the Sidneys. The most powerful of these male influences over her was undoubtedly that of her brother (her relationship with her son will be the focus of part of a further, full-length study on which I am presently working). Her Psalms, which constitute the countess’s greatest claim to sustained poetical achievement, were written under her brother’s (absent) tutelage. They were the works by the countess that were best known to her contemporaries and they upheld her reputation as a writer for fifty years after her death, by which time John Aubrey (once again) inaccurately but revealingly mentioned “a translation of the whole book of Psalms, in English verse, by Sir Philip Sidney, writt curiously, and bound in crimson velvet and gilt.”8 The “Sidnean Psalmes,” as Donne called them, were in fact mainly composed by the countess, not by her brother. They remained unpublished until 1823 and were never fully published with all their variants until J. C. A. Rathmell published his “semi popular edition” in 1963 and I supplemented his edition in 1977 (Triumph of Death). The sixteen manuscripts of the Psalms show that Mary Sidney spent over twenty years on these poems. She was, in William Ringler’s term, an “inveterate tinkerer,” a phrase that I quoted in my earlier work on her without seeing its dismissive connotations.9 The countess saw her repeated working on the psalms as a continuation of her brother’s playful yet pious experimentation with meter, stanza, and trope in the forty-three psalms he completed. I say “playful” because the countess’s “tinkering” might be seen more interestingly and fairly than as merely the nervous tic of a literary dilettante. The evidence from the Psalms manuscripts shows her continually shifting epithets, altering rhymes, translating psalms into a variety of English verse forms. She made quite different versions of a number of psalms. Psalms 120-27, for example, exist in quantitative verse forms as well as in simpler ballad stanzas, and there are two and sometimes three quite distinct versions of a number of psalms. In a sense, the countess had no “final” version of the work. In 1599 she had a copy made by the scribe John Davies of Hereford for presentation to the queen on a visit to Wilton House, but even as it was being copied, she was making changes. In all there are over 150 distinguishable psalms in her 8

John Aubrey, The Natural History of Wiltshire, ed. John Britton (London, 1847), 86. 9 William A. Ringler, ed., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 502; Waller, Triumph of Death.

46

Chapter Three

collection, plus many substantive and minor variants. She expressed her dedication in Psalm 111, a poem in which the first letters of the lines spell out the alphabet: At home, abroud most willingly I will Bestow on God my praises utmost skill

But more revealing, when we consider the manner in which she revised her work, are four lines in Psalm 104: As for my self, my seely self, in me while life shall last, his worth in song to show I framed have a resolute decree. And thankfull be, till being I forgoe.

The pronouns are significant here, in particular the contrast between the devalued self of the poet and the “worth” of the male authority figure. For twenty and more years, Mary Sidney worked over her brother’s manuscript, learning from not only God’s but her brother’s “worth,” his continuing example and guidance. She kept two working copies of the psalms, one at Wilton House and one at Baynard Castle, in London. Often discrete changes were copied from one working copy to the other; sometimes, quite distinct versions of the same psalm were developed independently. The additions and independent versions provide us with glimpses in the interstices of translation into something of her strategies as a writer—as well as into the ideological repertoire she brought into her work. To some she added a distinctively courtly note as if wanting to move the original into the more playful realm of the courtly lyric; to others she added a stern Calvinist emphasis, thus reinforcing their religious impact; and most interestingly, some psalms mix Calvinist and courtly elements in what I have elsewhere termed, using Arthur Golding’s translation of a phrase of Calvin’s, a “matching of contraries.”10 It is these last psalms where the contradictory discourses that produced the countess as a woman and a writer are most evident. She was caught amongst conflicts over which she had little control and in which she struggled to “own” a voice. I summarize Mary Sidney’s method of working on the psalms because, 10

The Psalms of David with Calvinist Commentaries, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1571), Psalm 8. See the discussions in Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century, 144, and "'This matching of Contraries': The Influence of Calvin and Bruno on the Sidney Circle," Neophilology 56 (1972): 331-43.

The Countess of Pembroke and Gendered Reading

47

it seems to me, we should see it in the light of what Lacan terms woman’s “supplementary jouissance.” His phrase, as Jacqueline Rose notes, points to a recognition of woman’s “‘something more,’ the ‘more than jouissance,’” which Lacan locates in the Freudian notion of repetition excecpetition—“what escapes or is left over from the phallic function, and exceeds it” (Mitchell and Rose 51). Like the traditional Western female subject, Mary Sidney’s writing embodies (largely) a question not an assertion, the question of her own (that is her repressed) gender-specific jouissance. Her “tinkerings” represent what her culture would have approved of, a subordination to a male, since the originals are after all, psalms to God, and to a doubly authoritative transcendental paternalistic ideology. Yet by their very obsessive repetitiveness, her writing makes gestures toward a supplementary, what might become in a later cultural conjunction, an owned, jouissance. Elaine Showalter notes that because the woman writer “has no alternative” to the dominant discourse, she can “inscribe her disaffection only through a deliberate mimicry” ( 138). There is, says Lacan, a “jouissance proper to” woman, “to this ‘her’ which does not exist and which signifies nothing. There is a jouissance proper to her and of which she herself may know nothing, except that she experiences it—that much she does know” (quoted in Mitchell and Rose 5 I). Here Lacan is trying to avoid the essentialism of speaking of the feminine, or of “woman”: undoubtedly, the best way of avoidance is to historicize how particular women were spoken and read by the dominant discourses of particular ages. The countess’s “tinkerings” in the psalms are at once evidence for her being written by the masculinist patriarchal/fratriarchal discourse of her age; yet at the same time they show the glimmerings of a “disaffection” as she struggled to encode her own jouissance. Something similar can be observed in the work of her niece, Lady Mary Wroth, where a constant sense of “molestation” is at once a helpless cry against patriarchy and a smothered assertion of a counter-discursive sexuality (Waller, “Struggling into Discourse,” 248). We should briefly observe the same pattern in the countess of Pembroke’s other writings. The Tragedie of Antonie and A Discourse of Life and Death were both written under the shadow of both Sidney and God, the same potent combination that had “authorized” the Psalms. By the late 1580s no dramatist had taken up Sidney’s call for the “notable morallitie” and “stately speeches” of the French neo-Senecan closet drama, so the countess’s sense of literary vocation directed her to take on that task as well.11 Her translations initiated a series of English closet 11

Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip

48

Chapter Three

dramas, the most notable of which are Daniel’s Tragedy of Cleopatra (1594) and Greville’s Mustapha (1599) and Alaham (I601). The distinctively favorable view Garnier took of Cleopatra may well have appealed to the countess’s own sense of being a woman, just as Philippe de Mornay’s Discours de la Vie et de La Mort undoubtedly appealed to her because of its subject—and because its author had been a friend of her dead brother. In translating Discours, Mary Sidney must have been only too deeply aware of the force of the commonplaces of ars moriendi: her daughter Katherine died in 1584, her father and mother, as well as Philip, died in 1586. Around her the golden age of the Elizabethan court was breaking up, and although Wilton House, the “little court,” must have seemed a safe and tranquil haven, the omnipresence of death was clearly a subject on which the countess had personal as well as intellectual conviction. The most interesting of the countess of Pembroke’s works outside the Psalms is the translation of Petrarch’s “Triumph of Death.” Not fully published until my edition of her works in 1977, the countess’s translation is a triumph of technical mastery, formal ingenuity, and vigorous language.12 It is also intriguing because of its subject—the dead Laura, idealized by the poet, farewelling him and setting him free to praise her while he waits, in the world, for the day they will be joined in heaven: Ladie (quoth I) your words most sweetie kinde Have easie made, what ever erst I bare, But what is left of you to live behinde. Therefore to know this, my onelie care, If doe or swift shall corn our meeting-day. She parting saide, As my conjectures are, Thow without me long time on earth shalt staie. (78-79)

Why did the countess choose this particular trionfo to translate? Did the combination of idealized but intense love and death have an unusual personal attraction for her? What seems to be equally important to note is that, unlike Petrarch, the countess found her forbidden love’s death a liberation into autonomy, into being more than a passive reader of the significance of her brother’s life. Instead, even within the restrictive practices of her society, she became a writer, and the overdetermination of her gendered role, an act of “homage” (Schor 98) which opened up—in absence if not visibly in her texts—emergent struggles that would surface Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan and Jan van Dorscen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), I 13. 12 Quotations are taken from Waller, Triumph of Death, 66-79.

The Countess of Pembroke and Gendered Reading

49

later in our history.

IV I want, finally, to retheorize something of the approach I am taking in this paper—an approach that I believe has important implications for historical scholarship generally. The goal of a symptomatic history such as I am attempting is to read back into the texts of the past the ideological contradictions that their rhetorical and structural devices were designed to exclude. We can usefully categorize these exclusions as “silences” and “absences.” “Silences” occur where a text deliberately does not speak of issues and pressures that were contemporary with its production but that were only, as it were, in the vicinity of the text, that helped, silently, to produce it as it appeared. “Absences” are the ruptures in a text where it could not, was unable to, speak—because the language or the social practices that would enable it to do so were not yet available. Historical criticism’s traditional task has been to make the silences of a text speak: to bring the political, religious, material practices of a culture that, as it is conventionally put, “influenced” that text to bear on our reading of it. What recent theory has legitimized are ways of reading absences into a text, reading it for the broader cultural patterns into which later readers may see it fit but that were not present or even perhaps possible at the time. Such absences show where texts reach a point beyond which there can be only gaps and puzzlements, where the writing contradicts itself, or comes to a premature close often because as yet, historically, no language is available or adequate to fill out the absences. We all live within systems of representations that both enable and limit our articulations as living (and writing or reading) subjects; the absences of our particular historical conjunctions can often be articulated only by later readers who see them precisely as absences, as signs perhaps of a preemergent break with the epistemic limits of a particular society, class, gender, or family, and who link that “absence” with a (by-now) more visible preoccupation within their own society. With Mary Sidney, issues of gender point clearly to such a major set of absences. I have presented her as a woman “written” by men—in particular by God and by her brother, with the two sometimes not easily distinguished. She occupied the classic position of woman as mediatrix: her body—as daughter, sister, wife, and mother—the site of struggle for men and their language. As Rosi Braidotti puts it, “it’s on the woman’s body—on her absence, her silence, her disqualification—that phallocentric discourse rests” (235). In making the argument, of course, I am also

50

Chapter Three

making her a subject of my own uneasily gender-conscious discourse, using her words as traces (which they often, indeed, literally are) of contradictory discursive practices. Many of these—the dominant ones— are the discourses of predominantly masculinist scholarship and criticism. The most notable counterdiscourse is, of course, that evoked today by her gender. Does it matter that I acknowledge the importance of this counterdiscourse as a man? Or can I, as Culler would argue (and as I would like in more complacent moments to assume) read “as a woman”? (43-64). Behind the phrase are a number of unfortunate assumptions. Two in particular need to be teased out. The first is gender essentialism—that there are, indeed, “universal” or “natural” ways by which men and women read rather than that there are prior historically produced discourses within which men and women are subjected. Yet to read “as a man” may involve very different assumptions today, for me, than it did for Sidney or Daniel or Jonson over four hundred years ago, or even than it did for me a decade ago. We are all historical subjects, written not only by contradictory but (partly because contradictory) by changing discourses. The second is textual essentialism—the assumption that it might be appropriate to read (or to try to read) as a woman because the countess of Pembroke was one and therefore reading as a woman will somehow get us closer to the “truth” of her writing, to its “essential” meaning. Behind Culler's wellintentioned concession to feminism is, therefore, an older paradigm of both reading and writing—that these are essential truths and that they reside somehow “in” texts, waiting for appropriately educated readers to extract them. But readings are always made from and on behalf of positions. Those positions are not absolute or authoritative: they do not valorize meanings any more than texts can do so. Meanings are neither “in” the reader nor “in” the text; they are always interactive and, as such, always historically situated. When a reader starts to become self-conscious about how (like the text being read) he or she is situated, then it is possible to start to construct a model for reading that is neither essentialist nor blind to gender. Each reader has a characteristic repertoire of literary assumptions and reading strategies which is the product of education, class, and other factors—including gender. No text makes sense “in itself”: it wants, always, to be read. Rereading my own early work, like many critics trained in the contradictory conjunction of formalism and old historicism, a combination that still dominates so much of our discipline, I am only gradually becoming aware of many of the ideological assumptions buried deep in the

The Countess of Pembroke and Gendered Reading

51

language that writes me. According to the culturally rooted interactive theory of reading from which I have worked throughout this essay, a reader should always strive to problematize her or (in this case, his) reading situation. But such an effort should not simply turn into a personality profile: an individual reader is always subject to wider cultural forces than is usually compassed within simplistic notions of subjectivity or being an “individual.” For any reader to acknowledge that he or she has acquired “natural” assumptions about reading is to become aware not only of cognitive style but also, more specifically, of cultural situatedness. We can acquire, from our wider culture, a variety of reading strategies that may (some would say “must”) include an awareness of gender issues. Such an awareness of the cognitive processes of reading involves an exploration of factors underlying our responses, but it needs to be complemented by an acknowledgment of the cultural imperatives underlying cognitive style. Increasing our cognitive and cultural awareness of the ways we read texts includes, therefore, starting to understand how, as readers, we are produced not as neutral but as gendered subjects, asking gender-specific questions, from a particular though changing cultural conjunction. We need always to foreground this process of situating ourselves. We can thus avoid the essentialism of reading “as a man” or “as a woman” while acknowledging that gender, and thus our wider culture and history, has produced what we are as readers. We might—perhaps should—then choose to offer ourselves as allies in learning to read as men-in-relation-tofeminism and to women, but perhaps only if we realize that as Stephen Heath puts it, “we,” as men, are the “point of departure” for such a shift in criticism (27). Elaine Showalter remarks that “the way into feminist criticism” for the male critic “must involve a confrontation with what might be implied by reading as a man, and with a questioning or surrender of paternal privileges” (143). To read the countess of Pembroke, then, four hundred years after she took up her pen, thereby transgressing against an encultured male autonomy in ways she may have felt (and certainly wrote about) only obscurely, is to read with an awareness that there are no fixed meanings of “her” text, but that her writing, her cultural situatedness, her role as a woman written by men, can be explicated in gender-sensitive terms without being limited by them. It is on the one hand to acknowledge that in every reading situation, it is not something we have reified as the self that speaks but language along with the other material practices of a culture that language attempts to name. But, on the other hand, it is also to acknowledge that language contains emphases and demands that come to

52

Chapter Three

readers and writers alike from a culture that has tried, for hundreds of years and more, to be blind to gender. A text may try to privilege a certain reading—and, as the countess’s writings show, that reading may be deeply offensive to the writer’s own gender or class interests, though not to her situatedness. She was a woman, written by men. Today, she can be—and it is the responsibility of the critic to ensure that this is so—a woman read by men and women, sensitive to their own as well as her subjection to history. As Tony Bennett puts it, a text is never “the issuing source of meaning” but rather “a site on which the production of meaning” takes place (174-75). It becomes the responsibility of today’s readers, men and women, to articulate and acknowledge their parts in that struggle and above all to acknowledge that such a struggle is not just a literary one.

Works Cited Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Methuen. 1979. Combines Althusserian Marxism and feminism to raise, among others, the question of the gendered subject. Bennet, Tony. Formalism and Marxism. London: Methuen, 1980. Invaluable for raising the Issue of the "reading formation" by which critics and readers construct readings of earlier texts.. Braidotti, Rosi. "Envy: or With Your Brains and My Looks." In Jardine and Smith, Men in Feminism, 233-42. Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982. In his chapter "Reading as a Woman" (43-64), Culler raises the important question of how women readers are culturally and linguistically constructed. Hannay, Margaret P., ed. Silent But for the Word. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985. Contains a series of valuable essays on Renaissance women writers. Heath, Stephen. "Male Feminism." In Jardine and Smith, Men in Feminirm, 1-32. Holzapfel, Rudolf. Shakespeare’s Secret. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1961. Argues, melodramatically and unpersuasively, for Shakespeare as the countess of Pembroke's lover. Jameson, Fredric. "Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject." Yale French Studies 55-56 (1977): 338-95. An important attempt to reconcile the Marxist theory of the subject with psychoanalysis. Jardine, Alice, and Paul Smith, eds. Men in Feminism. London: Methuen, 1987. A series of provocative essays raising the question of the place

The Countess of Pembroke and Gendered Reading

53

of men in feminist criticism. Kamuf, Peggy. "A Double Life (Femmeninism Il)." In Jardine and Smith, Men in Feminism, 93-97. —. "Femmeninism." In Jardine and Smith, Men in Feminism, 78-84. McCormick, Kathleen, Gary Waller, and Linda Flower. Reading Texts. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1987. Attempts to combine readercentered cognitive with cultural criticism, making a space for the construction of gendered readings of Renaissance and other texts. Mitchell, Juliet, and Jacqueline Rose, eds. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. New York: Norton, 1985. A major introduction to the work of Lacan in relation to gender. Rathmell, J.C.A., ed. The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess 4Pembroke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. The first modern edition of the Sidney Psalms. Needs to be supplemented by Waller, The Triumph of Death. Ross, Andrew. "No Question of Silence." In Jardine and Smith, Men and Feminism, 85-92. Schor, Naomi. "Dreaming Dissymmetry: Barthes, Foucault, and Sexual Difference." In Jardine and Smith, Men in Femmism, 98-110. Showalter, Elaine. "Critical Cross Dressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year." Raritan 3, no. 2 (Fall 1983): I 30-49. Smith, Paul. "Men in Feminism: Men and Feminist Theory." In Jardine and Smith, Men in Feminism, 33-40. Waller. Gary. English Poetry ofthe Sixteenth Century. London: Longman, 1986. A "revisionist" historicist reading of the sixteenth century. It includes a consideration of gender within Petrarchanism, a chapter on the Sidneys, including the countess of Pembroke, and concluding remarks on how the question of gender has opened the canon of the period. —. Mary Sidney Countess of Pembroke. Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1979. A biographical and critical study, focusing on the countess's writing and her circle. —. "Struggling into Discourse: The Emergence of Renaissance Women's Writing." In Hannay, Silent But for the Word, 238-56. —, ed. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Lady Mary Wroth. Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1977. An edition of the poems attached to Urania, with variants from the Folger MS. The introduction focuses on the court's power over Mary Wroth. —, ed. The Triumph of Death and Other Unpublished and Uncollected Poems by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. Salzburg: lnstitut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1977. Prints all the known variants of the

54

Chapter Three

countess's Psalms, miscellaneous poems, and the first complete edition of "The Triumph of Death." Waller, Gary, Kathleen McCormick, and Lois Fowler, eds. The Lexington lntroduction to Literature. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1986. Sets out, mainly for students, the possibilities of gender-aware readings of older texts. Young, Frances Berkeley. Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. London, David Nutt, 1912.

CHAPTER FOUR THE MONK AND THE GIANTS: TEXTUAL AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES AND THE INTERPRETATION OF LITERARY WORKS JEROME M. MCGANN

What is the relevance of textual and bibliographical studies to literary interpretation? This is not a question that has been posed in a systematic way very often. Wellek and Warren, in their Theory of Literature, saw clearly that “merely bibliographical facts” could often “have a relevance and value,” and they explicitly concluded that textual and bibliographical studies were to be “justified by the uses to which their results are put” in the interpretation and evaluation of literary works.1 Nevertheless, they made no attempt to set forth a program, or even a schema, of such uses. Indeed, by calling textual and bibliographical studies “preliminary operations” to literary study per se (whether the latter were to be “intrinsic” or “extrinsic”), the Theory of Literature effectively placed such work somewhere east of the Eden of literary interpretation and evaluation. The specific question of how textual and bibliographical studies were to be used in literary interpretation was set aside. Still, the discussion of these matters in Theory of Literature is perhaps the most thoughtful to be found anywhere in the past fifty years, when we have witnessed, on one hand, a growing divorce between “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” literary work, and, on the other, a notable expansion— particularly in the past fifteen years—of highly idiosyncratic forms of literary appreciation. With the acceptance of “free play” as both an operation and a standard in hermeneutics, the relation between extrinsic and intrinsic forms of criticism is further loosened; and textual/bibliographical studies, already conceived as “preliminary operations,” are all but removed from 1 Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 2d ed. (New York, 1955), 47, 52. See especially pp. 26-34 and part 2 ("Preliminary Operations"), 43-57.

56

Chapter Four

the program of literary studies. Nor is this merely a theoretical removal: today, courses in textual criticism and bibliography are no longer required in most graduate schools, and often they are not even available to the student. In the meantime, the academy has ceded a privilege to textual scholars and bibliographers that allows them to live and move and have their being at the periphery of literary studies as such. It is a privilege that has been agreed to by all parties: the scholars have thereby gained considerable freedom and autonomy to pursue their (often highly technical and specialized) work, and the critics have been released from the obligation to develop certain skills that are not easily or quickly acquired. As a result, the angels of hermeneutics have long feared to tread in the fields of textual/bibliographical studies, which are widely regarded, in fact, as a world well lost. Reciprocally, the bibliographers, editors, and textual critics have largely agreed to the bad eminence they have achieved, whence they may hurl defiance at the heavens of the interpreters. Of course, textual critics and bibliographers can (and do) function quite well in their specializations. The difficulties of collecting and ordering a complex set of manuscripts, or of preparing a complete bibliographical record of a particular work, are often so complex that the operations have to be subdivided and further specialized if they are to be performed correctly. Under such conditions, it is no wonder that “the uses to which their results are put” are often left to the hermeneuts. In recent years, a few scholars—some of them represented in this volume—have begun to reconsider the relations that do or might exist between textual/bibliographical studies and literary interpretation. In most cases, these efforts have come from those who are knowledgeable in textual criticism and bibliography and who thereby command the expertise necessary to begin serious inquiries into such matter.2 Still, the efforts have been relatively scattered; only a handful of textual/bibliographical scholars have ventured into the field, while the literary critics have all but completely avoided these subjects. The latter indifference is perhaps to be expected: after all, the principal strains of literary criticism in the twentieth century developed in a conscious reaction against the philological and historical traditions that dominated the nineteenth. 2

Besides various works by the scholars herein represented, see also Randall McLeod's several essays, including "UnEditing Shakespeare," Sub-Stance 33/34 (1982): 26-55, and "Unemending Shakespeare's Sonnet III," Studies in English Literature 21 (1981): 75-96; John R Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (Chicago, 1976); and the work on William Blake by Morris Eaves and Robert Essick.

The Monk and the Giants

57

It is the assumption of this paper that literary study surrendered some of its most powerful interpretive tools when it allowed textual criticism and bibliography to be regarded as “preliminary” rather than integral to the study of literary work. I shall be arguing that the nonintegral view of textual criticism and bibliography is historically explicable, that it derives from a particular understanding of the nature and goals of textual criticism and bibliography, and that this is an understanding that literary academics of all types now take for granted. Furthermore, in what follows, I shall attempt both an exposition of this view of textual criticism and bibliography as well as a critique of its limits. I take it for granted that specialized studies in these fields—studies that are in fact “preliminary” to critical interpretation—carry the justification that all specialized studies must be allowed, whatever the field. I shall argue, however, that textual criticism and bibliography are conceptually fundamental rather than preliminary to the study of literature, and that, consequently, their operations need to be reconceived along lines that are more comprehensive than the ones currently in force.

II Fredson Bowers opens his discussion of Bibliography and Textual Criticism in the following way. The general procedures of textual criticism as it deals with manuscript study have been formulated for some years. Differences of opinion may develop from time to time over the precise techniques for constructing a family tree from variant readings, and other matters of technical concern may occasionally come in dispute. But on the whole it is not unduly optimistic to suggest that when the editor of a classical or of a medieval text begins his task he can attack the problems from a position of strength. That is, he will be well aware that much drudgery lies ahead and that the difficult nature of the material may give him some bad hours; but he is seldom in doubt about the textual theories that guide him. Moreover, he can hopefully anticipate that if he follows these traditional methods for sorting out and arranging his texts, he will be left with few cruxes that cannot be solved by linguistic skill and ripe critical judgement. In the halcyon days before the emergence of bibliography as a force, the textual critic of printed books could approach his task with something of the confidence of the manuscript scholar, fortified also by the comforting thought that, in comparison, the initial preparation of the text would be far less onerous. If he were the first adventurer, the number of early reprint editions to collate would not be large; and if he were a latecomer, he need only exercise his ingenuity in improving the edition of

58

Chapter Four a predecessor, whose pages he could send to the printer with an occasional correction. The choice of copy-text was not a particularly acute question, for what are now called the “accidentals” of a text would all be modernized, and literary judgement could mend the errors in the “substantives.”3

I reproduce the whole of this passage because it fairly represents a number of ideas that remain current in the textual scholarship that focuses on modem national scriptures. Probably Bowers would no longer wish to stand by some of these ideas, and perhaps least of all the idea that textual critics of medieval and classical works “can attack [their problems] from a position of strength.”4 Although it is true that classical and medieval scholars are better armed for their tasks than they ever were, greater knowledge has only brought greater circumspection. Bowers speaks as he does here partly because he is a casual observer of the classical field, and partly because he is a methodist in the world of textual criticism.5 Bowers's views about the textual scholarship of classical works reflect an ignorance about the historical development of textual studies widespread among textual critics who work on national scriptures, especially in the modem periods. This lack of attention to the textual criticism of ancient literatures, both biblical and classical, has caused serious damage to the criticism and scholarship of our more recent and national literatures, and I will return to this problem in a moment. For now, I want to concentrate on another, closely related problem, which also appears in the passage I have quoted: its underlying and fundamental assumption that the disciplines of textual criticism have as their aim, their raison d'etre even, the editing of texts. When Bowers conceives textual criticism in editorial terms, he is of course following the common view. Indeed, many—perhaps even most— textual critics would argue that the editorial function of their discipline

3

Fredson Bowers, Bibliography and Textual Criticism (Oxford, 1964), 1-2. Perhaps the best indication of Bowers's scholarly strength is to be seen in his flexibility. In the past ten years, he has seemed anxious to alter and revise his views when the work of others suggested that he should do so. See his “Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of Copy-Text,” Library, 5th ser. 27 (1972): 81-115, and "Greg's 'Rationale of Copy-Text' Revisited," Studies in Bibliography 31 (1978): 90-161. 5 The textual problems in the fields of classical and biblical studies remain exceedingly vexed and in many cases insoluble, given the current state of our documentary knowledge. In medieval studies, the problems are often only slightly less difficult. 4

The Monk and the Giants

59

fairly defines its method and purposes.6 Such a view of textual studies appears transparent, and hence goes unexamined, largely because of the actual historical development of textual studies in the early modem period. In point of historical fact, textual criticism as we know it today developed because Renaissance scholars of antiquity felt the need to find ways of establishing reliable texts. Nevertheless, the historical conditions that initiated the development of modem textual studies could not and, in fact, have not permanently defined the nature of this discipline. Changed historical circumstances may modify or even alter one's conception (and practice) of a discipline. Textual studies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries underwent a radical shift, largely because they were carried out under the influence of the new biblical scholarship on one hand and the widespread development of various historicist studies on the other. This was the period in which the grand conception of a philolgia perennis, imagined and sought after by men like Petrarch and Politian, finally achieved operational form in what F. A. Wolf called Alterthumswissenschaft. With this philological ideal, textual criticism had been so reconceived that the period saw the emergence of a conservative reaction within classical studies. Scholars like Gottfried Hermann, aware of the limits that textual criticism would always have to face when dealing with classical texts, determined to pursue a relatively narrow course of textual work. Others, like August Boeckh, resisted the line of specialization.7 To the degree that we think of textual criticism in terms of its editorial function, we are following the line of Hermann's thought rather than Boeckh's. In all these cases, of course, we are dealing with a textual criticism that is theorized in terms of the works of antiquity. With the advent of Alterthumswissenschaft, however, emerged the professional study of national scriptures, or what we sometimes call modem philology, where radical changes of focus have to be made. These changes are most sharply 6

The view is commonplace; James Thorpe, for example, speaks of “Textual studyor, to use a more enveloping term, editorial work,” and he states that “the goal of textual criticism is to determine the text of what we are to read as the work of literary art.” See Principles of Textual Criticism (San Marino, Cal., 1972), vii; and the Oxford Classical Dictionary entry: “Textual Criticism, the technique and art of restoring a text to its original state, as far as possible, in the editing of Greek and Latin authors.” 7 Good discussions of these lines of development are available in John E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (reprint ed., New York 1958), 3: 89; and Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (Oxford, 1976), 179-82.

60

Chapter Four

defined in the field of textual criticism. The historical circumstances in which Renaissance and post-Renaissance works are transmitted into our hands differ sharply from those that surround classical and biblical works, and they also differ in crucial ways from the circumstantial field of medieval works. The textual problems that a scholar of ancient works has to face rarely find close analogues in modern national scriptures. Consequently, when textual critics of modem works assume an editorial function for their discipline, they also take over a methodology and structural focus that are normally not well adapted to the most pressing scholarly problems they should be facing. (I should also say, in passing, that this assumption of editorial models drawn from the study of works of antiquity has had important consequences for the theory of editing modern works, as well as for the theory of textual studies in general.)8 This larger context helps us to see why the textual and bibliographical study of modem national scriptures, and in particular English and American literary works, took the shape and course that it did. The tools developed for the study of biblical and classical texts from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries were brought to bear upon English and American literatures. This in itself generated certain theoretical problems for students of modern philology. In addition, however, the classical tools were taken over at a particular period in the history of classical philology, that is to say, at a time when classical studies had entered a specialized and even technocratic phase. The broad theoretical issues that had been the preoccupation of men like Wolf, Herder, and Eichhorn were no longer matters of imperative critical inquiry. Textual criticism had entered a phase of its modern life that Thomas Kuhn would later call “ordinary science.” Also, because the classicist model presided over the development of the textual criticism of national literatures, our scholarship assumed that fundamental homologies existed between the problems of classical scholars and those of the modems. This assumption is evident as early as the eighteenth century and is epitomized in Johnson's famous lament over the state of the Shakespearean texts.9 This historical context I have been sketching should allow us to see why the textual criticism of our national scriptures became almost completely identified with an editorial function. When Paul Maas opens his classic work with the statement “The business of textual criticism is to 8

Some of the problems in specialized textual studies are taken up in my Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago, 1983). 9 See Samuel Johnson, On Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New York, 1968), 1: 51-52.

The Monk and the Giants

61

produce a text as close as possible to the original,” he does so in a special context—the fields of biblical and especially classical scholarship—where the editorial action of textual criticism has to be emphasized. “We have no autograph manuscripts of the Greek and Roman classical writers and no copies which have been collated with the originals,” Maas observes; and furthermore, “the manuscripts we possess derive from the originals through an unknown number of intermediate copies…of questionable trustworthiness.”10 In such circumstances, textual criticism will and should concentrate on the task of producing reliable texts. Maas's statement on the business of textual criticism becomes a troubling one, however, when it is assumed as a premise in the textual criticism of modern national scriptures, where the conditions faced by the biblical and classical scholar do not prevail. Even in the context of classical scholarship, however, the editorial function ought to be seen as only one aspect of the aims of textual and bibliographical criticism. If we reflect upon the larger history of textual criticism, and in particular on the scholarship of men like Wolf, we are forced to remember that textual criticism has not always been identified with an editorial function.11 When Teubner asked M. L. West to write a new book on textual criticism to replace the earlier works of Maas and Stahlin, West approached his task with a more comprehensive view of “the business of textual criticism”—largely, I suspect, because his work had been influenced by the more capacious views of Pasquali’s Storia della tradizione e critica del testo (2d ed., Firenze, 1952). For West, the business of textual criticism is not to produce a text as close as possible to the original; it is much more comprehensive and—ultimately— hermeneutic. Students have sometimes said to me that they recognize the necessity of textual criticism, but they are content to leave it to the editor of the text they are reading and to trust in his superior knowledge. Unfortunately editors are not always people who can be trusted, and critical apparatuses are provided so that readers are not dependent upon them. Though the reader lacks the editor's long acquaintance with the text and its problems, he may nevertheless surpass him in his feeling for the language or in ordinary common sense, and he should be prepared to consider the facts presented in the apparatus and exercise his own judgment on them. He must do so in places where the text is important to him for some further 10

Paul Maas, Textual Criticism, trans. Barbara Flowers (oxford, 1958), 1. For an excellent discussion of Wolf’s significance, see Anthony Grafton, “Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 44 (1981): 101-29. 11

62

Chapter Four purpose. This book, therefore, is not intended solely for editors, but for anyone who reads Greek and Latin and desires some guidance on how to approach textual questions.12

This is a wise set of remarks that students of all literatures ought to bear in mind at all times. The literary criticism of English and American works has ceded to textual and bibliographical specialists almost total authority to pronounce upon matters relating to their fields. In the process, the pursuit of textual studies has been carried out by people whose practical concerns are circumscribed by their editorial aims or by that subset of related, largely technical problems that bear upon editorial method (e.g., the preoccupation in recent years with the problem of copy text). West’s view takes it for granted, however, that textual criticism is a field of inquiry that supervenes the narrower issues that concern editors, and that textual criticism is a pursuit incumbent upon anyone who works with and teaches literary products. Textual criticism does not meet its fate in the completion of a text or an edition of some particular work. Rather, it is a special method that students of literature must and should use when they examine, interpret, and reproduce the works we inherit from the past. When this fundamental conception of textual criticism loses its authority—when it is replaced by the more specialized conception, that textual criticism is an editorial instrument—the schism that characterizes current literary studies gets reified. Whether textual scholars work with actual texts or whether they comment, at a theoretical level, on the field of textual criticism generally, they tend to conceive their operations almost wholly in terms of the editorial functions of their discipline. The interpreters, for their part, either produce their work in the purest state of scholarly innocence, or they agree to accept—quite uncritically—the textual results of editorial scholars In each instance, the practice of an informed and comprehensive literary criticism is diminished. Today, the editorial conception of textual studies remains dominant, thanks largely to the profound influence of the work of Fredson Bowers and his followers. Important consequences have resulted from this dominance, for all fields of literary work. Of course, shrewd scholars like Bowers are well aware that textual and bibliographical studies produce results that may be of interest to many people besides editors. G. Thomas Tanselle acknowledges this fact when he speaks of “the effect which the findings of bibliographical and textual research have on the ultimate 12

M.L. West, Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique (Stuttgart, 1973), 8-9. West explicitly acknowledges his debt to Pasquali in his preface, and he cites Pasquali's second edition (Firenze, 1952).

The Monk and the Giants

63

meaning of the work of literature as evaluated by the [literary] critic.” Tanselle thinks that this relation of textual studies to literary interpretation is so evident that it hardly requires discussion. That the establishment of texts is the basic task of literary scholarship, a prerequisite to further critical study; that emendations which result from textual research can significantly affect the critical interpretation of a work; and that detailed collation and bibliographical analysis are necessary activities for the establishment of every text, even if only to prove that no variants exist or that the variants are inconsequential—all these propositions are, to the scholarly mind, self-evident, and they have all been buttressed by numerous concrete examples in recent years.13

Of this passage, two things must be said, at least initially. First, like Bowers, Tanselle accepts the editorial function of textual studies as fundamental. Indeed, this editorial function is presented as the alpha and the omega of all literary scholarship. This function appears so obvious to Tanselle that he sees no further need to inquire into the theoretical relation of textual studies and literary criticism; the relation is “self-evident” and “buttressed by numerous concrete examples.” What Tanselle means by this, as his note to the passage shows, is that literary critics can, do, and should turn to textual critics and especially to editors for specific facts of verbal changes in the texts they study.14 This record of verbal variants, uncovered by the textual scholar and editor, supplies the interpreter with useful information that may affect his “readings.” This is Tanselle's “selfevident” relation of textual studies to literary criticism. However, I think that this view of the relation is deeply misconceived and that it springs directly from the assumption of an editorial approach to textual studies. From such an approach, one can draw few connecting lines between a practical literary criticism and (say) a bibliographical record of early printings or the history of a manuscript’s provenance. Textual scholars must labor to elucidate the histories of a work’s production, reproduction, and reception, and all aspects of these labors bear intimately and directly on the “critical interpretation of a work.” To an editorial conception of textual studies, however, the bearing that these large fields of inquiry have upon interpretations of literary works is not merely not “self-evident,” it must remain positively invisible. If we reconceive the projects of textual criticism along lines that are 13

G. Thomas Tanselle, “Textual Study and Literary Judgment,” reprinted in Essays in Bibliography, ed. Vito J. Brenni (Metuchen, N.J., 1975), 355. 14 Ibid., 363 n. 9.

64

Chapter Four

closer to those suggested by M. L. West, however, we will take a different view of this textual research and will probably begin by putting the findings of the editorial textualists to very different uses. An analysis of the editorial history of a particular author’s works may assume different forms, depending on the purposes to which the analysis is being put. If we wish to illuminate the reception history of an author—a matter of some consequence for the interpretation of the works—we shall have to be able to master and use, in a particular macrobibliographical field, various tools of microbibliography. Similarly, to study the verbal text of a particular work for its lexical or syntactic meaning is an operation that must employ the same historical resources of textual criticism that are used by editors when they prepare a critical text. The two operations, however, are conceptually different. A proper theory of textual criticism ought to make it clear that we may perform a comprehensive textual and bibliographical study of a work with different ends in view: as part of an editorial operation that will result in the production of an edition; as part of a critical operation for studying the character of that edition; as part of an interpretive operation for incorporating the meaning of the (past) work into a present context. No one of these practical operations is more fundamental than another, and all three depend for their existence on a prior scholarly discipline: textual criticism. The practical direction that textual studies will take, under any given set of circumstances, will of course vary with the immediate requirements of the critic and the situation. In any case, we might better start from the following ground: that the precise relation of textual scholarship to literary criticism is a good deal less evident than current theory suggests, and furthermore, that we cannot argue the relationship by an appeal to a series of concrete examples. Because the examples are produced out of a misconceived theory of textual criticism and its basic tasks, they do nothing to alter that conception; indeed, they merely reify it, as Tanselle’s comment about selfevidence suggests. The examples he cites all go to show how textual emendations and variants may affect the meaning of a certain work or passage. But the examples are congruent with an editorial theory of textual criticism and they are only as good as the theory that supports them. If textual and bibliographical studies are to have a significant impact on literary interpretation, textual criticism will have to be reconceptualized along lines that transcend an editorial theory. Of course, an editorial perspective on the principles of textual criticism is imperative under certain circumstances. Nevertheless, such a perspective only tends to obscure matters when the central issue is the relation of textual scholarship

The Monk and the Giants

65

to literary meaning. For example, consider again Tanselle's comments in “Textual Study and Literary Judgment.” In his view, “the establishment of texts is the basic task of literary scholarship, a prerequisite to further critical study,” and he goes on to suggest the following as the model for how textual studies affect literary criticism: “emendations which result from textual research can significantly affect the critical interpretation of a work.” But textual criticism does not ground its deepest relation to the “critical interpretation of a [literary] work” on the textual emendations it may produce. Indeed, emendations are probably the least significant product of textual and bibliographical studies, from the point of view of literary criticism. Tanselle takes this position because he sees textual criticism as part of a comprehensive editorial program, rather than as a key element in an even more comprehensive program: the historical elucidation of texts, both ancient and modern. A text, from an editorial vantage, appears in its ultimate form as a linguistic or verbal event, and the act of interpreting texts consequently tends to appear as an operation we must perform on a definite and localized set of words. A more comprehensive sociohistorical view of texts, however—for example, a view of texts as books, manuscripts, or otherwise materialized objects—forces us to approach the issues of criticism and interpretation in a very different way, for the language in which texts speak to us is not located merely in the verbal sign system. Texts comprise elaborate arrangements of different and interrelated sign systems. It makes a difference if the poem we read is printed in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books or The New Republic. Textual and bibliographical criticism generates, in relation to the works we read, a great deal more critical information than a calculus of variants or a record of emendations. The interpretation of literary works, then, does take its ground in textual and bibliographical studies, as Tanselle has said, but not for the reasons or in the way that he has said. It does so because these studies are the only disciplines that can elucidate the complex network of people, materials, and events that have produced and that continue to reproduce the literary works history delivers into our hands. Current interpretations of literary works only acquire a critical edge of significance when they are grounded in an exegesis of texts and meanings generated in the past—in an exegesis of texts and meanings gained, and perhaps also lost, over time. Such an exegesis depends for its existence on the tools and procedures of textual criticism. The current practice of hermeneutics does not ordinarily avail itself of these tools and procedures, largely because literary critics

66

Chapter Four

and interpreters have come to accept Hermann’s specialized view of textual criticism. Nor is it to be expected that this part of the academic world will be able to rethink the limits of the editorial view of textual studies: literary criticism as currently instituted lacks the technical and historical knowledge to carry out, or even initiate, such a process of reconceptualization. An immersion in textual and bibliographical studies presupposes and reciprocates an understanding of the entire developing process of a literary work’s historical transmission, and this in turn creates, or ought to create, a profound sense of how many factors enter into the production of the literary work. Textual studies do not pursue emendations and corruptions (or their absence) as the justifying end of the discipline. The first obligation of textual studies is to elucidate the meaning of what has taken place, not to adjudicate between these events and their consequences. Of historical method in general, Collingwood once said that it should not begin by asking the question “Is this right or is this wrong?” but rather, “What does this mean?”15 Collingwood’s view is as applicable to the work of textual scholarship as it is to any other historically grounded discipline.

III These general remarks introduce the following methodological schema that I would propose as a model for a procedure in textual criticism. This program is an analytic outline of the subjects and topics essential to textual criticism, whether it is viewed as a program of study or as an operational (a practical) event. The specific subjects and topics placed under each of the general categorical headings call for an elucidation of their circumstantial character, that is, a sociohistorical analysis of each element in the heading. These specific analyses together constitute an analytic presentation of the category, and the character, as well as the adequacy, of any act of textual criticism will be a function of the range of textual material that is critically examined. My view is that a critical presentation of all the material ranged under categories A and B constitutes a finished program of historicist, textual criticism. Such a program gains what I should call a properly historical character when the material ranged under category C begins to be brought into the critical analysis. The material in this category must, of course, be a part of any exercise in textual analysis; it need not be made a part of the 15

R.G. Collingwood, The Idea o f History (Oxford, 1946), 260.

The Monk and the Giants

67

critical (i.e., self-conscious) analysis, however, and in fact most of the material in this category is not material that is critically studied by textual scholars.

A. The Originary Textual Moment The Originary textual moment comprises the following: Author Other persons or groups involved in the initial process of production (e.g. collaborators, persons who may have commissioned the work, editors or amanuenses, etc.) 3. Phases or stages in the initial productive process (e.g., distinctive personal, textual, or social states along with their defining causes, functions, and characteristics) 4. Materials, means, and modes of the initial productive process (physical, psychological, ideological) 1. 2.

B. Secondary Moments of Textual Production and Reproduction (Individual and Related Sequences) Secondary moments should be ranged under two subsets: the period of reproduction carried out during the author’s lifetime and the periods of production and reproduction that begin with the author’s death. The elements to be ranged under each of these subsets are the same as those set out under category A above. In the critical study of this material, certain shifts of emphasis take place. Most obviously, the author is studied as he or she is a critical and historical reconstruction. The heading “Author,” then, will comprise a range of ideas or concepts of the author that have emerged in the minds of various people and the ideologies of different classes, institutions, and groups. Reciprocally, the critic will necessarily bring to the center of attention, not the author himself, but those “other persons or groups” signaled in A.2. Similarly, the influence of the work’s own production history on the work itself grows more important with the passage of time. Works descend to our hands in certain concrete and specific forms and along a series of equally concrete and specific avenues. The textual history of literary works reflects the influence of these factors even as the specific texts give a visible (if unanalyzed) form to the meaning and significance of that history. The critical analysis of texts discovers one of its chief intellectual justifications in that set of circumstances. Certain patterns of

68

Chapter Four

history are literalized in complete and finished forms in such texts; consequently, the critical analysis of these forms is an invaluable key to understanding those most elusive types of human phenomena, social and historical patterns. Categories A and B are chiefly to be studied under the historian's milder (and preliminary) rubric “What does this mean?” rather than under the more severe polemical question “Is this right or is this wrong?”

C. The Immediate Moment of Textual Criticism The category of the immediate moment calls for an analysis of the critic’s own programmatic goals and purposes. This is probably the most demanding of all the tasks, since it involves a critical presentation of events that do not lie in a completed form of pastness but are coincident with the entire act of analysis itself. This moment appears as a specific act of criticism—as a particular bibliography, edition, set of glosses, or critical commentary of one form or another. The particular bibliographers, editors, or commentators may approach the subject matter critically (categories A and B) without approaching their own work in a critical spirit. The heuristic model for such a case would perhaps be an edition undertaken by a technically skilled scholar as a set task. The governing model for a criticism that fulfills the obligations of this categorical imperative might well be either Thucydides and his History of the Peloponnesian War or Trotsky and his History of the Russian Revolution, depending upon whether one wanted an experimental or a polemical model. In textual studies, I would instance the Kane and Donaldson edition of Piers Plowman as a model of an experimental critical edition and Bowers’s edition of The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker as a model of a polemical sort; and I would set these beside F. A. Wolf’s Prolegomena and Homerum (1795) and Joseph Bédier’s “La Tradition manuscrite du Lai de L’Ombre" as similar models of textual criticism carried out in the form of commentary.16 Works that exhibit a high degree of critical expertise in this aspect of their analysis will almost necessarily be controversial in their immediate scholarly context. Such works may display more or less serious deficiencies in their critical grasp of their subject matter (categories A and 16

George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds., The Plowman: The B Version (London, 1975); Bowers's edition was published by Cambridge University Press (1953-61); Bédier's essay was printed in two parts in Romania 54 (1928): 161-96, 321-56.

The Monk and the Giants

69

B). Whatever the case, they approach their own projects under the imperative query: “Is this right or is this wrong?”

IV This schema may be summarized in a brief set of instructions to the student of literary works. The elementary maneuvers for studying, understanding, and finally teaching such works involve, first, an elucidation of the textual history of the work, and second, an explication of the reception history. Neither of these operations can be performed independently of the other because the two historical processes are dialectically related. (This is why no textual criticism, however specialized, can be produced without at least an implicit reference to certain more broadly established social phenomena, which impinge on a work’s various textual constitutions.) Nonetheless, in textual criticism the attention will focus, necessarily, on a work’s shifting verbal forms on the one hand and on its changing bibliographical states on the other. The editorial function of textual criticism is to establish the reliability of the received texts and to determine whether a new edition is useful and what sort it might be. As I have argued, however, this is a specialized use of the method. A thorough study of the textual history of any work does not cease to be a sine qua non of literary criticism when readers are provided with good editions, even good critical editions; the contrary, in fact. Furthermore, the analysis of the textual history is crucial for a more broadly considered act of literary criticism not merely because such an analysis may turn up textual mistakes or interesting verbal variants; the analysis establishes its justification at more primitive levels altogether. Let me give two sets of examples. The text of Byron's Don Juan, cantos 1-2, in the first authorized printing is identical in all essential verbal features with the text of the first pirated printings. When one examines authorized and pirated printings in their historical contexts, however, we discover that their “meaning” was radically different. That difference in meaning is not simply a function of differences in verbal content, nor even of the acts of analysis and interpretation performed by later critics. It is an objective and original difference, and one that will only appear in our view if and when Byron's poem is analyzed with the methods of textual criticism. Or consider a poem like Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death,” which has an identical verbal text in Johnson’s critical edition, in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, and in Franklin’s

70

Chapter Four

recent Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson.17 These three apparently “identical” texts are in fact very different, for they exist in bibliographical environments (as it were) that enforce very different reading experiences. The analysis of these environments will only yield to an applied textual criticism. There is as well the notorious case of Auden’s “September 1, 1939.” Its first printing in The New Republic established a text that Auden later grew to regret. He reprinted the poem in the 1945 Collected Poem, but in a revised text with the penultimate stanza removed. Later still, he decided to suppress the poem altogether, and Auden's present editor, Edward Mendelson, has not printed the work in his posthumous edition of the Collected Poems.18 That history is itself interesting. Equally interesting, however, is another, parallel history of the poem’s textual fortunes. For this famous work remained in print—in its original unrevised state—throughout Auden’s lifetime, and it continues to be printed to this day in various anthologies of poetry, and especially in anthologies prepared for school use.19 To read this poem now in one of those anthologies is to read a work very different from the first printed text (though they are verbally identical) as well as from the later revised text. Textual criticism is uniquely prepared to elucidate and explain these matters, to establish the ground for an advanced literary criticism, for these events will and do impinge upon the experience of Auden’s poem in whatever textual state it is read, whether one is aware of the influence or not. The objective reality of these matters, along with their meaning and influence, may be changed by a reader’s ignorance of them, but it will not be removed by such ignorance. It will merely assume a specific (and explicable) shape and significance, one that will submit, in its turn, to the elucidation of textual criticism. 17

I have discussed both of these examples at greater length in “The Text, the Poem, and. the Problem of Historical Method,” New Literary Horizons 12 (1981): 269-88; see also a similar discussion of Poe's “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” and Byron's “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year” in my essay “Shall These Bona Live?” Text 1 (forthcoming). The Dickinson editions cited are Thomas H. Johnson's third volume The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), and R.W. Franklin's recent facsimile text in two volumes (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). 18 Edward Mendelson, ed., Collected Poems of W.H. Auden (New York, 1976). For a discussion of the textual history, see Joseph Warren Beach, The Making of the Auden Canon (Minneapolis, 1957), 49-52. 19 See, for example, Chief Modern Poets of England and America, ed. G.D. Sanders et. al. (London, 1970), 1: 366-68.

The Monk and the Giants

71

The example from Auden illustrates yet another important point: that when verbal changes and variations are revealed through a process of textual criticism, their significance may not lie merely in the (obvious) fact that two verbally different texts may have different meanings. More interesting, in the case of the Auden poem, is the conflict of meanings that the work incorporates in itself. The textual and bibliographical history of the poem from 1939 to the present reveals how and why, when we read any particular verbal text of this work, the other verbal texts are necessary poetic presences. No scholar can read this poem today, in any verbal constitution, without being aware of the conflicts and contradictions built into the poem, which have become part of it as a consequence of the work’s peculiar historical life. All literary works have their own special and peculiar histories, though some are more useful than others for illustrating this fact, and hence for demonstrating the theoretical and methodological point I am trying to make. The example from Auden might be supported by an analogous case from Marianne Moore. In its first printing, her well-known poem “Poetry” appeared as a work of thirty lines, and it was reprinted in this form several times by Moore herself, in the 1935 Selected Poem and in the 1951 Collected Poems as well. When she published the 1967 Complete Poem, however, the original work had disappeared in favor of a text that comprised only the first three lines of the original. This three-line text is now accepted as the authorized version, and it appears alone in Moore’s Complete Poems. Anthologies and school texts adopt varying approaches to this work, some printing the three-line text, some the original thirty-line version. Whatever the choice, the significance of this history does not lie merely in the “different meanings” the two texts embody. What textual criticism also shows (and more significantly shows) is that no reading of either text of this work can remain innocent of the significance of the other text (though it may well remain ignorant or unconscious of that other text). To read the work called by Moore “Poetry” entails something like a close encounter of a third kind: that is to say, an encounter in which the two texts are present to the reader’s mind, an encounter in which the interplay of the two texts is at the center of the reading experience. Examples of the fundamental place that textual and bibliographical analysis occupy in literary interpretation are not difficult to multiply. The problem with such examples, in the current scholarly climate, is that they tend to obscure the essential theoretical point behind a screen of particulars. Many textual critics smile condescendingly on the innocence (or ignorance) of various literary interpreters who do not ground their

72

Chapter Four

work in a disciplined textual criticism. But textual criticism and its practitioners seem to me to labor under a corresponding sort of innocence, which has only reinforced the schism that exists between hermeneutics and textual criticism. Bibliographers and textual critics tend to conceive their work today almost exclusively in terms of its editorial functions and application. This we have already seen. Equally significant, however, is the fact that contemporary textual work is dominated by a theory of literary production that is so author-centered that it has increasingly neglected the importance of nonauthorial textual determinants. Establishing texts for editions too often begins and ends in the pursuit of the so-called author’s intentions or author’s final intentions (as if these were definitive matters, or as if the author could or even should exercise an exclusive authority over the use of his works). This pursuit has its corresponding consequences in the prevailing views of the relation of hermeneutics to textual studies. Readers look to the resources of textual criticism for emendations, corruptions, and textual variants, as if these were the contributions literary criticism should expect from textual and bibliographical studies. The expectation seems to be shared by most textualists themselves, and the consequence of this state of affairs is only too apparent: the rich analytic resources of textual and bibliographical analysis have hardly begun to be recognized or used in the literary criticism we observe today. That a different and much more fruitful relation might prevail is clear, if only because we know that it has prevailed, in the work of certain critics in the past. Earlier I mentioned Thucydides as a writer whose critical habits might well serve as a model for literary scholars, though he was himself neither grammarian nor critic nor philologue. But he had a profoundly critical mind—the ne plus ultra for textual or any kind of scholarship, as Housman once suggested.20 And it so happens that in his great History, he does make occasional forays into the field of textual criticism. These are always memorable events, and I want to recall one of them here to conclude this paper. After his narrative of the plague at Athens, Thucydides begins his summary with the following anecdote. Such was the nature of the calamity which now fell on the Athenians; death raging within the city and devastation without. Among other things which they remembered in their distress was, very naturally, the following verse, which the old men said had been uttered long ago: “A Dorian war 20 In Housman's famous essay “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism,” Proceedings of the Classical Association 18 (1921): 67-84.

The Monk and the Giants

73

shall come and with it death.” A dispute arose whether dearth and not death had not been the word in the verse; but at the present juncture it was of course decided in favour of the latter; for the people made their recollection fit in with their sufferings. I fancy, however, that if another Dorian war should ever afterwards come upon us, and a dearth should happen to accompany it, the verse will probably be read accordingly.21

The scholarship in this commentary does not lie in the recording of a textual dispute, and it dearly has nothing at all to do with adjudicating between the two received readings of the line, nor even with explaining what each version means. Thucydides’ mordant eye is not directed toward the “original version” of the line but toward the versions produced by later “editors” and interpreters; and his interest lies in the meaning of scholarship and criticism rather than in the meaning of that line of ancient verse. To that extent, the passage illustrates a textual criticism that has raised and answered Collingwood’s historicist question: “What does it mean?” But the passage pushes beyond that question in order to ask the further and more demanding one: “Is this right or is this wrong?” Nor does Thucydides ask this question merely as a matter of technical accuracy, as editors today might perhaps ask such a question of the texts they will study. What is “wrong” here is, not a textual, but a critical deficiency. I think much the same kind of judgment might be passed on a good deal of the work we produce, whether as textual scholars or as literary interpreters. The weaknesses seem to me critical rather than technical, and they can often be traced to a failure of theory a failure to begin the inquiry at fundamental levels. To the degree that this is true, to that extent does Thucydides’ scholastic satire remain an important model and resource. It may be that we shall never know whether the original Greek word was limos or loimos and that we shall fail forever to cross the boundary of the Greek New Testament or to pass beyond the Masoretic wall and the Alexandrian limits; it may be that we shall never hear the uncorrupted word of God and that we shall not see Homer, or even Shelley, plain. If these are losses, and they are, they are losses that may be filled with meaning, in several senses—losses that bear fruit in a critical intelligence, 21

Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, ed. and trans. Sir Richard Livingstone (Oxford, 1960), 122 (book 2, sec. 54). The crux involves a choice between the Greek words limos and loimos.

74

Chapter Four

losses over which we need grieve not but rather find “strength in what remains behind…in years that bring the philosophic mind.”

CHAPTER FIVE TEXTUAL SCHOLARSHIP LEAH S. MARCUS

If textual scholarship is defined broadly enough, it encompasses almost everything that literary scholars do, except that the traditional associations of the phrase require it to be accompanied by a portentous aura of high seriousness and erudition. The phrase is used here to refer to those branches of literary study that analyze or determine the specific forms in which written texts reach readers. Such work includes the discovery and study of manuscripts and printed books as material artifacts; the analysis of changes in the materially embodied texts as they were shaped and reshaped by authors, scribes, printers, editors, and publishers; and the creation and critique of new textual embodiments in the form of new editions, whether printed or online. Such analytic processes are not, of course, unique to literary studies: similar endeavors are undertaken by historians, philosophers, art historians, media or film scholars, among others. Indeed, rudimentary textual scholarship is practiced by anyone who has ever noticed a typographic error in a newspaper headline or memo. Over the past three decades, because of an infusion of poststructuralist methodology and computerized technology, textual scholarship has lost its dry-as-dust reputation and become one of the most exciting and contested areas of literary studies. Arguably, it has always been the most fundamental, in that textual scholarship determines the very shape in which the objects of literary studies reach the people who read and analyze them. Textual scholarship is itself a form of interpretation, and through editorial practice it sets the parameters within which we explicate a given literary text. It also plays a key role in defining the literary canon, insofar as texts that are discovered, edited, and published are given a currency that can lead to canonicity, while texts that are not so favored are not. The present essay offers a brief history and overview of the field but concentrates on the vexed and interesting matter of textual scholarship as interpretation. My examples come largely from Anglo-American and anglophone literature, because that is the area about which I know most,

76

Chapter Five

but similar trends are visible in other literatures (see, e.g., Chartier, Forms and Order; Gabler, Bornstein, and Pierce; Grésillon; and Greetham, Scholarly Editing, “Textual Scholarship,” and Textual Scholarship). At present, the discipline of literary studies is faced with a catch-22. We depend on textual scholarship to give us reliable information about the composition, dissemination, and reception of literary and other texts, and to create editions that reliably communicate those texts and that information. At the same time, we are all too aware of the constructed nature of such activities and the extent to which they are subject to interpretive pressures of their own. Textual scholars today must strive for objectivity and uniformity in working with their materials, just as they have in the past. But today, perhaps more than in the past, they are painfully—or gleefully—cognizant that these goals are unattainable in practice.

Textual Scholarship in the Past As D. C. Greetham pointed out in the 1992 MLA Introduction to Scholarship that preceded the present volume, contemporary trends in textual scholarship were anticipated by Western scholars as early as the sixth century BCE, when Peitsistratus (c. 560-527 BCE) decided to stabilize the Homeric epic, which existed in his culture in many disparate oral forms, by having an official copy of Homer’s work fixed in writing for the Panathena festival. The rivalry between the early libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum prefigured the modern textual debate between “new bibliographers” and what I like to call the “new philology,” discussed below, in that Alexandrian textualists emphasized the combing of extant scrolls of the same work for comparative purposes with the goal of combining them to create an ideal text, while Pergamanians expressed skepticism about the Alexandrian enterprise and preferred to anchor their work in a single extant “best text” copy. Anticipating the canonizing activities of nineteenth—and twentieth—century editors, ancient librarians strictly limited the number of poets and dramatists whose work they collected, thereby consigning other classical writers to oblivion (Greetham, “Textual Scholarship” 105-07). Similarly, early compilers of the major religious texts—like the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and to some extent the Qur’an—established canonicity in foundational religious text by deciding which writings to include and which to reject as apocryphal or, in the Qur’an, which punctuation and ordering of the text to consider authoritative. But all this earlier activity notwithstanding, there seems to be general

Textual Scholarship

77

agreement that modern textual scholarship dates back to the Renaissance, when scholars rediscovered numerous texts from the Greek and Roman past; attempted to edit them; and, beginning in the late fifteenth century, made them widely available internationally through a flood of printed editions that used the newly invented technology of movable type. To locate the origins of modem, “scientific” editing in the Renaissance is to associate it with other types of origin attributed to the same era: the rise of modem empiricism and of the modern Burkhardtian individual; of global exploration, vastly expanded international trade, and commercial development. Identification of textual scholarship as a Renaissance invention therefore tends to privilege those elements of modem textual scholarship that place emphasis on empirical techniques, standardization, and the authority of the individual author. In fact, like the history of science, textual scholarship in the Renaissance—or early modem era, to use today’s preferred terminology—was as chaotic as it was intense and productive. Famously, Lorenzo Valla (1407-57) used philological principles to demonstrate that the Donation of Constantine, used by the Church to justify its wielding of secular power, was a forgery. Not all scholars were so scrupulous. The same Erasmus who did so much to establish the text of the Greek Bible on humanistic philological principles also forged at least one document when an original that took the tone he wanted was inconveniently unavailable (Grafton 43-45). Many of the early humanist printers used extraordinary care in producing the most accurate possible editions—the Aldine press kept a scholar in house to check typeset pages for errors—but such printers were often rewarded for their pioneering spirit by bankruptcy. And early printers regularly destroyed the manuscripts their editions had been based on once the book was in print: they did not have the concern of later philologists for the preservation of a literary text along the full gamut of its manuscript and printed history. We can trace a path by which early modern textual scholarship gradually became regularized, but well into the eighteenth century it was, by present standards of textual accuracy, quite cavalier. In publishing his edition of Shakespeare, Alexander Pope saw no difficulty about demoting to the notes passages from the plays that he disapproved of. Even Samuel Johnson, the formidable lexicographer and critic, used eighteenth-century editions as base texts for his 1765 edition of Shakespeare instead of going back to earlier printed editions: However, in the course of the century, preeighteenth-century editions gradually received greater attention when Johnson reedited Shakespeare in 1778, he increasingly consulted them. The eminent classicist Richard Bentley freely emended Milton in his 1732 edition of Paradise Lost, though his liberties with Milton’s text were so

78

Chapter Five

outrageous that they were controversial even then. During the nineteenth-century, the genealogical methods of classical historical philology were increasingly applied to modern literatures. The name of Karl Lachmann (1793-1851) is particularly associated with this development. Lachmann’s statement, which Lachmann employed in editing Lucretius, but also medieval German literature like Parzifal and the Minnesingers, demonstrated how errors in textual transmission over many centuries could often be traced back methodically to their origin in a single miscopied version. He emphasized that literary texts needed to be studied (and recovered) through analysis of the historical accretions that altered them over time. In the historical philology of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lachmann’s methods gradually became standard. Yet the concerns of philologists did not permeate all aspects of the field of textual scholarship. Through much of the nineteenth century, the “history of the book” as we know it now did not exist. Just as editors tended to choose the last edition produced during an author’s lifetime as the definitive basis or copytext for their work, so most bibliographers, editors, and collectors tended to pass over the “original” form in which a writer’s work was published in favor of later versions. Many an early binding in simple calf or soft vellum was sacrificed to collectors’ desire for sumptuous modern replacements. Generally speaking, the version of a literary work that commanded the most respect (and price) among bibliographers and collectors was the last edition or the most elaborate one, not the first. The new bibliography of the early and mid-twentieth century brought radical change. Though the new bibliographers—scholars like W. W. Greg and Alfred Pollard in England and Fredson Bowers in the United States— kept some of the genealogical methods of nineteenth-century historical philology for the purpose of recovering authorial intent, they insisted on greater uniformity and accountability in editorial practice and editions that sought to distinguish clearly between the literary text and ancillary historical materials. As much as possible, they sought to recover originals, the first or final version intended by the author, and tended to view mediating institutions like the printing house, the playhouse, or the schools as agents of corruption rather than contributors to the meaning of a given literary work. As has frequently been noted, new bibliography in England and America was more or less contemporary with literary modernism. The new bibliographers were arguably antimodernist in their insistence on textual stability at a time that modernist poetics was dismantling so many received literary forms. The important editions produced by new bibliographers were designed to be definitive and to relieve future scholars

Textual Scholarship

79

of the painful task of consulting manuscript and early printed versions for themselves. Work like Fredson Bower’s Principles of Bibliographical Description set standards for the precise descriptions of literary materials that are still followed today. On the other hand, we can identify a clear methodological alliance among the approximately contemporaneous movements of the new bibliography, literary modernism, and the new criticism, in that all, at least in their dominant manifestations, tended to idealize literary texts and cordon them off from the polluting influence of what was defined as extraliterary. Not surprisingly, at about the same time, bibliographers and collectors reversed their earlier sense of priorities and began to value first editions more highly than later ones, creating a rage for first editions that transformed the book market. Textual scholarship in its various manifestations had assimilated the Romantic paradigm of the literary work as a brief, brilliant moment of incandescent creativity that, over time, could only lose its luminosity. To offer a gross generalization, the purpose of textual scholarship as formulated by the new bibliography was to create printed texts that approached as nearly as possible the literary creation as it existed in that originary brilliance in the mind of its author. For that reason, all other things being equal, the practitioners of the new bibliography preferred manuscripts or early printed versions as copytexts. They needed to immerse themselves in historical research such as the recovery of printinghouse practices, but they studied such institutions primarily to free the literary text from the corruptions that the institutions introduced. Herbert J. C. Grierson put the matter rather bluntly early in the century: for the lover of literature “literary history has an indirect value. He studies history that he may discount it” (2: v-vi). As literary studies became professionalized in the mid-twentieth century, the field tended to bifurcate, with textual scholars and literary critics taking separate and irreconcilable tracks. Textual scholars established literary texts by using and further developing Greg's “rationale of copytext,” by which editors selected a text to “copy” for their edition in all “accidentals” of spelling, capitalization, and so forth, while retaining the freedom to emend the copytext when it came to essential features of the text, or “substantives,” so long as the editors could claim that such emendations followed the author’s original or final intent. Critical editions that followed or adapted Greg’s rationale were usually meticulous in recording emendations, but not necessarily in a way that was accessible to the general public or even to other literary scholars. Lewis Mumford and Edmund Wilson both complained about the “barbed wire” of bristling,

80

Chapter Five

unintelligible textual variants that separated text and explanatory notes in the MLA’s Center for Editions of American Authors (CEAA; the CEAA evolved into the MLA’s present Committee on Scholarly Editions [CSE]). Textual scholars were the patient, hardworking technicians who worked behind the scenes to make close reading in a “new critical” vein possible and attractive for critics, who, for their part, as Bowers complained, seemed to “believe that texts are discovered under cabbage plants” (Textual and Literary Criticism 3). During this period of bifurcation, textual scholars liked to point out the impoverishment of literary critics who operated without a sound sense of bibliography. Thus Bowers heaped scorn upon John Crowe Ransom for contending that Milton deliberately “roughed up” Lycidas during the process of composition, when a simple study of the transmission of the text would show the opposite to be true (3). Thus Alan Tate made an elaborate argument about the perfection of Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not Stop for Death,” basing the argument on an outmoded edition of 1890 that titled the poem “The Chariot” (a title Dickinson had never used), omitted one entire stanza, and heavily emended several other lines (McGann, Beauty 123-26). If Tate had used a more recent edition available to him, would he have found a version closer to Dickinson’s manuscript to be better or worse than the one he extolled for its perfection? Much of the bibliographers’ scorn was justified, particularly given the penchant of the new criticism for close reading. It makes a great deal of interpretive difference, to mention only two of many famous textual cruxes, whether Herman Melville called the “fish of the sea” “coiled” or “soiled” in White-Jacket (Harkness 26) and whether D. H. Lawrence’s Henry Morel “whimpers” or “whispers” the word “Mother!” at the end of Sons and Lovers. Lawrence’s manuscript and corrected galleys say “whimpers,” but the Viking Press edition in the United States (1958) and the Heinemann Phoenix edition in London (1913; reset 1956) prefer “whispers” (Baron and Baron 464). On the other side of the divide, literary critics could absolve themselves from worrying about issues of textual scholarship so long as they did not make undocumented claims that they could have checked against existing textual scholarship and so long as they used the best possible modern edition of an author’s works. Many literary critics felt scorn for textual scholarship (and some still do)—it was the engineering branch of literary studies, forced to sully itself in enumerative work and investigation of historical processes and therefore compromised in a way that mainstream belletristic criticism was not. Literary critics were encouraged to use the same “standard” edition so that variant readings

Textual Scholarship

81

would not rear their ugly heads and destabilize the capacity for textual consensus that the new bibliography had provided. In the institution where I began my teaching career, one young scholar during the 1970s was allegedly denied tenure at least partly on grounds that she had cited eighteenth-century printings of her eighteenth-century authors rather than the standard modern scholarly editions! Since the 1980s, by contrast, textual stability has increasingly been sacrificed to other disciplinary goals, and the earlier divide between textual scholarship and literary criticism has eroded almost to the point of invisibility.

Textual Scholarship in the Present The theory of originary or final authorial intentions is a laudable goal: who would not find it valuable to know precisely what Victor Hugo, Chinua Achebe, Heinrich Kleist, Iris Murdoch, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky had in mind as they wrote and revised, or at least what printed version of their writings they might endorse as faithfully fulfilling their intentions? To put the matter baldly is to highlight some of its internal complexities: What if authors were unclear about their intent, or changed their intent for a given text over time? What if there were multiple authors and each had a different intent for the same work (Stillinger)? What if the subsequent history of the work suggests that the author or authors were plain wrong in thinking that they knew what they intended? What if an editor or publisher, in the author’s view, improved on what the author had intended? (We may think immediately of Ezra Pound and his intent for T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.) Or what if authors deliberately overrode what might otherwise have been their intent—out of self-censorship, perhaps, or a strong sense of what would appeal to a targeted market of readers (Eaves)? And, for that matter, what is literary intent and how can it be separated from the welter of social and economic pressures that help determine the shape of any cultural production? As Michel Foucault put the matter at about the same time that Mumford and Wilson were grumbling about barbed wire, “What difference does it make who is speaking?” (160). Over time the cachet of the new bibliography has eroded as a result of shifting paradigms of authorship and altering perceptions of the discipline of literary studies. Meanwhile the new bibliography has itself evolved to meet some of the objections of poststructuralist and newhistoricist critics (Tanselle, Rationale). A number of forces have conspired to alter the climate for textual scholarship in the past twenty-five years. The new bibliography has come under attack for its emphasis on textual stability over process, its tendency

82

Chapter Five

in practice to construct the author’s intent in ways that coincide with the editor’s aesthetic or political preferences, its tendency to impose stemmatic ordering in textual situations where such imposition appears unwarranted, its encoding of patriarchal and colonial assumptions, and (occasionally) its faint aura of class privilege. The issue of textual stability is a vexed one because the field oscillates over time between the two poles of rigid fixity and chaotic indeterminacy. Confronted with an unexamined plenitude of manuscript and printed evidence about what an author may have written, many of us can share the new bibliographers’ desire for order and codification. In fact, we continue to rely on standard editions and bibliographies of authors about whom we desire textual information without going to the trouble of replicating the painstaking research ourselves. Then again, confronted with too much rigidity in the stabilization of literary texts, which tends to appear tyrannical over time, most of us can understand the recent desire to deconstruct or otherwise undermine the standard editions in order to free literary texts to assume a range of forms and meanings that were precluded by those editions. With the passage of time, some of the new bibliographers’ editorial emendations that may have appeared judicious or even transparently obvious at the time the editions were first published have come to appear strangely arbitrary. For example, in the standard edition of Herman Melville’s Mardi And a Voyage Thither, the CEAA editors overrode both authorized editions published during Melville’s lifetime and emended the numbering of 375 pillars that embellished Melville’s “Temple of the Year, somewhere beyond Libya” to 365 pillars, because Melville states that the pillars “signify days.” The author, they argued, must have intended a congruence between the number of pillars and the number of days in the year (Melville 228). But this conclusion relates more to the editors’ desire for symmetry and closure than to anything we know about Melville’s intent. What if he deliberately wanted to signal the number of days in the year plus ten, perhaps to satisfy some desire for symmetry of his own, or perhaps to disrupt readers’ expectations of congruence between architecture and the calendar? Scholars who may wish to investigate the anomaly are ill served by an edition that corrects it with out any supporting material evidence that the emended version of the passage represents Melville’s intent. Much of the recent dissatisfaction with twentieth-century editorial practice has to do with its valorization of textual stability per se. In recent decades, the discipline of literary studies has assimilated poststructuralist ideas about textuality, which prefer kinetic process over fixity, orphan status over filiation, and plurality over monovocality. To the extent that

Textual Scholarship

83

standard editions encode the second of each of these contrasting terms by suppressing the first, they appear to us to fall short of the kinesis and plenitude that, as readers of Roland Barthes and Jean-François Lyotard, we have come to expect in our interaction with literary texts. Sometimes authors deliberately play with textual differences in order to create a tension between two or more versions of, say, a poem—as in Marianne Moore’s “Poetry,” which Moore first published in a thirty-line version (1935 and 1951) but which she pared down to three lines for the 1967 Complete Poems. The Complete Poems is therefore forever incomplete, forever in need of supplement “The interplay of the two texts is at the centre of the reading experience” (McGann, Beauty 86-87). The playwright Tom Stoppard takes positive pleasure in altering his texts over time: the recurrent image of scattering pages in the film version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead aptly captures his position towards theatrical texts. Or, to take an earlier example, the English baroque poet Richard Crashaw published a cruciform poem in a different, perennially incomplete form every time it appeared, as a way of indicating humility towards his own creations before the plastic powers of God (Chambers). A single critical edition of one version could not capture the spirit of such designedly multiple texts. During most of the twentieth century, it was seldom practical for economic reasons to offer parallel edited versions of a literary work that existed in numerous early forms, though it was theoretically possible for an individual reader to at least glimpse pieces of different early versions of the work through the textual notes in a good critical edition. Indeed, editors considered it an element of their responsibility to the profession and the public at large to override multiple texts in favor of a single definitive version of the literary work. Some innovators created special printed formats for displaying a text’s transformation over time, as in Hans Gabler's synoptic edition of Ulysses, which incorporated various stages in the process of authorial revision as part of the experience of reading the work. In the synoptic Ulysses, the left side of each opening registers the “ineluctable modality of the visible” (1:74) by showing revisions seriatim in the text, while the right side offers the critical edition that results from the editorial process. Here is a passage chosen more or less at random from the synoptic text, with only Gabler’s editorial superscriptions omitted: [Browbeaten Mr Bloom fell] Mr Bloom, chapfallen, drew behind a few paces so as not to overhear. Martin laying down the law. Martin could wind a [fellow] [fathead] sappyhead like that round his little finger, without his seeing it. (235)

84

Chapter Five

The equivalent passage on the right-hand side (the critical edition) reads: Mr Bloom, chapfallen, drew behind a few paces so as not to overhear Martin laying down the law. Martin could wind a sappyhead like that round his little finger, without his seeing it. (236)

Despite the Joycean flow of the synoptic text, Gabler’s edition was criticized for regularizing the novel too much. In Gabler’s version, following the Rosenbach manuscript, Stephen Daedalus answers his own query earlier in the novel about the “word known to all men”: “Love, yes. Word known to all men” (419). In the view of some vocal scholars at the time, this passage, as one that Joyce himself had suppressed, did not belong in a critical edition of the novel, which was too open-ended to admit such a self-defeating form of closure (Kidd). In addition to having other problems with emendation, at least in the view of his critics, Gabler’s text of Ulysses pulled in two directions: the synoptic text in the direction of an emphasis on writing as process, as innovated in “genetic” European editions of Friedrich Holderlin, Friedrich Klopstock, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Marcel Proust (Grésillon; Gabler, Bornstein, and Pierce; McGann, “Ulysses”), the critical edition in the direction of stasis and closure. If Gabler had begun his Joyce edition twenty years later, might he have pushed for an electronic format rather than print? The development of electronic editions has made it possible for textual scholars to achieve both goals simultaneously without an appearance of methodological confusion. Electronic editions can offer stable, searchable texts along with the ability to compare different manuscript and printed versions of a given work in a way that brings its composition to life as process, not only as product. Objections to the inert quality of the standard critical edition are of course not based solely on aesthetic preference for multiplicity and multivocality over stasis and unity. There is also the question of the relation of a literary text over time to its surrounding culture, which is always, perforce, in flux. The new bibliography assumed for strategic purposes that an author’s intentions could be regarded as single, but they may have been irreducibly plural; authors may have intended different versions of a work for different occasions and audiences. Sometimes pressure from readers or editors prompted authors to alter their creations, as in Charles Dickens’s revised ending for Great Expectations, which conceded to readers’ desires for a marriage between Pip and Estella by hinting that Pip would not again part from her. Richard Wright similarly revised Native Son to reject the bleak original ending that showed Bigger

Textual Scholarship

85

Thomas strapped in the electric chair and awaiting execution. When revision is prompted by editorial pressure, does that mean it does not encode the author’s intent? In any case, it represents the text as it was received in print by the original audience—a form that many critics today find considerably more interesting than what the author may have intended. Even when authors expressly stated that editorial interventions had improved their work over its prepublication form, the new bibliography did not necessarily regard the published version as definitive, as in G. Thomas Tanselle’s controversial CEAA edition of Melville’s Typee (1968), which restored cuts made by the editor of the second edition even though Melville himself termed the cuts “beneficial” (Greetham, Textual Scholarship 336). Virginia Woolf revised her novels with a great deal of self-censorship and corrected them differently, depending on whether they were being issued for the British or for the American market. As she noted in the holograph manuscript of Orlando, “ink is excessively sensitive to environment” (Lee 5). Sometimes, paradoxically, writers may revise their novels for a new edition to try to achieve an effect similar to that the work had on its first readers years before, as in Joyce Carol Oates’s recently updated version of A Garden of Earthly Delights (first published in 1967), which, as Judith Shulevitz lamented in the New York Times Book Review, sacrifices the “satisfying plainness” of the original opening for a twenty-first-century revision “with all the saturated color and kinescopic precision a writing workshop leader could ask for.” Clearly, there are now not one but two versions of A Garden of Earthly Delights, one for the 1960s and one redesigned by the author for the present. Since 1980, editorial practice has become increasingly sensitive to such forms of textual multiplicity, and literature has been increasingly reattached to the culture of which it forms a part. Led by Jerome G. McGann in the United States and Donald F. McKenzie in Britain, a movement to rehistoricize editorial practice has revolutionized textual scholarship. Critical editions are still being created, but alongside them readers now are increasingly exposed to what Donald Reiman has termed “versioning,” an editorial method that produces a modern version of a single historically specific form, whether in manuscript or in print, of a given text or two or more versions printed separately for comparative purposes, instead of attempting a single definitive composite edition in the manner of the new bibliography. Reiman’s interest in versioning stemmed from his dilemmas in attempting to edit Romantic texts that changed markedly over time, but the technique has also been adopted in many other areas of scholarship, perhaps most notably in the editing of Shakespeare.

86

Chapter Five

The editing of Shakespeare has been revolutionized over the past three decades by a revitalized interest in the Bard as a reviser of his own plays, perhaps in the direction of greater artistic perfection, but perhaps also with an eye to the tastes of different audiences. After pioneering work by Steven Urkowitz, Michael Warren, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells (see Taylor and Warren; Wells and Taylor, William Shakespeare…Works and William Shakespeare…Companion), it is now commonplace in Shakespeare criticism to regard early printed quarto and folio versions of the plays as encoding different intents geared to different times and audiences. Seduced by the fascinating problems of Shakespearean multiplicity, numerous scholars have turned to editing the plays: it is no longer possible to separate Shakespearean editors from critics. Even the “bad quartos” despised by new bibliographers as inferior, possibly pirated copies of what Shakespeare actually wrote, are now receiving editions of their own, and some scholars are exploring the hitherto heretical possibility that Shakespeare may have worked collaboratively more often than we think. There can be no question, at the very least, that he worked in collaboration with his theatrical company, so that all Shakespearean texts are “contaminated” by the early modem play house in a way that cannot be remedied through even the most careful editing. Obviously, the potential of electronic editions is crucial in making the textual differences among different versions of Shakespeare's plays easily negotiable, as it is crucial for so many other cases of textual multiplicity. It is a sign of the times that early editions of Shakespeare are now readily available online through Early English Books Online (EEBO), the British Library, and smaller initiatives like Peter Donaldson's MIT Shakespeare Electronic Archive. Even seemingly traditionalist enterprises like the MLA-sponsored New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare have laid plans to make all their edited volumes of the plays available in CD-ROM or Webbased formats that will allow readers to retrieve all the major textual forms the plays have assumed over four hundred-odd years since their original publication. Recent editorial practice continues to use traditional stemmatics but frequently modifies it when that methodology does not apply. Created to track alterations in classical texts over centuries of recopying, stemmatics is less useful for cases of much more rapid transmission or for cases in which there may never have been a single written original. There are many such “open recensions”: the oral epics of Homer, of South Slavic peoples, and of modern urban rap culture; biblical texts such as the creation story from Genesis or the four Gospels, which cannot be resolved into a single authoritative account of the events they describe; courtly lyrics, speeches,

Textual Scholarship

87

or sermons that may have been intended for oral delivery but were transcribed by auditors, either during of after their delivery, possibly in multiple versions, as is frequently the case with the sermons of John Donne or the speeches of Queen Elizabeth I. That a monarch’s speeches or a Croatian oral epic or a rap artist’s street performance can now be incorporated within the purview of literature indicates the degree to which the canon has expanded since the heady days of the new bibliography. The matter of editing and canonicity is tricky: on the one hand, fulldress critical editing of an author’s work has traditionally been one of the signs that the author has arrived; it has served to create a secure niche for an author in terms of future scholarship. We reasonably expect a similar level of editorial attention to works that we are in the process of making canonical, if only to ensure that they receive equal exposure and currency. On the other hand, as amply indicated above, the traditional ways of indicating canonicity through new bibliographical practice are ill suited to many of the forms that are coming to be included in the broadened field we now conceptualize as literary and cultural studies. One of the things that is frequently obscured in traditional critical editions is a given text’s engagement with issues of colonialism and race. For example, nearly all modem editors of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine emend the first octavo’s description of him as “snowy” in complexion to the preferred reading of “sinewy,” on grounds that “snowy” is hardly likely as a description of a warrior-conqueror, even though it is the reading of all the early texts; one of the later octavo’s even amplifies the descriptive term to “snowy-white.” In this case, editors have tacitly discounted the overwhelming likelihood that Tamburlaine, whom we have tended to think of as the paradigmatic Islamic other for the English in the sixteenth century, might instead be defined by Marlowe as light-skinned, like the English themselves. Similarly, editors of The Tempest have regularly glossed Shakespeare’s description of Sycorax as a “blue-eyed hag” to mean “bleary eyed” or “blue around the eyes,” confident that Shakespeare could not possibly have intended an Algerian witch to have eyes of such a quintessentially north European color (Marcus, Unediting 5-17). Even more significantly, eclectic editions that freely emend their copytext to incorporate other materials deemed part of the author’s intent can completely obscure a process of what we might call textual racialization, as in the first quarto of The Merchant of Venice, where the plot’s gradual entrapment and alienation of Shylock is mirrored textually by an alteration in the identification of speakers. Shylock’s speeches are headed “Shylock” early in the play but increasingly “Jew” toward the end

88

Chapter Five

as he collapses into a stereotype. Similarly, the first quarto (1622) and first folio (1623) versions of Othello encode very different conceptions of race, and nearly all the passages that critics use to discuss race in the play are in the folio only. To imagine Shakespeare as revising from a text resembling the folio version is to imagine a Shakespeare who participated in a gradual cultural process by which color came to be the chief marker of racial difference (Marcus, “Two Texts”). In all these cases, editorial constructions of textual stability have aligned with nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century colonial assumptions, which is to say that textual critics, like everyone else, are creatures of their times. The same tendency is quite visible in more recent work: we can, for example, trace a process by which the Faber and Faber editors of the Yoruba author Amos Tutuola’s Palm Wine Drinkard (1952) regularized the language of his novel to bring it more nearly into line with standard English, though obviously they chose to prefer some Nigerian forms, like “Drinkard” instead of “Drunkard” in the title. In the view of some educated Nigerians, they did not standardize nearly enough. What is the effect of Faber’s editorial intervention? It was the publisher and not the author who determined the degree of ethnicity allowed in the novel as it was published; it was the publisher who thereby defined a boundary between Anglo-American self and anglophone other. In such a formulation, editing can itself be a form of colonial or racial codification. Since the field of postcolonial studies has become active in textual scholarship, we can expect newly edited versions of literary texts that engage colonial issues, along with the discovery and editing of the works of previously unknown writers. The fields of Afro-American and Chicano studies have contributed enormously to the expansion and diversification of the canon through critiques of received editorial practice and the dissemination of previously unknown work, both in print and electronically. Feminism and gender studies are two other areas that currently have a strong impact on the shape of textual scholarship. In the same way that scholars studying race and colonialism have shown how editorial practice can perpetuate assumptions of racial and ethnic superiority, feminist and queer theorists have posited an alignment between traditional editorial practice and the social control of women and sexual “deviance.” Early humanist scholars frequently conceptualized the texts they were editing as unruly women whom they were bringing under patriarchal domination (Jed), and a similar implicit gendering of textual scholarship has endured for centuries. Even in a standard twentieth-century guide to research methodology, we find Richard Altick assenting to a definition of the driving force behind textual scholarship as an “incontinency of the Spirit”

Textual Scholarship

89

that “hath a pleasure in it like that of Wrestling with a fine Woman” (15). It would, of course, be a mistake to assume that all regularizing impulses are by definition straight and patriarchal. Feminist scholars over the last several decades have worked to dissipate outmoded assumptions on the part of editors and bibliographers. But, like scholars in other canonexpanding areas of the discipline—post-colonial, Afro-American, Chicano studies—they have done codifying of their own, collecting and publishing editions of previously unknown or undervalued writers: Elizabeth Cary, Christine de Pisan, Maria Edgeworth, Zora Neale Hurston, Harriet Jacobs, and Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), to name only a few. The Brown University Women Writers Project has been an especially important venue for making women writers available in printed editions and online. Feminist textual scholars have also attempted to disentangle cases of literary collaboration in which a woman author’s contribution may have been eclipsed or reshaped by the man’s; the genesis, publication, and revision of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818 and 1831), for example, or Harriet Mill’s role in the authorship of J. S. Mill’s autobiography. They have studied women’s roles as translators, collectors, printers and publishers of books and reevaluated evidence for women’s authorship of anonymous materials previously attributed to men. The issue of textual collaboration and mixing is also of particular interest to the field of gender studies. For example, scholars have shown how queer the history of textual scholarship can be shown to be if sufficient attention is paid to questions of homosocial and homoerotic desire (Goldberg), as in the close friendship of the early modem playwrights Francis Beaumont and Phineas Fletcher, who were both collaborators and bedfellows and apparently even shared the same mistress (Masten 121-55). Appropriately for a field as diverse as textual scholarship in the present, we have a wide array of textual presentations to choose from—a development that is very welcome but also potentially quite bewildering, especially to neophytes in the field. Would-be readers of a given author or literary text can often find a photographic reprint of the work in manuscript, typescript, copyedited or early printed versions, in print or online or both; a type facsimile, which records as faithfully as possible within the limits of modem typography the original appearance of a single text of a literary work; a diplomatic transcript, which reproduces the words, spelling, and punctuation of a single version but without attempting to reproduce the work’s appearance in the original; an edited version of one among a number of possible early texts of a given work, like the 1608 quarto of King Lear or the 1850 version of Wordsworth's Prelude; and a

90

Chapter Five

gamut of synthesizing critical editions, which vary greatly, as we have seen. They vary in the amount of editorial intervention allowed; in the variety of textual evidence consulted; in the autonomy accorded to different early versions of a given text; and in the ways the author’s intent, whether conceptualized as singular or plural, is reconstructed and incorporated into the editorial process (Greetham, Textual Scholarship 347-417). Thirty years ago, literary critics could rely on the devalued but indispensable work of textual scholars to provide them with reliable texts. Today, with the breakdown of that convenient division of labor and a new recognition of the rhetorical power of the editorial process, more and more professors and students of literature are setting up shop as textual scholars themselves. The field is rich but also rife with problems: it has gradually marginalized the standardized practices associated with the new bibliography but is only in process of replacing them with a new uniform system, so that in some respects, mutatis mutandis, we have returned to the heady, chaotic days of traditional philology that twentieth-century bibliographical practice was designed to reform. Hence the phrase “new philology” is sometimes applied to the revisionist work in textual scholarship today.

The History of the Book One key element in the new textual scholarship is a passionate interest in the materiality of texts: the forms in which they have been preserved since their creation (whether through inscription on stone, papyrus, parchment codex, loose manuscript leaves, printed book, or online edition), the ways in which alterations in those material forms correlate with or contribute to other elements of social and cultural change, the ways in which the forms in which they are disseminated correlate with changing conventions of copyright and intellectual property, and the ways in which the interpretation of a text is altered from one material presentation to another. Those interests are encompassed in the wide rubric of the “history of the book,” a movement spearheaded in recent decades by scholars like Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier. The history of the book incorporates the traditional interests of descriptive and analytic bibliography and of publishing and copyright history, but with an added injection of theory, particularly the writings of Foucault. Historians of the book study its format in formal terms but also in relation to environments of reading and writing. What difference does it make in terms of reading whether a given text is entered on a roll of

Textual Scholarship

91

parchment, as was standard in classical times, or in a codex, as is still standard for printed books today? (Anyone who has attempted to read a book online has become reacquainted with some differences between the two forms of reading.) How does the formal presentation of a book contribute to its meaning? We may think here of the appropriately green cover of Walt Whitman's virtually self-published Leaves of Grass (1855) or of the sinuous, sweeping giant S that begins Ulysses in most twentiethcentury editions—but not in Gabler’s, since that highly appealing graphic presentation was added by the designers of the United States Random House edition; it was not part of the author’s intentions. One of the major criticisms of the Gabler Ulysses has been that it did not respect early editions of Ulysses as material artifacts or attempt to preserve elements of syncopation between the book’s design and Joyce’s own alterations of the page proofs, which may have taken design elements into account. To take another example, if the 1633 duodecimo edition of George Herbert’s The Temple was designed in size and ornamentation to resemble pocket editions of the Book of Common Prayer available at the same period, then that tells us something important about how the editors and publishers expected the edition to be received (Targoff 112-17). Are there formal features of printed books that have been specifically gendered feminine at certain periods or geared to readers of a specific race, class, or cultural group? And what about fake imprints, which are very common, for example, in French books under the censorship of the ancient regime? Not only typography and ornamentation but also prefatory material; dedicatory poems; illustrations; printed marginalia; title page decoration; information about publisher, printer, and place of publication; and even the internal organization of the volume are part of the interpretation of the book as a material artifact. Historians of the book are also interested in how books have been altered by early owners or other readers. To take some medieval examples, if manuscript materials were bound up together as a unit, even if the contents were quite disparate, that may tell us something about habits of mind then. The existence of contemporary large compendiums or “great books” of chivalry may alert us to generic expectations readers brought to Sir Thomas Mallory's Morte Darthur. If a patron commissioned a special edition of a literary text to memorialize himself and his court, as in Heinrich II of Hesse’s commission of the Kassel Willehalm Codex, how does the presence of the patron in the volume, through dedicatory inscriptions and illustrations, inflect the ways in which it was likely to be read and used (Holladay)? Manuscript marginalia in books of any period may be as interesting as the contents, in that they can offer clues about the

92

Chapter Five

book’s reception by at least one reader. The Folger manuscript of Merry Wives of Windsor, which dates probably from the 1650s (Folger ms. V.A. 73), employs pointing fists in the margins to call attention to the topic of marrying for love instead of money—a sign that the subject was of particular interest to the transcribers or an early reader. Of course, the malleability of material books to alteration at any time in their history can create pitfalls for scholars. Particularly in American libraries, choice editions of major writers often turn out to have been altered or even made up from pieces of other copies. Such tampering can be interesting in itself: the Harvard and University of Texas copies of the 1633 posthumous edition of John Donne’s Poems both have Donne’s signature pasted onto the title page obviously an early enhancement that may well have been engineered by the same friends who saw the book through the press. But the Harvard copy also has a frontispiece portrait of Donne that was pasted in from a later edition: anyone who uses that copy to make a general argument about the appearance of the first edition of Donne's Poems is likely to go seriously astray. Similarly, reputable scholars have been misled in making arguments about portrait frontispieces in George Herbert’s Temple and Ben Jonson’s 1616 Works, to mention only two examples, simply because they used Huntington Library copies into which portraits from elsewhere had been pasted (Marcus, Unediting 199, 259n26). Most major American collections contain at least a few of what bibliographers term “sophisticated” copies of literary classics: that is, copies that have been altered in various ways from their original formatting and appearance, usually by enterprising book dealers. Not many libraries do enough to warn scholars about the nonrepresentative features of these copies. Sometimes new books are made up entirely. The Mayflower Bible at the University of Texas, said to have accompanied the pilgrims to America on the Mayflower, was for many years one of Texas’s prized possessions, acquired after a bitter bidding war with the Mayflower Society. However, it was the Mayflower Society who won: an alert Texas librarian noticed that the Book of Common Prayer included in the Mayflower Bible was in fact spliced together from two different editions, one of which dated from 1634, which was somewhat late for the first Mayflower crossing! Pages from the Mayflower Bible that derived from the 1634 prayerbook contained charming (forged) illustrations supposedly doodled by Pilgrim children who conveniently dated their drawings 1619 and 1623. The impossible dating revealed that all the illustrations, and in fact the whole production, had been faked (Thomas). One of the greatest pitfalls to good scholarly work in the history of the

Textual Scholarship

93

book, as in textual scholarship more generally, is a lack of bibliographic training. Under the old regime of separated duties, literary scholars counted on bibliographers to do the bibliographic work for them. But now that literary scholars have set themselves up as students of the book, they need to learn the techniques that will enable them to distinguish sophisticated copies, they need to be wary about generalizing about an edition on the basis of any single copy, and they need to continue to rely on the expertise of trained bibliographers for matters they cannot investigate themselves. Consider the following hermeneutic circle. The famous forger and bibliographer Thomas J. Wise (1859-1937) helped fuel the seemingly insatiable early-twentieth-century demand for first editions by creating numerous fakes: for example, a separate early printing of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point, which she had in fact never published separately (Collins 89-91; Todd 60-62). If curious scholars wanted verification of the book’s genuineness, they had only to turn to what had long been the standard bibliography of Browning, which happened also to be by Wise and which duly included the first edition of The Runaway Slave, even though Wise himself had manufactured it. One way for the average scholar to escape this circle of deceit would be to rely on a more recent bibliographer, Warner Barnes, who lists the edition correctly as a forgery and explains a bit of its provenance (65-68). The history of the book is rife with similar stories of deception. That deception is part of its fascination and a worthy research topic in its own right but also a warning to scholars to take care in working with material artifacts. Which is not to say that any of us can be expected to take on the prodigious task of inventing the field anew on the basis of our own research At a time when there are so many competing ideas about how textual scholarship should be done, we need to be quite clear about which elements of the field we are willing to take on trust from previous scholars and which areas of previous scholarship we wish to challenge and rework.

Electronic Textual Scholarship As anyone who has browsed the World Wide Web for literary authors and texts is well aware, there are already electronic editions in a wide variety of formats, from simple reprints of older printed scholarship to highly sophisticated hypertextual archives like the Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and The William Blake Archive, both at the University of Virginia. In addition, scholars are increasingly choosing CD-ROM format for major editions. Some electronic archives aim

94

Chapter Five

eventually to bring a literary text to life in all its major transformations from manuscript through a range of printed editions, often with a generous selection of explanatory materials and related cultural documents also included in searchable form. Electronic editions can claim many significant advantages over printed ones. As noted above, they allow for disparate forms of textual presentation that if placed together in a printed edition might appear confused or impossibly unwieldy. A stable critical edition, or more than one, might be presented along with a display of early manuscript and printed forms that allow the reader to examine and critique the processes by which the critical edition was arrived at. In some cases, readers can intervene in the editorial process and either revise an existing critical edition for their own use or capture a single version of the text for further analysis. Electronic editions are particularly well suited for presentation of material by authors who were perennial revisers, such as Joyce and Rosetti; they can also bring together collections of material (slave narratives, literature by women) in a form that is easily expandable as new material is discovered. They enable deep searches of a wide variety of primary texts and archival material, exceeding the capacities of most printed indexes and concordances. They facilitate multimedia presentations—allowing their creators, for example, to present audio materials to accompany the ballad poems of Robert Bums or present staged scenes on video to accompany the written text of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. But they also introduce complex new questions about copyright and intellectual property, and not all copyright holders welcome them. An electronic edition of Joyce is unlikely anytime soon because of the anxieties of the copyright holders. Insofar as the World Wide Web facilitates, or at least fails to police, rowdy, cheek-by-jowl juxtapositions of disparate cultural materials, Webbased textual scholarship by the very nature of its medium further erodes the boundary between and implicit hierarchy of traditional canonical literature and other forms of cultural production. While revisionist textual scholars hail the rapid digitalization of the discipline over the past decade as helping dismantle assumptions about the potential for textual purity and integrity behind some earlier editorial and bibliographic practices, many other scholars in the field are unwilling to concede that the altered medium changes the ontological status of the literary text in any essential way (Burnard, O’Brien O’Keeffe, and Unsworth; McGann, Radiant Textuality). As books published before 1500 are called incunabula, so we now find ourselves in the age of electronic incunabula—an area of textual scholarship that is so new that its impact is almost impossible to assess.

Textual Scholarship

95

There are, however, several clear trends, the most obvious of which is electronic editing’s remarkable editorial eclecticism. If, as many scholars would contend, the idea of the authoritative edition is now for all purposes defunct, that erosion of authority is particularly evident on the World Wide Web, where multiple versions of a given literary text compete for reader attention without the usual credentializing of providers that accompanies the scholarly publication of books. Much of the painstaking work of the most careful twentieth-century editors has, in effect, been rolled back. To return to the example of Emily Dickinson treated earlier, readers wishing to consult an online edition of her writings will most likely encounter one of several postings of the 1890 edition of her poems, which is out of copyright and therefore available for use. But as they consult an online edition of the 1890 Poems, will those readers recognize that “The Chariot” is not Dickinson’s title for “Because I could not Stop for Death,” that the poem in her manuscript was longer and differently worded? Of course the version they are reading can be described as fairly definitive in terms of early audience response, because it approaches the form in which the printed poem reached the public in 1890, even if it differs in significant ways from the poem as Dickinson wrote it. We are back in the shadow of Foucault and of the deconstruction of received textual authority: “What difference does it make who is speaking?” And precisely what is being said? What if we unwittingly base our scholarly conclusions on a downloaded text that has been truncated or abridged or bowdlerized or otherwise revised? The textual indeterminacy that has appealed to so many scholars in theory is often exhilarating online, but it appears incommodious or worse when we find ourselves in need of something “authoritative.” The MLA’s Committee on Scholarly Editions has for many years provided guidance on and articulated standards for the editing of scholarly editions in print. In recent years, the committee updated its “Guidelines and Guiding Questions for Editors of Scholarly Editions” to include electronic editions. These guidelines are a central feature of the MLA volume Electronic Textual Editing (Burnard, O’Brien O’Keeffe, and Unsworth), which is the result of a collaboration between the committee and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The TEI is an international consortium that has created standards for encoding text in SGML (standard generalized markup language) and, more recently, in XML (extensible markup language). By using the TEI guidelines, editors and publishers make use of a set of standards for marking textual features that is designed to endure as software interfaces evolve. Electronic Textual

96

Chapter Five

Editing includes the TEI P4 guidelines along with advice on when (and when not) to use them. The book presents practical advice on editing and marking up texts representing a variety of genres and historical situations. Electronic editions are delivered to users in several fashions, and the choice of delivery medium can have consequences for the durability of an edition. A number of recent endeavours, like the mammoth Canterbury Tales Project, which has already published massive compilations of early versions of Chaucer’s “General Prologue” and “Wife of Bath's Prologue,” have used CD-ROM. CD-ROMs are somewhat like the printed book in that they may be updated only through a new edition. Web-based editions, by contrast, allow for frequent updating. Indeed, to a certain extent electronic editions with links to other electronic sites require frequent updating, for links often change. Many a well-engineered edition has fallen into disrepair simply because its creators became busy with something else. We budget for maintenance of books in libraries but not always for the maintenance of electronic scholarly materials. How long can electronic editions remain useful without significant maintenance, and who will maintain them over time? The TEI guidelines anticipate this dilemma by offering an encoding scheme that is standard and that will endure as delivery platforms change. Nevertheless, humanists will need to continue addressing the significant problem of electronic textual vulnerability; and libraries are increasingly searching for ways to archive and preserve electronic materials. By moving significant editing and archiving projects into electronic form, we have by no means solved the conundrum of silent editorial shaping of the literary text. Electronic textual scholarship is, perforce, a creature of its time, and with standardization and stabilization we are sure to create ideological effects as yet unknown that may hamper subsequent generations of scholars in the same way that the standardization offered by the new bibliography hampered postmodernist and new-historicist critics in the 1980s and 1990s. Setting aside the more visible forms of ideological intervention represented by site design and organization, hypertext markup languages have rhetorics of their own; they can premap and therefore constrict the ways in which we use electronic editions just as predigital editorial practice did. And, of course, electronic editions can never fully reproduce the material forms that a text has assumed at important points in its predigital history. The most careful photofacsimile may not distinguish adequately between pen strokes and age spotting on a manuscript and cannot give users a sense of the heft and feel of a binding. It is as important now as it has ever been for scholars to choose carefully among the array of available editions on the basis of the purposes that we need the

Textual Scholarship

97

edition to serve—which means that we all need to know more than a little about textual scholarship.

Works Cited In addition to the works cited and suggested below, these journals are particularly prominent in the field: Library: The Transactions of, the Bibliographical Society (1889-), Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (1913-), Studies in Bibliography (Univ. of Virginia;1948-), and Text: An interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies (Soc. for Textual Scholarship; 1981-). Altick, Richard D. The Scholar Adventurers. 1950. New York: Free, 1966. Barnes, Warner. A Bibliography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Austin: U of Texas P, 1967. Baron, Helen, and Carl Baron, eds. Sons and Lovers. By D.H. Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Bergmann, Elizabeth Loizeaux, and Neil Fraistat, eds. Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2002. Bornstein, George, ed. Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism. U of Michigan P. 17 Feb. 2006 . —, ed. Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as interpretation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1991. Bornstein, George, and Ralph G. Williams, eds. Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993. Bowers, Fredson. Bibliography and Textual Criticism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1964. —. Principles of Bibliographic Description. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1949. New York: Russell, 1962. —. Textual and Literary Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1959. Brack, O.M. Jr., and Warner Barnes, eds. Bibliography and Textual Criticism: English and American Literature, 1700 to the Present. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1969. Burnard, Lou, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, and John Unsworth, eds. Electronic Textual Editing. New York: MLA, 2006. The Canterbury Tales Project. Humanities Research Inst., U of Sheffield. 2000. 17 Feb. 2006 . Chambers, A.B. "Crooked Crosses in Donne and Crashaw." New Perspectives on the Life and Art of Richard Crashaw. Ed. John R.

98

Chapter Five

Roberts. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1990. 157-73. Chartier, Roger. Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P. 1995. —. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. Cohen, Philip, ed. Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1991. Collins, John. The Two Forgers: A Biography of Harry Buxton Forman and Thomas James Wise. New Castle: Oak Knoll, 1992. The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rosetti. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Inst. for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, U of Virginia. 17 Feb. 2006 . Darnton, Robert. "What Is the History of Books?" Daedalus 111 (1982): 65-83. Rpt. in The Kiss Lamourette. New York: Norton, l990. 107-35. Eaves. Morris. “Why Don't They Leave It Alone?: Speculations on the Authority of the Audience in Editorial Theory." Ezell and O'Brien O'Keeffe 85-99. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. Ezell, Margaret J. M., and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, eds. Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. Finneran. Richard J., ed. The Literary Text in the Digital Age. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. 1996. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” 1969. Trans. Josué V. Harari Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Poststructuralist Criticism. Ed. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979. 141-60. Gabler, Hans Walter, ed. Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition. By James Joyce. 3 vols. New York: Garland, 1984. Gabler, Hans Walter, George Bornstein, and Gillian Borland Pierce, eds., Contemporary German Editorial Theory. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Gaskell. Philip. From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978. —. A New Introduction to Bibliography New York: Oxford UP, 1972. Goldberg, Jonathan, ed. Queering the Renaissance. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. Grafton, Anthony. Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.

Textual Scholarship

99

Greetham, D.C. Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research. New York: MLA, 1995. —. "Textual Scholarship." Introduction to Scholarship in Modem Languages and Literatures. Ed. Joseph Gibaldi. New York: MLA, 1992. 103-37. —. Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. New York: Garland, 1992. Greg, W. W. "The Rationale of Copy-Text." Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950-51): 19-36. Brack and Barnes 41-58. Grésillon, Almuth. Élements de critique génétique: Lire les manuscrits modenes. Paris: PUF, 1994. Grierson, Herbert J. C., ed. The Poems of John Donne. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1912. Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions. MLA. 15 Nov. 2005. 17 Feb. 2006 . Harkness, Bruce. "Bibliography and the Novelistic Fallacy." Brack and Barnes 23-40. Holladay, Joan A. Illuminating the Epic: The Kassel Willehalm Codex and the Landgraves of Hesse in the Early Fourteenth Century. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1996. Jed, Stephanie H. Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Kidd, John. "The Scandal of Ulysses." New York Review of Books 30 June, 1988: 32-39. Kline, Mary-Jo. A Guide to Documentary Editing. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. Lee, Hermione. "Orlando and Her Biographer." Times Literary Supplement 18 Mar. 1994: 5-6. Marcus, Leah 5. "The Two Texts of Othello and Early Modem Constructions of Race." Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare's Drama. Ed. Lukas Erne and Margaret Jane Kidnie. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.21-36. —. Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton. London: Routledge, 1996. Martin, Henri-Jean, Roger Chartier, and Jean-Pierre Vivet, eds. Histoire de l’édition française 4. vols. Paris: Promodis, 1982. Masten, Jeffrey. Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. McGann, Jerome J. The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988. —. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.

100

Chapter Five

—. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave, 2001. —. "Ulysses as Postmodem Text: The Gabler Edition." Criticism 27 (1985): 283-305. McKenzie D.F. Bibliography and the Sociology of the Text: The Panizzi Lectures 1985. London: British Lib., 1986.McKenzie, D. F., David McKitterick, and I. R. Willison, eds. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. 7 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000- . McKerrow, Ronald B., and David McKitterick. An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students. Winchester: Oak Knoll, 1995. McLeod, Randall, ed. Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance. New York: AMS, 1994. Melville, Herman. Mardi: And a Voyage Thither. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970. Mumford, Lewis. "Emerson behind Barbed Wire." New York Review of Books 18 Jan 1968: 3-5. Perseus Digital Library. Ed. Gregory Crane. Dept. of the Classics, Tufts U. 17 Feb. 2006 . Reiman, Donald H. “‘Versioning’: The Presentation of Multiple Texts." Romantic Texts and Contexts. Columbia: U of Missouri P, ,1987. 16780. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Dir. Tom Stoppard. Brandenberg, 1990. Shakespeare Electronic Archive. Ed. Peter Donaldson. MIS. 17 Feb. 2006 . Shillingsburg, Peter. Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice. 3rd ed. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996. Shulevitz, Judith. "Get Me Rewrite." New York Times Book Review 6 Apr. 2003: 31. Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Cover Pages: Online Resource for Markup language Technologes. Ed. Robin Cover. 12 July 2002. 17 Feb. 2006 . Stillinger, Jack. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of the Author in Criticism and Textual Theory. New York Oxford UP, 1991. Tanselle, G. Thomas. A Rationale of Textual Criticism. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1989. —. Selected Studies in Bibliography. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1979. Targoff, Ramie. Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modem England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.

Textual Scholarship

101

Taylor, Gary, and Michael Warren, ed. The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of Kmg Lear. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983. TEI: Yesterday's Information Tomorrow. TEI: The Text Encoding Initiative. 18 Feb. 2006 . Thomas, John B., III. "Tales from the Vault: Our Mayflower Bible." Common-Place 1.3 (2001). 18 Feb. 2006 . Todd, William B., ed. Thomas]. Wise: Centenary Studies. Austin: U of Texas P, 1959. Urkowitz, Steven. Shakespeare's Revision of King Lear. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor, eds. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. Oxford: Clarendon,1987. —. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. The William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Vicomi. Inst. for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. U of Virginia. 1996-2006. 17 Feb. 2006 . Wilson, Edmund. “The Fruits of the MLA: I. ‘Their Wedding Journey,’” New York Review of Books 26 Sept. 1968: 7-10. Wise, Thomas J. A Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. London: Clay, 1918. Women Writers Online. Brown U 17 Feb. 2006 >. Women Writers Project. Brown U. 17 Feb. 2006 .

CHAPTER SIX FROM TEXT TO BOOK ZACHARY LESSER

At some point during the press run of the first edition of Shakespeare’s Historie of Troylus and Cresseida (1609), the publishers Richard Bonian and Henry Walley changed their minds about the play. Ordering their printer George Eld to stop the press, they altered the title page and inserted an anonymous preface, greeting their imagined customer with a somewhat hopeful name: “A neuer writer, to an euer reader. Newes.”1 The publishers—themselves never-writers, at least of plays if not of prefaces— famously offer “a new play” to their ever-reader, one “neuer stal’d with the Stage, neuer clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulger,” despite the fact that their own previous version of the play’s title page had declared its performance “by the Kings Majesties servants at the Globe.” As has often been pointed out, the preface is a “publicity blurb”2 designed to appeal to those readers of plays who viewed themselves as more learned and witty than the rabble present at the theatre: this play, Bonian and Walley proclaim, was not “sullied, with the smoaky breath of the multitude.” But as the publishers extend “a warning” to their potential customers to buy the play now or risk its going “out of sale,” it becomes clear that they are more interested in ever-buyers, who will bestow their “testerne” (sixpence) on the publishers’ latest offering, than they are in ever-readers. Bonian and Walley lament that plays are not held in higher esteem by 1 All quotations from William Shakespeare, The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid (1609), sigs.¶2 r-v, emphasis removed. Although one cannot be certain who wrote the preface, the two publishers are the most likely agents behind this piece of advertising, for, as I will show, publishers (rather than printers) stood to profit most from sales of books. Further, the epistle is a cancel leaf, added to the book during production, when the tide page was also altered; few people would have had access to the book while it was in the print shop, and the printer, George Eld, is unlikely to have made these sorts of alterations on his own. 2 David Bevingron, ed., Troilus and Cressida, by William Shakespeare (Waltonon-Thames: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1998), 1.

104

Chapter Six

“grand censors”—and we may take these, as critics usually do, as figures of authority in church and state, but equally, and more to the publishers’ point, as all potential customers who censure plays, refusing to buy “such vanities.” The publishers wish instead that “the vaine names of commedies [were] changde for the titles of Commodities.” Punning on “title” as name, noble rank, and legal right of possession, they desire (with their own interests firmly in mind) that plays, so often disparaged as worthless “vanities,” were transformed into consumer products of commercial value. But are they not themselves engaged in precisely this transformation? For it is the job of play publishers, after all, to take comedies (as well as tragedies, histories, pastorals, and any of the hybrid genres Polonius can imagine) and change them into commodities, to take their copies of plays and turn them into saleable goods. While this preface has been frequently seen as an advertisement designed to enhance the value of the play, what has not been stressed is that the preface is also a reading of the play. Bonian and Walley are not merely the play’s publishers: when they reconsidered their understanding of the play and inserted their preface, they also became the earliest literary critics to publish on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Not only does the preface catch the mercantile tone of the play—both repeatedly dwell on commodities and their values—but it even highlights the odd word clapper-clawed, used in the play itself by Thersites. Of all Shakespeare’s comedies, the preface asserts, “there is none more witty than this.” This attribution of wit, a word repeated like a shibboleth nine times in the short preface, elevates the play above the common rank, claiming its worth to customers like those Ben Jonson called his “wity young masters o’ the Innes o’ Court,”3 while remaining incomprehensible to “all such dull and heauy-witted worldlings, as were neuer capable of the witte of a Cornmedie...” The play’s wit deserves the book-buyer’s money “as well as the best Commedy in Terence or Plautus,” a comparison that places it firmly in the neoclassical mode that Jonson, for one, hoped to cultivate. Of course, the publishers hope to attract not merely the “learned” or “elite” or “witty” reader, but any potential purchaser. The point is not that their reading provides a transparent representation of their actual audience, but rather that, in order to find any audience at all, they sought to position the play within a particular niche of the print marketplace, appealing to all customers who, for whatever reasons, might want to buy a commodity marked as witty and elite. And, most importantly, they themselves understood the play (at least on second thought) as fitting within this 3

Ben Jonson, Bartholmew Fayrn (1631), sig. A4v (Ind. 34-5).

From Text to Book

105

niche. It is no accident, in other words, that this preface appears in this play, given its classical setting and its sharp, satirical style popular with the selfstyled “wits” frequently imagined as the exclusive patrons of the boy companies, companies that grew out of the grammar-school tradition in which boys were taught rhetorical skill by performing the Latin drama of Terence and Plautus. Bonian and Walley carefully tailor their advertisement to suit the play they are trying to sell, and the advertisement reveals how they themselves read the play and how they hoped, and attempted to determine, that their customers would read it as well. The fact that the preface is part of a stop-press cancel sheet testifies to their ambivalence over exactly how to market it and to their belated decision to fashion it as a witty play suitable for refined tastes. This decision makes much more sense in 1609, after the vogue for satirical city comedies had been cultivated, than in 1603, when the play was first entered in the Stationers’ Register (but not printed) by James Roberts and when the boy companies had just begun to perform at Blackfriars and Paul’s. Bonian and Walley, in other words, seem ultimately to have read Troilus itself as a kind of city comedy, a reading far less available in 1603.4 With this reading, the publishers saw, as perhaps no one could have in 1603, how Troilus and Cressida could fit into their publishing strategy. During Bonian and Walley’s short two-year partnership, they were involved in three other poetic or dramatic works, all of which share the elitist emphasis on wit and classicism displayed in the preface to Troilus: Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queenes (1609), with an authorial dedication to 4

Roberts's entry is typically seen by the New Bibliographers as one of the "blocking entries" used by acting companies to prevent unscrupulous printers from issuing plays that companies wanted to keep off the print market. See W. W. Greg, Some Aspects and Problem of London Publishing Between 1550 and 1650 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 112-22. The Lord Chamberlain did on several occasions write to the Stationers' Company preventing publication of King's Men plays, but these isolated incidents may have been too quickly extended into the theory of regular blocking entries. See Cyndia Susan Clegg, "Liberty, License, and Authority: Press Censorship and Shakespeare," in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 464-85; Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 103-5,115-28. Robert's entry notes the requirement of further authority, but such a requirement was not unusual. Nor was it unusual for the rights to books to be sold informally, without an indication in the Register, which may explain why Bonian and Walley's entrance takes no note of Roberts's previous rights. Bevington integrates well the work of recent bibliographers and historians of the book (Troilus, 398-429).

106

Chapter Six

Prince Henry noting that “Poetry...is not borne with euery man,” a claim Jonson substantiates by annotating his text with marginal references to his classical authorities, thereby indicating the “studies, that goe vnder the title of Humanitie,” necessary to create poetry; George Chapman’s elaborately classical volume of poetry Euthymiae raptus (1609); and John Fletcher’s The Faithfull Shepheardesse (1610), printed with preliminaries that sound very much like the preface to Troilus and Cressida.5 Fletcher complains that his play, written in the novel genre of pastoral tragicomedy, was mistaken by the “common people” for “a play of country hired Shepheards...sometimes laughing together, and sometimes killing one another.” The “rude” multitude at the theatre, “missing whitsun ales, creame, wassel & morrisdances, began to be angry.” Like Jonson, Fletcher warns his reader that his “Poeme”—the word choice is itself polemical—is not for “euery man”: “If you be not reasonably assurde of your knowledge in this kinde of Poeme, lay downe the booke...”6 In deciding to publish Shakespeare’s play and to alter its title page and preliminaries, Bonian and Walley thus seem to be working within a broader relationship with their customers, tailoring their product to meet commercial demands and, at the same time, shaping future demand for similar plays like Fletcher’s. Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication is about these relationships between never-writers and ever-readers, and about the texts and testerns they exchanged. It offers a new kind of historicist criticism, one that investigates the contemporary reception of early modern drama by focusing on the people who staked their money on their readings of plays. It argues that thinking of plays as publishers thought of them, as commodities, can change the ways in which we read these plays themselves. Or rather, not these plays in themselves, for no such thing exists, but instead particular instantiations of them, the earliest printed editions that were bought and read by the customers of early modern bookshops. What did these plays mean in these editions, in these specific 5

Ben Jonson, The Masque of Queenes (1609) sigs. A3r-v. Bonian and Walley may also have been silent partners in publishing Jonson's The Case is Altered (1609). They entered the play on 26 January, 1609; six months later, Walley, Bonian, and Bartholomew Sutton entered the play, "whiche was Entred for H[enry] Walley and Richard Bonyon the 26 of January [1609] last." When the edition appeared, neither Walley nor Bonian appeared in the imprint. The second entry is unusual: it is a reentry rather than a transfer to Sutton, and the wording of the entry eliminates the possibility that Bonian and Walley had forgotten their earlier entry. It seems possible that they maintained a stake in the edition though their names do not appear on the title page. SR III: 400,416. 6 John Fletcher, The Faithfull Shepheardesse (1610?) sig.¶2v.

From Text to Book

107

historical moments, to these people? How might we go about answering such a question, given that reading as an actual, historical activity is often intangible and undocumented? Reading can seem the most difficult to reconstruct of the everyday practices of the past, as it seems to occur in the illegible space between the text and the minds of its incalculable number of usually anonymous readers. “Scattered in an infinity of singular acts,” as Roger Chartier writes, “always of the order of the ephemeral,” reading seems obstinately to escape all attempts to constrain it through historical explanation. According to Michel de Certeau, “readers are travellers” and “nomads,” their activity a series of “ephemeral dances”; taking “no measures against the erosion of time,” reading “does not keep what it acquires, or it does so poorly…”7 Reading is not completely invisible and ephemeral, however: it often does generate material traces. Much recent work in the history of the book has examined marginalia, commonplace books, and other markings that readers leave behind as evidence of their labor.8 The “history of reading practices” that scholars like Anthony Grafton, Heidi Brayman Hackel, Lisa Jardine, Kevin Sharpe, William Sherman, and Steven Zwicker have begun to write provides important insight into the varieties of early modern literacies and “the kinds of training that readers brought to bear on their encounters with texts…”9 Studies of individual readers like John 7

Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), I; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 174. 8 Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, "Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy," Past and Present 129 (1990): 0-78; William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991); Heidi Brayman, "Impressions from a 'Scribbling Age': Recovering the Reading Practices of Renaissance England," diss., Columbia University, 1995; Anthony Grafton, "Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise? Guillaume Bude and His Books," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 91 (1997): 133-57; Steven Zwicker, "Reading the Margins: Politics and the Habits of Appropriation," in Refiguring Revolution: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution, eds. Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 101-15; Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 9 Sherman, John, 59; William H. Sherman, "What Did Renaissance Readers Write in Their Books?" in Books and Readers in Early Modern England.. Material

108

Chapter Six

Dee, William Drake, Frances Egerton, and Gabriel Harvey have helped to restore “actual” historical readers of texts to an area of research traditionally dominated, on the one hand, by the theoretical “inscribed” or “ideal” readers of reader-response and reception theory, and, on the other hand, by the large-scale histories of the Annales school that claimed to deduce actual reading from statistical and sociological studies of book production and distribution.10 As Sherman himself has recently lamented, however, marginalia too often tell us “less than we need to do much with them.”11 At the most basic level, not all of the early modern books in which we are interested contain marginalia, and the archive of marked books has been largely determined by historical accident and by the policies of collectors and librarians who may have preserved, bleached, or cropped the margins of their books.12 In fact, given that the process of canon creation has involved detaching “great literature” from its historical moment, these are precisely the books most likely to have been cleaned of readers’ markings in the effort to create a pristine, and hence “timeless,” copy. The playbooks in the British Library’s Ashley holdings, for instance, are unusually clean, because they derive from the collection of Thomas Wise, who, when he was not forging nineteenth century literature, was busy stealing clean leaves from other copies of these plays and inserting them into his own to replace annotated leaves. Of course, most collectors did nothing so nefarious, but they did often favor clean copies, as we can see from their occasional notes of praise for this quality written on endpapers or flyleaves. Far more than with other books, the archive of literary books has been pre-selected against marginalia. Studies, eds. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 119-37.126. For more on these "kinds of training” and the book technologies that enabled them, see The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print, eds. Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (New York: Routledge, 2000). For a fascinating discussion of the politics of a transformation in these "kinds of training" during and after the Civil War, see Zwicker, "Reading," 109,111. 10 Sherman, "What," 120. 11 Ibid., 133. 12 Monique Hulvey, "Not So Marginal: Manuscript Annotations in the Folger Incunabula," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 92 (1998): 159-76. For similar caveats, see Randall Ingram, “Lego Ego: Reading SeventeenthCentury Books of Epigrams," in Andersen and Sauer, Books, 160-76. About one in every six copies of the plays I examined was heavily cropped, including copies in which the text had been cut from the original book and pasted into a new binding along with other plays.

From Text to Book

109

Even where we can find marginalia, it is difficult to relate the “history of reading practices” like annotation to specific readings of individual texts. The early modern practice of annotation was generally formal and impersonal, lacking what Sherman calls the “personal or creative intensity” that we might hope to find in the engagements of readers with their texts.13 While most of the extant copies of the plays I will discuss in this book contain either no contemporary marginalia at all or marginalia with no discernible relation to text at hand—such as the copy of Othello in the Bodleian Library featuring an elaborate drawing of an ostrich on its final leaf—a sizable minority do show evidence of reading.14 But this minority clearly supports Sherman’s characterization. The most common form of annotation in these books is the simple correction of obvious printing errors: the first edition of A King and no King, for instance, omits a speech prefix for Tigranes at one point, and several of the extant copies show a reader adding it in the margin.15 Much of the rest of the marginalia in these playbooks consists of the underlining or marginal ticking of sententiae, commonplaces, or somehow noteworthy lines. Only occasionally does the reader tell us why the passage was marked, as in one copy of the 1616 edition of The Insatiate Countess, in which someone has written “vndobted / freindshi[p]” beside a reconciliatory exchange between Rogero and Claridiana.16 But relating such annotations to particular 13

Sherman, "What," 137n41. Ingram similarly remarks that marginalia "answer dubiously and darkly to the twenty-first century scholar" ("Lego," 161). But for important counter-examples, see Robert C. Evans, "Ben Jonson's Chaucer," English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989): 324-45; and A. H. Tricomi, "Philip, Earl of Pembroke, and the Analogical Way of Reading Political Tragedy," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 85 (1986): 332-45. 14 Arch.G.d.43(7), sig. N2r. Of the 111 copies of these playbooks that I have examined, 55 are entirely free of early annotation. I examined copies of The Insatiate Countess (5 copies of the 1613 edition and 4 of the 1616 edition), The Jew of Malta (16 copies), A King and no King (8 copies of 1619 and 10 of 1625), The Knight of the Burning Pestle (8 copies), The Noble Spanish Soldier (16 copies), Othello (11 copies), Phylarter (6 copies of 1620 and 6 of 1622), The Roaring Girl (8 copies), and The White Devil (12 copies). I examined all copies of these plays at the following libraries: Beinecke (10 books total), Bodleian (15), Boston Public (7). British (19), Folger (15), Huntington (14). London Guildhall (2), Houghton (7). New York Public (I), Pierpont Morgan (2), St John's College, Oxford (1), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1), Victoria and Albert National Am (13). Worcester College, Oxford (1). 15 See sig. A4v of British Library 643.h.8; Bodleian Mal.242(8); Victoria and Albert D.25.A.18; Folger STC 1670. 16 Folger STC 17477, sig. B3r.

110

Chapter Six

readings of the text at hand is problematic, because the practice of commonplacing was designed precisely to remove a brief passage from its original context for later use in another. This scene from The Insatiate Countess, for instance, in fact expresses not undoubted friendship, but exactly the opposite, as by the end of this attempt at reconciliation, Rogero and Claridiana once again fall to with each suspecting the other of cuckolding him. This annotator’s response obviously provides interesting evidence of one act of reading The Insatiate Countess, but this act of reading the play is less clearly a reading of the play. Most importantly, as Sherman points out, even in those rare instances when we can see evidence of the interpretation of particular texts, there are still formidable obstacles to connecting the idiosyncratic responses of individuals to the “larger patterns that most literary and historical scholars have as their god.”17 It is surely important, for example, that a reader of Thomas Archer’s 1612 edition of The White Dive1 copied and translated one of Martial’s epigrams on adultery beside the scene in which Flamineo disingenuously advises the jealous Camillo not to guard Vittoria too closely because “women are more willinglie & more gloriouslie chast, when they are least restrayned of their libertie” (sig. B3r; 1.2.90—2). The transcribed epigram makes the same point, indeed may be the source of Webster’s dialogue: “Nullus in vrbe fuit tota / qui tangere vellet / vxore[m] gratis Caeciliane tua[m] / Du[m] licuit / sed nunc positis custodibus Ingens / Turba fututoru[m] est, / Ingeniosus homo es / Martialli. epigra[m.]. lib. I. ep. [73],” which the reader freely translates: “[…] who when hee might) thy wife would neuer [sc. touch.] But now / Thy gate being shutt, the wenchers flock to it / Best way to gett a horne. I prayse thy witt.”18 Here we have evidence for one reader’s understanding of this scene in relation to the classical tradition, an association that Webster would have welcomed, given that he himself quotes from Martial to conclude his preface to the reader. But, as I will discuss in chapter four, the publisher Thomas Archer had his own reasons for publishing the play, reasons that had little to do with classicism. How many of Archer’s other customers shared this reader’s intertextual associations? How representative of Archer’s audience is this one customer? These are questions that marginalia studies, by their very nature, cannot answer, but they are also questions of real importance, for they point towards the “larger patterns” that most interest most of us. If we want to understand the politics of these plays, in other words, we 17 18

Sherman, "What," 131. British Library 840.c.37.

From Text to Book

111

need a larger sense of their reception than studies of individual readers can provide, because politics by definition relate to cultural and social structures beyond the level of the individual. As individual and “actual” readers, however, publishers differ significantly from their customers. Publishers must read not only for themselves, but for others. A publisher’s job is not just to read texts but to predict how others will read them. For this reason, although attention to the moments of consumption embodied in readers’ markings will continue to play a vital role in any history of reading, we also need to look at moments of production, at the men and women whose careers depended on their readings of texts and their assessments of the likely readings of their customers. The history of publishing is itself a history of reading, and every play publication is already a piece of literary criticism—if only we can learn to read it. We must begin with one crucial fact about the early modern book trade. As I have suggested with Bonian and Walley, and as I will detail in chapter one, publishers tended to specialize in order to appeal to their customers. For this reason, if we read a play in the context of its publisher’s entire corpus of work, we can often begin to see what the publisher saw in the play—even in the absence of paratextual matter like Bonian and Walley’s preface—since determining whether a given play fits within a given specialty requires the publisher’s interpretation. And because the publisher always has one eye on his potential customers, we can discern, through the publisher’s informed judgment, how the people who bought the play may have read it—or, at least, how the publisher imagined they would read it.19 Though Bonian and Walley seem to have been familiar with the details 19

Print was only one part of the circulation of texts and of the book trade. Early modern publishers would certainly have taken account of manuscript circulation when making their business decisions, as the two markets must have overlapped. But I focus here on printed books, not merely because it is difficult to match scribal publications to particular entrepreneurial stationers, but also because, as T. H. Howard-Hill has recently shown, "nothing in the literature of dramatic publication indicates that there was a nonauthorial commercial trade in dramatic manuscripts . . . [With plays,] there was no serious commercial competition between the manuscript tradition and the newer print technology in the English Renaissance." "'Nor Stage, Nor Stationers Stall Can Showe': The Circulation of Plays in Manuscript in the Early Seventeenth Century," Book History 2 (1999): 2841, 37, 39. On scribal publication, see Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

112

Chapter Six

of the text of Troilus and Cressida—though they seem, that is, actually to have read the play—I am not suggesting, nor does my argument require, that all publishers were so meticulous in reading their texts before deciding whether to publish them. I use “reading” broadly to indicate the wide variety of ways in which publishers must have made sense of texts, for whether or not they read a play in its entirety or saw it performed in the theatre, all early modern publishers needed to judge plays’ larger cultural meanings in order to decide whether they fit into their specialties. Reading, in this sense, begins well before the publisher leafs through a manuscript or enters the playhouse yard. Reading includes, among other possibilities, the publisher’s understanding of a text based on its title, or its author’s previous work, or its provenance—its acting company, theatre, patrons, or coterie—or its generic conventions, or simply based on what friends or fellow stationers may have said about the text. All these judgments, many of which may be only partly conscious, are part of the publisher’s reading of the text, for they form its “horizon of expectations,” and while these expectations may or may not be fulfilled if the publisher reads the text word by word, they will inevitably shape that reading.20 Even if, as must sometimes have been the case, the publisher never does read the entire text, these judgments in themselves function as an interpretation or reading of the text and its place in early modern culture, and one of considerable importance, for it is this reading that stands behind the decision to publish. More than a century ago, Edward Arber alerted scholars to the importance of publishers, beginning his Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London with a bibliographical call to arms: “The time has now come when the English Printer and the English Publisher must take their due places in the national estimation. Hitherto the Author has had it all his own way.”21 Arber’s distinction between the English printer and the English publisher—and we might add the English bookseller—is of vital importance, and I will be defining each of these roles more precisely in my first chapter. What interests me here, however, is that while the printers of plays have since received voluminous attention, the other agents Arber urged us to consider have failed to rouse critics, particularly literary critics, to battle, and Arber’s injunction (without, perhaps, its emphasis on “national estimation”) is as relevant today as in 1875. 20

Hans Robert Jauss, "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory," in New Directions in Literary History, ed. Ralph Cohen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 11-41. 21 SR 1:xiii.

From Text to Book

113

This lack of critical attention to publishers is odd, considering that, as Peter Blayney points out, “if our concern is…the reasons why that play was published then…we must focus…on the publisher.”22 Understanding why a play seemed particularly vendible at a given time could provide a wealth of possibilities for the historicist critic. But publishers, when they are studied at all, still seem solely the concern of the book historian, separated by a disciplinary gulf from literary critics, largely because it has not been clear how publishers might matter for our readings of texts. One can see the depth of this problem when even Robert Darnton, one of the most prominent historians of the book, writes: “I cannot claim that the works of Voltaire and Rousseau take on a new meaning if one knows who sold them.”23 While I cannot speak to the works of Voltaire and Rousseau, I do claim that the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, and their contemporaries will in fact take on new meanings if we pay attention to the people who published them. Indeed, that is the central claim of this book. But in order to see these meanings we need to stop thinking of plays simply as texts, and start thinking of them as books. As D. F. McKenzie has shown us, “every book tells a story quite apart from that recounted by its text.”24 Thinking of a play as a text means attending to the meanings of an immaterial sequence of letters, words, and punctuation, and for this reason most literary critics feel comfortable turning to modern editions for their texts; if a text is immaterial, it may be removed from its original material instantiation with no essential loss of meaning. Thinking of a play as a book, on the other hand, would mean, in part, returning to what G. Thomas Tanselle calls the document, the necessarily unique material artifact in which a text physically appears.25 Until recently, literary critics have tended to concentrate on texts and to leave the study of documents to bibliographers—a division of academic labor in which bibliographers edit 22 Peter Blayney, "The Publication of Playbooks," in A New History of Early English Drama, eds. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 383-422, 391. 23 Robert Darnton, 'The Forgotten Middlemen of Literature," in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1990), 136-53, 152. 24 D. F. McKenzie, "'What's Past Is Prologue': The Bibliographical Society and History of the Book," in Making Meaning: "Printers of the Mind" and Other Essays, eds. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S.J. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 259-75, 262. 25 G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).

114

Chapter Six

the texts that literary critics then analyze—despite the repeated claims of some bibliographers that the two disciplines are in fact intimately related.26 Indeed, the critical concentration on texts seems to obtain regardless of whether this sequence of words is considered as a “Work” or a “Text” (in Roland Barthes’s terms), as New Critical icon or New Historicist discourse, as self-referential and self-contained or as entwined with other texts.27 The distinction between text and book, in other words, logically precedes most theoretical discussions about how we should read texts. In the past two decades, however, in various studies of the material book sometimes grouped under the rubric of “New Textualism,” critics have begun to stress the importance of documents and of the matter in which texts are embodied (this phrase itself reveals the difficulty of escaping the dichotomy of spirit and body that underwrites the privileging of text over book).28 But even among these scholars, Arber’s call for attention to publishers has still gone largely unheeded. To understand the reasons for this neglect, we need to return to Arber himself, and to the New Bibliography that he helped to initiate. In the early twentieth century, the New Bibliography revolutionized textual and bibliographical scholarship, and Arber’s Transcript was one of its foundational texts, the kind of monumental scholarly undertaking at which the New Bibliographers were so adept. Without the transcript of the Stationers’ Register, much of the important later work of scholars like A.W. Pollard, W. W. Greg, and R. B. McKerrow would not have been possible. But this later work also inherited the biases of its foundation. For, despite his avowed desire to investigate printers and publishers and to put aside the Author who “has had it all his own way,” Arber ultimately still has the author in mind. He made his transcripts not merely to “honour the labours and risks of those men”—and, it should be added, women— who preserved early modern literature through their financial speculation, 26

Tanselle, Rationale, 33-5; D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, 1986), 14; Jerome McGann, 'The Monks and the Giants: Textual and Bibliographical Studies and the Interpretation of Literary Works," in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. McGann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 18-99. See also Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 18ff. 27 Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text," in Barthes, Image, Music, Tat, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). 155-64. 28 The term 'New Textualism" was coined by Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass in "The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text," Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 255-83, 276. See also Alan B. Farmer, "Shakespeare and the New Textualism," Shakespeare International Yearbook 2 (2002): 158-79.

From Text to Book

115

but also to discover the conditions under which that literature made its progress from the author to the printer.29 For Arber, as for the New Bibliographers who followed him, publishers only transmit texts, the meanings of which remain firmly in the hands of authors. Indeed, authors, and paradigmatically Shakespeare, dominated the work of these early bibliographers. Although they produced volumes of invaluable material on the printing, publishing, and selling of early modern books, the New Bibliographers were primarily interested in printed books because of their desire to establish firmly “the foundations of Shakespeare’s text” and “to present the text…in the form in which we may suppose that it would have stood in a fair copy, made by the author himself, of the work as he finally intended it.”30 Their investigations into printing house habits, censorship, handwriting, varieties of manuscript, “good” and “bad” quartos, and the allowance, license, and entrance of books all aimed at creating “sound” critical editions of plays. Because the New Bibliographers felt that sound critical editions had to be based on authorial intention, they were mainly interested in tracing the “corruption” (as they saw it) that occurred during the processes of theatrical and print production. Imagining the various possible trajectories of a text from authorial “foul papers” (a bibliographic category that Paul Werstine has called “the product not of reason but of desire”), to fair copies, to promptbooks, to memorial reconstructions, to printers’ copy to, finally, the printed book, the New Bibliographers felt they could trace the path backwards from the printed book—generally the only surviving example of these steps—to the authorial foul papers, if only they could scientifically determine the types of errors, slips, memory lapses and other

29

SR 1:xiv. Women were important agents in the book trade, working as booksellers, printers, and publishers. But while women publishers were not uncommon in general, they were less common as publishers of drama. Prior to the closing of the theatres, only four women had been involved in publishing a total of seven playbooks: Joan Broome published Lyly's Endymion (1591), Gallathea (1592 ) ,and Midas (1592); Elizabeth Allde printed and published Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1630), and printed Arden of Feversham (1633) to be sold by Stephen Pernell; Anne Griffin printed The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1637), apparently to be sold by Thomas Allot; and Anne Wilson published The Hollander (1640). For an important re-assessment of the role of women as publishers, see Maureen Bell, "Hannah Allen and the Development of a Puritan Publishing Business, 1646-51," Publishing History 26 (1989): 5-66. 30 W. W Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare: A Survey of the Foundations of the Text, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), iii, x (emphasis removed).

116

Chapter Six

problems occurring in the long transition to print.31 With only the printed book to work with, the New Bibliographers naturally focused most of their energy on printers. But since on the whole they were less interested in the books themselves then in the authorial manuscripts that lay behind them, they were rarely interested in publishers. When publishers entered their arguments, they generally served only to provide a convenient “pirate” around whom a theory of “bad” quartos could be built; publishers were given attention only when they were necessary to explain the origins of a printed text and hence help get at the “foundations” of that text. In Shakespeare’s Folios and Quartos (1909) and Shakespeare’s Fight with the Pirates (1917), for example, Pollard used Arber’s transcripts to support his distinction between “good” and “bad” quartos and thereby to vindicate the majority of texts in the Shakespeare folio from the taint of textual corruption: “an entry in the Stationers’ Register may be taken as prima facie evidence that a play was honestly purchased from the players to whom it belonged, while the absence of an entry or entry and immediate transfer…points to a play being printed without the players’ leave, or in other words pirated.”32 But the crucial elements of this entire theory of piracy have been challenged in recent years: Peter Blayney and Gerald Johnson have critiqued New Bibliographic claims about the relation between textual transmission and entry in the Stationers’ Register; Roslyn Knutson and Lukas Erne have questioned received notions about the reluctance of theatrical companies to release their texts to the press; and Laurie Maguire has undermined the New Bibliographic faith that we can readily distinguish between so-called “good” and “bad” texts.33 With the death of the pirate, publishers have 31

Paul Werstine, "Narratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts: 'Foul Papers' and 'Bad' Quartos," Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 65-86,75. See also the excellent histories of the New Bibliography in Laurie E. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The "Bad Quartos" and Their Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 2; and in Joseph Loewenstein, "Authentic Reproductions: The Material Origins of the New Bibliography," in Textual Formations and Reformations, eds. Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998). 23-44. 32 A. W. Pollard, Shakespeare’s Fight with the Pirates and the Problem of the Transmission of his Text (1917; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937). 48. I am especially informed here by Margreta de Grazia, "The Essential Shakespeare and the Material Book," Textual Practice I (1988): 69-86. 33 Blayney, "Publication"; Gerald Johnson, "John Busby and the Stationers' Trade, 1590-1612," The Library, 6th ser., 7 (1985): 1-15; Gerald Johnson, "Nicholas Ling, Publisher 1580-1607," Studies in Bibliography 38 (1985): 203-14; Gerald Johnson, "John Trundle and the Book-Trade," Studies in Bibliography 39 (1986):

From Text to Book

117

lost their main role in the study of playbooks, and critics of the drama have found few other reasons to deal with them. Along with this piracy narrative, many other key assumptions of the New Bibliography have been revised by contemporary scholars interested in editing, authorship, and the history of the book, but ironically their revisionism has itself prevented them from focusing on publishers. For the various strands of this “New Textualism” are still largely responses to the New Bibliography, attempts to find new ways of dealing with the materiality of early modern texts in light of more contemporary theoretical concerns about textual production.34 Despite their often explicit rejection of their predecessors, the interests of these critics have thus strangely mirrored those of the New Bibliographers. Like Pollard, Greg, and McKerrow, they have been mainly interested in authors and, in a more minor way, in printing and the physical appearance of books. Three strands of recent critical work on the materiality of early modern playbooks seem important here. The first, often called “new revisionism,” effectively began with the publication of Gary Taylor and Michael Warren’s The Division of the Kingdom (1983), which sought to undermine the crucial New Bibliographic belief that a single, authoritative work lay behind the multiple texts of a given play, in this case King Lear.35 By paying close attention to the original documents of Shakespeare’s plays, new revisionists have shown that many of the features that were once taken as signs of textual corruption could as easily be evidence of authorial revision. According to these critics, the different editions once conflated into a single work actually represent different stages of Shakespeare’s creative process. This scholarship has illuminated many previously ignored passages, often providing compelling readings of variant texts, but it does retain the New Bibliographic concern with the author, despite its rejection of a central concept of the New Bibliography. 177-99; Roslyn L. Knutson, "The Repertory," in Cox and Kastan, New History, 461-80; Erne, Shakespeare; Maguire, Shakespearean. 34 See Laurie Maguire, "Introduction," in Maguire and Berger, Textual 11-18, 13. 35 Gary Taylor and Michael J. Warren, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Warren began the research that led to this book in a paper given at the annual meeting of the MLA in 1976 and in "Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar," in Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature, eds. David Bevington and Jay L. Halio (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978), 95-107. For "new revisionism," see Grace Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 4; see also Steven Urkowitz, Shakespeare’s Revision of King Lear (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

118

Chapter Six

Indeed, the new revisionists—writing, perhaps not coincidentally, just as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault were undermining traditional views of the author—arguably take their fascination with authors further than the New Bibliographers themselves.36 Greg and his peers at least acknowledged the roles of printers, compositors, scribes, and players in transforming the text on its way to the printing house (in fact, their analysis depended on this transformation), while the new revisionists often seem to assume that every variant reading must be evidence of authorial revision.37 If the new revisionism can be seen as, to some extent, a conservative reaction against the death of the author, the second major strand of New Textualism has taken up the post-structuralist charge, examining the role of print in the creation of the “author function” in the early modern period. Rather than looking for the author’s intentions behind “the veil of print,”38 David Scott Kastan, Douglas Brooks, Joseph Loewenstein, Leah Marcus, and Jeffrey Masten, among others, have looked at the importance of the printed book, and the folio volume in particular, in creating the authorial personae of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher, while Wendy Wall has examined the gendered nature of such personae as they were constructed through print and publication.39 These studies—some of the most exciting recent work on early modern drama—have greatly enhanced our understanding of authorship and authority in early modern 36

Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Image, 142-8, and "From Work”; Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in PostStructuralist Criticism, ed. and trans. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979). 141-60. 37 For a trenchant critique of this approach, see Farmer's comments on Ioppolo ("Shakespeare," 163-7). See also de Grazia and Stallybrass, "Materiality," 279. 38 Fredson Bowers, Textual and Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 85. 39 Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), and "For a History of Literary Property: John Wolfe’s Reformation,'' English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 389-412; David Scan Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999); Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modem England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Masten, Textual; Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), ch. I.

From Text to Book

119

England, but they too remain focused on authors, despite their reconception of that figure as a function of the text rather than its preexisting creator. Because the New Bibliographers searched for this creator “behind” a material text that incorporated the work of many non-authorial agents whose labor had to be stripped away to reveal the hand of the author, the New Bibliographers were the first to examine systematically the multitudinous features of textual documents. A third variety of the New Textualism has revised this aspect of the New Bibliography, studying these documents not for signs of the author but rather for what Jerome McGann calls their interrelated “systems of linguistic and bibliographical codings.”40 Joseph Loewenstein has examined the ideology of the italic typeface, David Scott Kastan the connection between literary forms and bibliographic formats, and Randall McLeod the junction of speech prefixes in creating, or dislocating, our sense of the unity of dramatic characters.41 Leah Marcus has been interested in the new readings available from the study of original (and often neglected) documents in all their material variation, reading The Taming of A Shrew as well as The Taming of The Shrew, and one version of Doctor Faustus against the other.42 Like the new revisionists, Marcus sees multiple texts as the discrete products of different historical conditions rather than as the corrupted descendants of a lost original, but unlike those critics, she feels no need to imagine the agency behind this variation as necessarily authorial, and, indeed, often feels no need to imagine it at all. Like the other strands of the New Textualism, this one has brought a welcome attention to the material book, forcing us to recognize that a text 40

Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 15. This approach grows out of the "sociology of texts" championed by McKenzie, Bibliography. 41 Joseph Loewenstein, "Idem: Italics and the Genetics of Authorship,"Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 (1990): 205-24; David Scott Kastan, "Little Foxes," in John Foxe and His World, eds. Christopher Highley and John King (Burlington: Ashgate, 2001), 117-31; Random Cloud (Randall McLeod), "'The very names of the Persons': Editing and the Invention of Dramatick Character," in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizbethan and Jacobean Drama, eds. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991), 8896. Also see my second chapter and its study of "continuous printing," and Zachary Lesser, "Typographic Nostalgia: Playreading, Popularity, and the Meanings of Black Letter," in The "Booke” of the Play in Early Modern England: Stationers, Censors, and “Curteous” Readers, ed. Marta Straznicky, forthcoming. 42 Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (New York: Routledge, 1996).

120

Chapter Six

is always transmitted within a document that deserves examination in its own right, and that the non-textual features of a document carry their own semiotic weight. But even this work still tends to consider documents solely as vehicles of meaning, whether linguistic or bibliographical, and not, as their publishers would have seen them first and foremost, as commodities to be exchanged between producers and consumers. Even when interpreting particular documents, therefore, critics have not been greatly interested in their publishers, in “why that play was published then.” In order to keep our focus firmly on commodities, I will use the term book, rather than Tanselle’s term document. The two classes are hardly mutually exclusive, since all books are documents (though not all documents are books), but the more mundane book better suggests the idea that early modern printed plays were always implicated in the economics of the book trade. Nor are books opposed to texts, for all books, unless they are blank, involve a text, but books are not merely texts and they are not merely documents. Texts are not in themselves commodities, and neither are many documents (personal notes, letters, or government records, for example). But almost all printed books are. My approach to the playbook thus draws on the best of the New Textualism: a precise attention to the book’s material features and to the ideologies of its “linguistic and bibliographic codings,” readings of the texts of particular books rather than conflated editions, and an awareness of the multiplicity of agents and intentions behind any printed book. But it also enlarges these strategies with an analysis of the play as a commodity within the book trade and of the publisher’s role in creating that commodity. It is crucial to recognize that such an analysis is not merely sociological or historical, but also literary critical. We cannot analyze the ways in which books were marketed and sold, as though their meanings were predetermined and stable, without simultaneously discussing the shaping role of the book trade in creating these meanings. The publisher does not merely bring a commodity to market but also imagines, and helps to construct, the purchasers of that commodity and their interpretations of it. Studies of the economic conditions under which books were exchanged can and should lead us to new understandings of the texts, and the politics, of those books.43 43 My methodology is influenced by the one called for by Chartier: “first, the analysis of texts, be they canonical or ordinary to discern their structures, their themes, and their aims; second, the history of books and, beyond that, the history of all objects and all forms that bear texts; third, the study of the [reading] practices that seize on these objects and these forms in a variety of ways and produce

From Text to Book

121

Just as publication necessarily involves an act of imagination, so too does my work depend on imaginative reconstruction. On a mundane level, only rarely do I have any documentary evidence, in marginalia or other readers’ markings, of who purchased these books and why, of how they saw themselves, of how they read these texts. Since the readers I am interested in have been dead for four hundred years, I certainly cannot use the sort of ethnographic techniques with which Janice Radway analyzes the contemporary readers of romance novels.44 In this sense, there is a conspicuous blindness to “actual” readers (other than the publisher) at the heart of a study that wants to understand historical readings, but it is a blindness that also enables the entire project. For if we cannot move easily from the readings that publishers imagine to the meanings that their customers made out of these books, neither can we hope to build up a larger sense of the reception of a book and its position in the marketplace from the marginalia and diaries of particular readers. Neither method, in other words, may be able to achieve its ultimate dream of access to the ways in which these texts were read by early modern readers; perhaps we must always stake out ground somewhere between the idiosyncratic and the imaginary.45 A full history of reading therefore needs to work from both ends of the dialectic, but it is worth stressing that publishers do stand at a unique point. They are themselves differentiated uses and meanings” (Order, 2-3). I would only add that we cannot consider the material elements of a book and their role in creating meaning without also attending to the book trade and its agents who shape those material elements. 44 Radway does note, however, that “[a] logical way to start such a project [of reconstructing interpretive communities] would be to make use of the publishing industry's own understanding of the book buying public.” “Interpretive Communities and Literacies," in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, eds. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 465-86, 469. See also Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarch and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); and David Morley, The Nationwide Audience: Structure and Decoding (London: BFI, 1980). Both books reveal the difficulty of adapting a Cultural Studies approach, at least in its more sociological forms, to historical periods other than our own. 45 I am arguing here for a combination of approaches similar to what David Morley suggests is required in media studies: “If micro-studies alone suffer from the 'So what?' problem, if they just pile up an endless set of ethnographic descriptions, then, equally, any theory of hegemony which is not grounded in an adequate analysis of the process of consumption will always tend to be so over-schematic as to be ultimately of little use…” David Morley, Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), 40.

122

Chapter Six

actual readers (among the first and most critical), although the material evidence for and traces of their readings lie not in marginalia but in the specialized corpus of books that they produced. And they are also highly invested (quite literally) in imagining implied readers and transforming them into actual readers. This methodology can thus lead us to what Stuart Hall has called the text's “dominant” or “preferred” reading, but early modern publishers could never hope to control completely who read their books nor how they read them, and publication could produce, and surely must often have produced, unintended results.46 Such unpredicted readings may be preserved in marginalia or other evidence of the responses of individual readers. But it may also be possible to infer them from the shape of a publisher’s career: there is a complex “feedback loop” between publishers and purchasers, and a publisher who misreads his audience may adapt his publishing strategy over time. Indeed, we might see Bonian and Walley’s refashioning of Troilus and Cressida as just such an adaptation. For a publisher to stay in business, however, he must have some success in both predicting and shaping the responses of book-buyers, and when a publisher stays in business for as long as the four I examine here—Walter Burre (twenty-four years), Nicholas Vavasour (twenty-six years), Thomas Archer (twenty-eight years), and Thomas Walkley (forty years)—we can safely assume that he was fairly good at doing so. In Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication, I have chosen to examine who seem to me to have succeeded in changing “the vaine names of commedies” into “the titles of Commodities,” but equally interesting results, I think, might be obtained by looking at the more spectacular failures of the book trade. Play texts, of course, do not become commodities only by becoming books: the same transformation occurs in the very different economy of theatrical production. And, as scholars like Mary Bly, Scott McMillin, and Sally-Beth MacLean have demonstrated, treating the play as a theatrical commodity in which playing companies specialized can generate results as productive as I hope mine will be for the play as a print commodity.47 But the processes of commodification in the playhouse and in the printing 46

Stuart Hall, "Encoding/decoding," in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79, ed. Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 128-38. 47 Mary Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); see also Scott McMillin, The Elizabethan Theatre and The Book of Sir Thomas More (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).

From Text to Book

123

house were not the same, and the differences between these processes raise significant methodological issues. Although print publication of early modern plays from the professional theatre was almost always chronologically posterior to performance, for modern critics print must be logically prior to performance, since our historical evidence for the details of the performance of a given play exists almost entirely in the printed playbook itself. Studies of early modern performance, therefore, must necessarily take account of print production when making claims about performance on the basis of a printed book (and manuscript plays, of course, carry their own complex textual issues).48 We cannot assume that the printed text reproduces the play text as it was performed, nor that it represents the same version of the play as was produced on the stage. While early modern plays may usually have been written for the theatre, in other words, they come to us filtered through the economy of the early modern book trade, an economy that differed significantly from that of the theatre. Studying this theatrical economy through the records of Henslowe’s diary, Roslyn Knutson has recently calculated that “[b]y the eighth performance [of a play]…the company probably had recovered its costs of production and even made some profit.”49 Even if the theatre need not have been filled to capacity at these performances, a production at the 48

As W.B. Worthen has observed of his own field, "[a]lthough textual theory has tended to multiply and complicate the relationship between author, work, version, and text," performance critics (and performers themselves) have too often ignored these complications. W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 19. Charles B. Lower, for example, begins a recent essay by acknowledging that "the 'text' now is convincingly understood as 'problematized,"' but quickly goes on to assert that "we can and do know the spoken English likely heard by some early-seventeenth century audience, as represented in the 1623 Folio." Beginning with this supposedly "hard fact," Lower then analyzes the ways in which characters are or are not named by other characters, for somehow all the problems of textual transmission "do not impact on the dialogue presence or absence of particular names." Because "Claudius" is never named in the text of the folio Hamlet, Lower concludes that "no audience member would hear such a name." Charles B. Lower, "Character Identification in Two Folio Plays: Coriolanus and All’s Well: A Theater Perspective," in Maguire and Berger, Textual, 231-50, 231, 232, 247n2, 235. Lower's argument illustrates the need for real caution when attempting to reconstruct the performance "behind" a printed text. I certainly do not want to close off such attempts, but rather to argue that print and performance cannot be diametrically opposed, because each to some extent depends on the other. 49 Knutson, "The Repertory," 468.

124

Chapter Six

Rose of The Jew of Malta, the subject of my third chapter, would thus have had to draw well over ten thousand spectators to begin earning money for its company.50 The publisher Nicholas Vavasour, however, could expect to turn a profit on his edition of The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta after selling about 60 percent of his press run; in a run of 800 copies, this would amount to 480 books.51 The profit Vavasour might earn was surely less than the theatrical company would hope for, but then so was his investment. The difference in the economies of scale for the two modes of play production is staggering. A playbook of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which I examine in chapter two, would have sold retail for about six or seven pence, a price roughly equivalent to the cost of entrance to Blackfriars, where the play was first performed. But while the cost to the consumer of an indoor stage play and a printed play are about the same, an utter disaster in the theatre—a play, for example, that sold out its first night but then failed ever to attract another spectator—would be a fair success if the same number of people bought the play as saw it. While the company must target a rather broad range of people to fill the theatre night after night, the publisher can afford to cater to a smaller, “niche” audience. Play publishers, in other words, could create far narrower specialties than acting companies could, and for this reason my methodology is ideally suited to printed plays, for the economy of print generates the specialization on which my approach depends. When studying the play as performance, then, we must at least consider that “the politics of publication” may have significantly affected the text that early modern audiences heard in the theatre, turning it into the one that they bought in the bookshop and that we study today. By “the politics of publication,” I mean first that early modern publishers inevitably transformed the meanings of plays through publication, reading them in the contexts of their own publishing specialties and their own historical moment, contexts that may have differed radically from those in which the plays were written and performed. In turning the play into a commodity, print publication does not simply transmit the text, is not simply a neutral vessel of textual meaning. Second, the politics of publication encompasses not only publishers’ readings but also their attempts to imagine and control their customers’ readings. When a publisher determined that a text fit within his specialty, he gambled his capital that others would understand the book as 50

For estimates of the Rose's capacity, which tend to cluster around two thousand, see Christine Eccles, The Rose Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1990), 131-7. 51 Blayney, "Publication," 389.

From Text to Book

125

he understood it, and that he would therefore be able to sell the book as he had sold previous books in his specialty. But publication also attempts to ensure this understanding, for it places the book in a new horizon of expectations for book-buyers, a horizon formed not only by their knowledge of and relation to the publisher and his specialty, but also, as Chartier has stressed, by the material form of the book itself, often designed by the publisher to ensure that it will be “correctly” understood.52 Publishers, in other words, developed techniques of presentation and marketing to ensure that their imagined customers became real ones. But because they specialized, publishers also constructed their customers’ readings simply by the act of publication itself, leading customers to consider a play within its publisher’s specialty. For this reason, the same play may carry radically different meanings and politics not only between its printed and its performed versions, but even between two otherwise identical printed editions brought out by two different publishers. In turning texts into books, then, the politics of publication regularly removed plays from the situation of their composition or initial performance, as publishers put them to use in new contexts under new conditions. When authors played a part in this process, it was less as the originators or guarantors of meaning than as one element among many in a publisher’s specialized corpus. The politics of playbooks thus come into focus only as the authors of plays are decentered from their position as the organizing principle of meaning. But in order to perceive the meanings of these plays in their moment of publication and reception, this decentering must be followed by a recentering of the play around a particular publishing specialty, a particular niche in the marketplace of print. In this sense, while certainly drawing on the lessons of New Historicism, the historicism of my methodology differs significantly from that most important mode of recent historicist criticism. New Historicism, of course, has been incredibly productive for early modern studies, both in making available to the literary critic whole areas of once-neglected culture, now re-examined in light of their discursive intersections with literary texts, and in overturning older critical models in which history (predominantly the history of ideas) functioned merely as the stable and univocal background that literary texts were thought to mirror. But New Historicism has been less proficient at answering the central theoretical questions raised by this very productivity, thereby running the risk, as has been pointed out almost from 52 Chartier, Order, viii. See also his criticism of traditional reception theory for failing to consider the effects produced by material form (ibid., l0).

126

Chapter Six

the start, of becoming circular, arbitrary, or homogenizing, or of producing an untheorized formalism.53 Among these questions, I take three to be of paramount importance: first, how should we, as critics, determine precisely which cultural discourses were engaged by a given text—and this is merely to reformulate the basic question of literary historicism, that of the relation of literary text to history—such that we can maintain some distinction, however circumscribed and self-reflexive, between our own understanding of this relationship and the understanding of the historical subject we are studying? Second, exactly who (or what) is this historical subject: when we talk about the politics of literature, who are these politics for? And, finally, how should we understand the action of literary texts in history: how are they made to intervene in political or cultural debates? Through its focus on the material production, circulation, and reception of texts as books, the history of the book can address these questions by offering us a more rhetorical understanding of literature-in-history as simultaneously text and event or political action.liv Attending to the politics of publication can thus yield a more finely tuned understanding of the relationship between literature and history, not least because in this methodology the discursive intersections and intertextualities marshaled by the critic always bear a material-historical relation to the book under consideration. Studying a play through its publisher’s specialty allows us to specify the particular texts and debates that the play was thought, at least by one historical actor, to engage; to whom it was thought (and made) to speak; and in what political field. Rather than working with somewhat amorphous and potentially reified ideas of “culture” and “power,” this approach derives from critical interpretations of the readings of individual agents appealing to particular audiences within particular segments of the early modern book trade. Attention to publication forces us to recognize too that texts are hierarchically organized not merely within discursive networks of power, but also within the material networks of the book trade, which granted neither equal access nor equal authority to all texts, writers, readers, or stationers. The politics of publication thus 53

See Jean E. Howard, "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies," English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 13-43; Leeds Barroll, "A New History for Shakespeare and His Time," Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 441-64; Alan Liu, 'The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism," ELH 56 (1989): 721-71. The different critiques and proposals in these essays, it seems to me, have still not been fully thought through. Liu's essay, in particular, offers an intriguing program for further research that has not been broadly taken up. See also Fredric Jameson's critique of New Historicist homology, in Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). 181-217.

From Text to Book

127

assumes New Historicism’s rejection of earlier historicist criticism: its replacement of a monolithic historical “background” drawn from the history of ideas with a view of history more contested, partial, and material; and its emphasis on the dialectical productivity of literature and history. But the politics of publication also insists on a less free-floating understanding of the political activity of texts and discourses by localizing that activity through attention to the material conditions of their commodification as books. In the history of the book, then, we can find one way of addressing the central questions raised by New Historicism about how to discern the politics of literary texts in their historical moments. But New Historicism, with its insistence on the ways in which literary texts are embedded in history and its consequent refusal to reify their meanings, also provides a challenge to the history of the book: to study not merely the changing conditions of the production and dissemination of books but also the new textual meanings that these changing conditions must inevitably produce. As I have suggested, book historians have been far more successful at the former than the latter. A focus on publishers—the primary readers and interpreters of the early modern book trade—opens up the possibility of studying both simultaneously. Precisely because of the centrality of reading in this method, I certainly do not want to ignore my own act of reading or simply dissolve it into the publisher’s and claim to have discovered it there. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the politics of publication refers to us. By helping us to imagine, alongside the publisher, the readings of seventeenth-century book buyers, this methodology can challenge our own understandings of these plays by revealing their ideological underpinnings, thereby illuminating our own politics of reading. Following an opening chapter on the role of publishing and specialization in the book trade that provides the detailed historical argument underlying my method of reading, I demonstrate this method in case studies of four publishers. Because I am not seeking to demonstrate any historical progression with these case studies, I organize them not chronologically but rather typologically, to emphasize the activity of playbooks in various political fields and various publishing strategies. I begin in chapter two with Walter Burre’s odd decision to publish Francis Beaumont’s notorious theatrical failure, The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Burre, I suggest, was exploiting and helping to create an emergent division in the market for printed plays between “select” and “popular” drama; in this context, a play’s failure on stage might in fact be a selling point in print. This chapter most directly addresses the shift of attention

128

Chapter Six

from author to publisher on which my work depends, for Beaumont played no role in this publication, neither as intentional agent— he was not involved in the decision to publish the play or to construct it as “select”— nor even as ideological effect or “author function”: Beaumont’s name does not appear on the title page, and Burre’s construction of the play did not depend on a construction of its author. Chapter three seeks to explain another odd publishing decision, Nicholas Vavasour’s belated publication in 1633 of the first edition of The Jew of Malta, two generations after its initial performances at the Rose. But while my studies of Burre and Vavasour begin with the same question, the answers to this question—the rationales behind these publishing decisions—differ, and publishing strategies of Burre and Vavasour differ as a result. Vavasour apparently believed that The Jew had gained new relevance in the religious climate of the 1630s and felt the play could be made to participate in the debates over the ecclesiastical program of Archbishop Laud. While Burre’s publishing strategy engaged with the politics of the dramatic field itself, therefore confining his specialty to his dramatic publications, Vavasour’s specialty extends over his entire publishing business, as do the specialties of the other two publishers I study, because the politics of these plays extend beyond the dramatic field to the wider issues engaged by their publishers’ corpuses as a whole. Both Burre and Vavasour specialized in books on only one side of a cultural divide: Burre brought out only playbooks constructed as “select” not “popular,” and Vavasour only books coded as Laudian not puritan. My third study of the politics of publication introduces a new publishing strategy by examining a publisher who specialized in both sides of a polemical debate, a strategy that I call “dialogic publishing” to distinguish it from the “monologic” strategy of Burre or Vavasour. Thomas Archer played both sides of the market in the querelle des femmes by publishing not only Joseph Swetnam’s incredibly popular Araignment of Lewde, idle, froward, and unconstant women, but also Rachel Speght’s rejoinder, A Mouzell for Melastomus, as well as a group of plays—including The Roaring Girl, The White Devil, and The Insatiate Countess—all dealing centrally with the “woman” question. The structure of dialogic publishing itself affects the meaning of texts, I suggest, and in the context of this publishing structure, Archer’s books create a form of “safe danger” by domesticating the dangerous woman for the pleasure of the reader. My final chapter follows Thomas Walkley across the entire span of his long career, from 1618 through the Civil War, showing how publishing specialties might change over time, and how the same publishing specialty might change meaning over time. I read Walkley’s plays, which included

From Text to Book

129

Othello and Beaumont and Fletcher’s Phylaster and A King and no King, in the context of his persistent strategy of selling “courtier’s merchandise,” books on matter of state, to members of Parliament and followers of the court. For forty years, Walkley’s books commented on the issues most hotly debated at Westminster. In many ways, his specialty did not change from the 1620s to the 1640s but its political valence did, simply because its historical context was now vastly different. What this final chapter demonstrates, then, is that just as the meanings of individual playbooks are shaped by the publishing specialties in which they appear, so too the meanings of publishing specialties themselves are shaped by their own situation within a changing culture. In each of these cases, I hope to show how critical attention to publishers can transform our understandings of familiar plays. And in attending to the meanings that readers have made of these plays in historical circumstances very different from and yet often constitutive of our own, I try to work in the intersection of two cultural moments, mine and that of Walter Burre, Thomas Archer, Thomas Walkley, Nicholas Vavasour, and their readers. In my epilogue, I suggest some of the challenges that this interpretive intersection poses for our own readings of plays, the politics of publication for us as critics. Ultimately, I hope my work will serve to estrange these plays, to make us take a new look at them, not simply to offer another new reading to replace the old, and certainly not to erase or contradict our own understandings of their politics, but rather to place these understandings within a history of which they are themselves a crucial part. That effort can only make us better readers.

CHAPTER SEVEN TO BE “A MAN IN PRINT” WENDY WALL

In his 1604 introduction to Daiphantus, Anthony Scoloker selfconsciously mocks one of the conventions of published introductions. Ridiculing an author’s feigned reluctance to appear in print, Scoloker tells his readers: He is A man in Print, and tis enough he hath under-gone a Pressing (yet not like a Ladie) though for your sakes and for Ladyes, protesting for this poore Infant of his Brayne, as it was the price of his Virginitie borne into the world in teares…Thus like a Lover wooes he for your Favor, which if You grant then Omnia vincit Amor.1

Scoloker here makes fun of the artful and elaborate disavowals uttered by many published writers. “It is not my ambition,” Thomas Dekker declares in one such representative statement, “to be a Man in Print.”2 By simultaneously identifying and satirizing the public author’s conventional modesty, Scoloker teases out the bawdy implications of the word “press.” In Elizabethan slang, to “undergo a pressing” is to act the lady’s part and be pressed by a man, an act associated here with the loss of authorial virginity. Publishing is widely represented, Scoloker claims, as if it were a bastardized birthing, a scandalous breach denoting forced entry into the public sphere. Breaking into print seemingly inspires the writer to present a highly confused gendered authorial position, paradoxically becoming vulnerable and impressionable while guarding against the effeminacy entailed in such a transformation (“not like a Ladie”). This entire procedure is nevertheless seen as expressly catering to women’s desires and is described in the peculiarly feminizing language of modesty, 1

Anthony Scoloker, Daiphantus, or The Passions of Love, STC, 21853 (London: 1604), sig. A2v. 2 Thomas Dekker, “To the Reader,” in The Gull's Hornbook (London: 1609), reprint ed. R.B. McKerrow (London: Chatto and Windus, 1907), 3.

132

Chapter Seven

seduction, and birth. Scoloker also plays here with the multiple meanings of the phrase “a man in print.” While obviously referring to a writer’s appearance in publication, the term also implies a full masculinity, with “in print” meaning “thoroughly” or “completely.”3 The bizarre associations between publishing and gender roles that Scoloker so elaborately reproduces in his introduction become condensed into a punning phrase. Scoloker’s further mockery merely draws out the slippages and contradictions that inform the gendering of writing. The declaration of full masculinity here is part and parcel of that gendering, for the writer can assert his manliness, despite the necessary feminizing that pressing implies, precisely by controlling his own effeminacy within a stylized and disingenuous language of seduction. Having been dangerously seduced by the press, the author plays out his seduction on the reader, thus establishing his thoroughly masculine power by professing to be a coy and reluctant lover. Omnia vincit Amor. In bringing to light the perplexing mix of gendered roles evoked by the rhetoric of publication, Scoloker’s mockery of prefatorial justifications raises a set of questions that this book addresses. What did it mean to be a “man in print” or to “undergo a pressing” in Renaissance England? What were the political climate of publication and the risks of public writing? Why did authors and printers justify their works through a highly sexualized language? How do these justifications shape authorship and the print medium? This book approaches these questions by mapping the complicated relationship between the gendered rhetoric of publication in late sixteenth—and early seventeenth—century England, the political stakes of printing, and the formation of a Renaissance version of literary authorship. Scoloker’s preface is fascinating because it both identifies and seeks to erode the reputed Renaissance “stigma of print” that other writers register so markedly.4 In the preface to his satiric plague pamphlet The Wonderfull Yeare, Dekker again testifies to the dangers of publication and thus offers an example of exactly the kind of language that Scoloker found so irritating. For by complaining that writers pander to the tastes of scurrilous readers, Dekker legitimizes the authorial reluctance that Scoloker saw as unnecessary. But in doing so, Dekker also singles out for critique the fashion for disingenuous authorial poses: 3 My thanks to Lawrence Lipking for calling to my attention the many resonances of this phrase. 4 The classic article outlining this phenomenon is J. W. Saunders, “The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry,” Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 139-64.

To be “A Man in Print”

133

To mainteine the scurvy fashion, and to keepe Custome in reparations, [the writer] must be honyed, and come-over with Gentle Reader, Courteous Reader, and Learned Reader, though he have no more Gentilitie in him than Adam had (that was but a gardner) and no more Civility than a Tartar…For he that dares hazard a pressing to death (thats to say, To be a man in Print) must make account that he shall stand…to be beaten with all stormes.5

Dekker’s sense of the incivility of the public reader, expressed with regard to lines of race and class, marks just one complaint within a vast array of commentaries on the disreputable nature of the practice of publication. Here Dekker implies that true degradation lies in the baseness of readers who unfairly attack the valiant publishing author and render his noble efforts a physical form of torture (pressing). Other descriptions of the press attack the vulgarity of publishing writers. Together these different protests produce a general stigma attached to printing. Scoloker’s words are particularly interesting because they suggest the fictitious nature of this stigma precisely by highlighting the way in which the scene of writing was eroticized and scandalized. In doing so, Scoloker produces a sarcastic version of what was in reality a conventional gesture: to use the axis of gender to encode anxieties about unauthorized social and textual circulation in early modern England.6 In this book I argue that Renaissance conceptions of authorship emerged in response to the social controversies surrounding print. As do existing studies of “the author,” my book assumes that the seemingly timeless concept of authorship does indeed have a history to be told. Unlike authors of other such studies, however, I locate the formation of this literary category in the collision between manuscript and print practices on the one hand, and between aristocratic amateurism and the marketplace on the other. In arguing for a historical “stigma of print,” scholars have noted that the four most influential books of Renaissance poetry—Tottel’s Miscellany, Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, and Herbert’s Poems were published only posthumously. It is easy to see the numerous prefaces, dedications, and 5

Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare, STC 6535.3 (1603), sig. A2v, reprinted in The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker, ed. F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 4. 6 Joan Scott's commentary on gender is helpful in detailing what is meant by this complex term: “Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.” (“Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91 [December 1986]: 1067.)

134

Chapter Seven

commendatory poems that justified publication merely as confirmation of such a stigma. I see this rhetoric as more crucial, however, in articulating the concepts of the newly commodified book and its governing author. When writers, publishers, and printers adapted material for the press, they simultaneously activated an intertwined social, textual, and sexual politics and promoted a particular concept of literary authority. Because, as I argue, nondramatic works printed between 1557 and 1621 conceptualized the relationship between writer, text, and new reading public in particularly gendered terms, the developing concept of authorship was masculinized. While it is commonplace to observe that the author and the subject are male, I look to specific genres, strategies, and gestures through which that gendering occurred in early modern England. In mapping the formation of English Renaissance literary authority, I am interested in giving attention to three important elements often neglected by scholarly accounts: the complexity of the printed book commodity, the variable of gender, and the social construction of the print medium. First, while following the recent work of new historicists and cultural materialists,7 The Imprint of Gender emphasizes the importance of 7

I refer to historicist critics' attention to the social embeddedness of cultural forms, their belief that Renaissance culture can serve as a possible object of textual and discursive analysis, and their assumption that cultural forms and social relations are reciprocally produced. For a description of Renaissance historicist practices, see the introduction to Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History & Ideology, ed. Jean Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987); Jonathan Dollimore's introduction to Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); and Stephen Greenblatt's introduction to “T h e Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance,” Genre 15 (1982). Louis Montrose outlines the professional politics of this methodology in “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989). 15-36. Cultural materialism and new historicism acknowledge intellectual debts to the varied work of Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Michel Foucault, and Clifford Geertz. For two of the more successful demonstrations of new historicist methodology, see Louis Montrose, “Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 2 (1983): 61-94, reprinted in abridged form in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modem Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 65-87; and “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form,” ELH 50 (1983): 41559. For a critique from a Marxist-feminist standpoint, and for an excellent bibliography of self-announcedly political work on Shakespeare, see Walter

To be “A Man in Print”

135

the text’s material features to historicist critique. I rely on an expansive understanding of the “textual commodity” as an object that marks a juncture between the material and the symbolic, the historical and the textual. The physical features of the text—its prefatory apparatus, its title headings, its mode of distribution—figure prominently in my analysis, for these “trappings” construct protocols of reading and provide the grounds on which the text is authorized. In short, I read the text as an object as well as a symbolic form. While many critics have discussed the cultural negotiations prompted by, for example, Astrophel and Stella, I investigate how the very form itself of the published Astrophel and Stella had vital social stakes. Similarly I have found it possible to refine and problematize the representation of gender “within” a work by noticing that gender is an issue at the level of the commodity. In the case of Gorboduc, for instance, a text in which the consequences of the division of the kingdom are displaced rhetorically upon maternal monstrosity, the preface’s eroticization of the text provides a layer that complicates the way gender functions in the play. When the publisher describes the book as a ravished, half-clad maiden, he suggests that the reader’s very act of buying the text is complicitous in a power relationship dependent on the trafficking in female sexuality.8 The text’s “packaging,” so frequently erased when a work’s history is drained from it, speaks to the specific conditions by which meaning was and is transmitted. I pause in this study, then, to consider how a literary work becomes readable to its culture—to make visible the lens through which the “book” and the act of public writing are viewed.9 Cohen, “Political Criticism of Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare Reproduced, 20-46. In “Are We Being Historical Yet?” South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (Fall 1988): 74386, Carolyn Porter echoes Cohen's concerns about historicism's political investments and its methodological premises, specifically taking practitioners of new historicism (namely, Stephen Greenblatt) to task for the unhistorical way in which they map the discursive field to be analyzed. See also Lee Patterson's comments on the political problems of new historicism in Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 57-74. 8 See my discussion of this preface in Chapter 2. 9 For recent critical works that have given attention to the physical form of the book-commodity, see Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Timothy Murray, Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in Seventeenth-Century England and France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). While not foregrounding the book-commodity per se, Annabel Patterson's

136

Chapter Seven

Extending my methodological concern with the relationship between the material and the symbolic, I argue that rhetoric itself can constitute crucial “evidence” for making historical claims about literature and culture. To understand the critically reputed Renaissance “stigma of print,” for example, we need to look not only to whether something was licensed for publication or not, but also to the book’s complex figures, tropes, and rhetorical self-identifications. If the text’s “objectness” is vital to an understanding of its literary representations, its discursive features are equally important in making sense of its historical functions. I believe it is important to develop a paradigm for reading Renaissance poetry that looks both to its material production and to its encoding of that process. Second, preeminent studies of Renaissance authorship often deemphasize the gender politics on which such a concept rests.10 Sixteenthcentury writers draw on a gendered and sexualized language—replete with figures of courtly love, cross-dressing, voyeurism, and female desire— when they legitimate publication. My book unfolds the sexual ideologies embedded within these strategies, points to how publication and its attendant class issues motivated such identifications, and then queries how women’s writing provided countermodels to dominant modes of authorization. In writing this book, I have been made particularly aware of the often uneasy connection between feminist and materialist methodologies. New historicists have suffered rebukes from feminists who, while welcoming the return to history as a validation of the critical work they have been doing since the 1970s (“montage”), have also sensed that their theoretical contributions have been erased by the term “new” and by new historicism’s self-identified genealogy.11 Other scholars have also voiced their dissatisfactions with the professional and intellectual politics of new Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) offers an important analysis of the environment of public writing. 10 The most compelling accounts of Renaissance authorship, which 1 discuss at the end of this Introduction, are by Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). 11 See Judith Newton, “History As Usual? Feminism and the New Historicism,” The New Historicism; Lynda E. Boose, “The Family in Shakespeare Studies; orStudies in the Family of Shakespeareans; or-The Politics of Politics,” Renaissance Quarterly 40 (Winter 1987): 707-42; and Carol Thomas Neely, “Constructing the Subject: Feminist Practice and the New Renaissance Discourses,” English Literary Renaissance 18 (Winter 1988): 5-18.

To be “A Man in Print”

137

historicism: its tendency to reinscribe the canon while espousing commitment to multiculturalism, and its tendency to subordinate issues of gender to more traditional forms of power. Work by such critics as Peter Stallybrass, Catherine Belsey, Karen Newman, Mary Beth Rose, and Louis Montrose, however, offers a model for integrating the projects of feminist and historicist critique. These critics investigate constructions of gender in early modern England (through such avenues as the body, legal codes, maternity, racial ideology and representations of the female monarch), and their studies make visible the discursive limits within which “woman” functioned.12 Other scholars have complemented these studies by reading female-authored texts as proof that (male) cultural constructions did not directly dictate “female experience.” In pointing out that women, like other subordinated groups, could resist cultural exhortations and proscriptions, these critiques have sought to replace a paradigm of victimization with one of enablement.13 My book combines these approaches. I first articulate how the new literary marketplace inspired writers and publishers to define reading, writing, and publishing by generating various representations of women. The “feminine,” it seems, often provided the unauthorized ground on which authorship could be established.14 But in order to prevent the category of “woman” from 12

For a collection of important feminist-historicist work outside the field of Renaissance studies, see Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture, ed. Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt (New York: Methuen, 1985). 13 One particularly fascinating study of women's writing is Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). See also Maureen Quilligan, The Allgory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan's “Cite des Dames” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Elaine Beilin, Redeeming Eve : Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Gwynne Kennedy, “Lessons of the ‘Schoole of Wysdorne,’” in Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, ed. Carole Levin and Karen Robertson (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991). 113-36; Margaret Hannay's anthology Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985); and Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991). 14 While I argue that gender distinctions were generated in relation to other social negotiations, I realize that “gender” was itself a crucial and formative rather than a subordinate ideological category in early modem England; and I intend my account to be complemented by those that foreground organizations of the family and of desire as catalysts for socioeconomic change. For such accounts, see Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama

138

Chapter Seven

becoming visible in this work solely as a metaphor for the insecurities of a patriarchal order, I conclude with an exploration of how women writers themselves tackled both the gritty problem of publication and the fact that cultural expressions of that problem relied on women as tropes. Gender thus provides a focal point throughout this work for querying the issues of authorship, privacy, and class energized by the spread of print technology. Third, critics generally fall into two camps when analyzing the authority of print and writing in early modern England—the ideological and the metaphysical. In other words, scholars tend to interpret print in terms of its effects either on the political structure or on categories of thought. By paying attention to the competing notions of textuality engendered by manuscript and print media, most critical accounts tend to isolate one kind of “authority” as the object of their analysis: either the textually defined author or the socially defined role of authorship. I am interested in calling attention to the relationship between these two—in particular, to revealing how social and political pressures condition the medium’s supposedly inherent textual features. Seemingly intrinsic features of print culture and textuality, I suggest, were in fact generated in response to specific cultural problems. By disclosing writers’ and printers’ strategies for presenting the newly commodified book, I hope to counter essentialist arguments, which imply that “print logic” necessitates a uniform movement toward fixity and totalization. I argue that neither authorship nor print, nor any set relationship between the two, is inevitable. Instead that relationship is created to fit the determinate needs of a specific historical situation. Conceptual shifts in the understanding of writing, authorship, and textuality were inextricably interwoven with political issues in early modern England. I am eager in this book to consider how the findings of bibliographical study can be brought to bear on an investigation of the cultural politics of print. These two scholarly pursuits offer an interesting point of connection simply because they both rely heavily on the term “unauthorized” in their analyses, but with quite different meanings. Either print or manuscript can be seen as “unauthorized,” depending on the particular way in which this term is used. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a writer could participate in either a healthy coterie manuscript culture or a newly (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); and Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (New York: Methuen, 1985). For a study that gives priority to the complex circulations of homoerotic desire over other ideological structures in early modern England, see Valerie Traub, “Desire and the Differences It Makes,” in The Matter of Difference, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

To be “A Man in Print”

139

burgeoning print industry. Manuscripts were unauthorized textually in the sense that they failed to designate “the author” as a central textual feature. To state the case somewhat schematically: Renaissance manuscripts were collectively produced and permeable texts, subject to editorial revision as they were passed from hand to hand. These works derived authority from their place in coterie circle at court and in the satellite environments of the Inns of Court and the universities. Printed texts, on the other hand, can be said to be have been authorized by an appeal to their intrinsic textual features rather than to their status as occasional verse. Because they were linked to merchandising, however, printed texts had considerably less social authority. I argue that these common characterizations of the “closed” printed work and the “open” manuscript are, in fact, descriptions of particular textual interpretations that were socially constructed and perpetuated during this time period. In this precarious moment when print and manuscript cultures coexisted, writers, printers, and patrons negotiated and fashioned competing textual and cultural “authorities” through specific representations of publication. We see these negotiations in the highly gendered rhetorical self-identifications that Renaissance texts offer (in prefaces such as Scoloker’s) and in changes in the typographical and physical format of the book itself. When examining texts with an eye to these elements, we uncover the sexual and social ideologies produced in the collision between coterie manuscript culture and print culture. This collision becomes especially pronounced in the love poetry that was so popular in courtly circles because this genre required more legitimation than sacred works. From within this intersection of competing authorities, I argue, we glimpse one site in which Renaissance authorship develops. Rethinking conceptions of Renaissance texts and authors has been made possible by scholars who have charted the broad historical shift from manuscript to print culture on the one hand, and by those who have paid attention to the particular environment of Renaissance poetic circulation on the other. Critics have schematized the move from manuscript to print as one from “alterability” to “closure.”15 The monumental and seemingly 15

Gerald L. Bruns, “The Originality of Texts in a Manuscript Culture,” Journal of Comparative Literature 32 (Spring 1980): I 13-29; Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), and Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982); Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy,” in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968) For an application of some of these theoretical tenets, see Martin Elsky, Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

140

Chapter Seven

highly finished medieval manuscript was “alterable,” such critics claim, mainly in its use of precursor texts and its free incorporation of other literary material. Manuscripts texts were also alterable in their mode of production because they were subject to the conscious and unconscious revisions of the scribe.16 In the principles by which they were constructed and read, coterie texts of the Renaissance share qualities with medieval manuscript works. The coterie text, as Arthur Marotti’s groundbreaking work has made clear, was similarly “unfinished” until it circulated to its various patrons and readers, from whom it took its full authorization. Responding to recent challenges to author-centered literary practices issued by critics of what has been termed the new bibliography,17 Marotti demonstrates the importance of locating Renaissance poetry within the social milieu that dictated how it was written and distributed.18 He has 1989). Broadly concerned with examining how printed texts authorized themselves through an appeal to the inherited distinctions between speech and writing (orality, manuscript, and print), Elsky builds on Ong's argument about the spatializing effects of print. The most comprehensive survey of the effects of print is Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 16 For a discussion of how medieval writers circulated their texts, see Robert K. Root, “Publication before Printing,” PMLA 28 (1913): 417-31; and H. S. Bennett, “The Author and His Public in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 23 (1938): 7-24. For an overview of scribal and print practices, see Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, trans. David Gerard (London: Verso, 1990), first published as L’apparition du livre (Paris, 1958). 17 See, for example, Stephen Orgel, “What Is a Text?” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 2:4 (1981): 3-6; Joseph Loewenstein, “The Script in the Marketplace,” in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 265-78; Murray, Theatrical Legitimation; and de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim Jerome McGann's A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) summarizes general innovations in bibliographical theory and indicates their ramifications for practitioners of literary interpretation. For a polemical argument about revisionist textual practice, specifically with regard to Renaissance texts, see Randall McLeod, “UnEditing Shakspeare,” Sub-Stance 33/34 (1982): 26-55. 18 Arthur Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), “Love is not Love”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order," ELH 49 (1982): 396-428, “John Donne, Author,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 19 (1989): 69-82, and especially his valuable essay “The Transmission of Lyric Poetry and the Institutionalizing of Literature in the English Renaissance,” in Contending Kingdom: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France, ed. Marie-

To be “A Man in Print”

141

uncovered a fascinating array of archival materials that startlingly dramatize the collaborative and collective textual practices engendered by manuscript circulation. Although written more than one hundred years after the invention of the press, coterie texts, we learn, behaved as fluid “events” staged within circuits of social obligation and receipt. According to print historians, such texts would necessarily become more fixed and closed as multiple reproduction gained force. It would be easy, then, to fit Marotti’s findings about Renaissance literature within a narrative that details print culture’s inexorable march toward stability and order. Sixteenth-century works would be said to display merely the residue of the dying world of manuscript culture. My book, however, argues that sixteenth-century poetic practices interrupt and complicate the evolutionary “logic” of this development. Seeing the Renaissance world as poised between manuscript and print cultures helps us begin to examine the complicated dynamic that ensued when coterie texts competed with and moved into the marketplace. The distinctions between these cultures, however are ones that I will question and problematize within the scope of book because their seeming differences are often an effect of the very language and forms created by writers and publishers. Both broad and local studies of textual authority have been prompted and facilitated by poststructuralist challenges to the primacy of the author—namely, Michel Foucault’s declaration that the author is a “function” and Roland Barthes’s announcement that the author is dead. As we have become more and more aware that such features are historical constructs, we have been able to develop possible ways for rethinking the relationship between the author and the textual/social closures evoked by the work. The standard terms for characterizing print arid manuscript cultures—as “closed” or “open”—find their extension, in fact, in Barthes’s opposition between the “readerly” and “writerly” text.19 This opposition provides a starting point for a more historical analysis of early modern Rose Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991) 21-41. Together with Stephen Orgel's investigation of stage practices and scripting (“What Is a Text?”), Marotti's attention to the production of Renaissance poetry has prompted further inquiry into the social, textual, and legal ramifications of these modes of textual composition. See also J. W. Saunders, “From Manuscript to Print: A Note on the Circulation of Poetic MSS. in the Sixteenth Century,” Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society 6 ( 1951): 507-28. 19 Michel Foucault. “What Is an Author?” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josue Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979); and Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, ed. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).

142

Chapter Seven

poetic presentation, for it enables us to identify characteristics of Renaissance poems that approximate poststructuralist theories of textuality without remaking these poems in our own postmodern image. My claims about authorship, gender, and print are premised on the now generally accepted idea that the two competing modes of literary transmission during the Renaissance carried strongly marked class implication.20 Much attention has been paid to the way in which sixteenthcentury English literature persistently makes visible a society obsessed with rank.21 At a time in which the economic and cultural world was shifting to accommodate a “middling” class, people at many points on the social spectrum were concerned with both social mobility and the security of status indicators. Regardless of the actual cultural effects of printing, textual transmission became rhetorically tied to the symbolic codes that designated rank. Manuscript writing, particularly within the genres of romance and love poetry, was seen to constitute a bid for gentility, while publishing belied one’s reliance on a “common” audience. Because it bridged socially differentiated readers, print played indiscriminately on real and perceived fears about the collapse of social difference. Renaissance texts air complaints that professional writers might ascend to 20 I use the term “class” here and throughout the book in an expansive sense, rather than in its narrow definition—as a self-conscious group operating within a capitalistic formation. Peter Laslett is representative of many critics who argue that despite obvious gradations in status and rank, the Renaissance world was a “oneclass society,” because there was “only one body of persons capable of concerted action over the whole area of society” (The World We Have Lost [New York: Scribner's, 197 I], 23). In his definition, “class” signifies “a number of people banded together in the exercise of collective power, political and economic” (23). I use the category of “class” because it can also address the social relations of a precapitalist world as well as the emergent capitalist relations evident in the late sixteenth century. Raymond Williams notes that class can mean “(i) group; …social or economic category, at varying levels (ii) rank; relative social position; by birth or mobility and (iii) formation: perceived economic relationship; social, political and cultural organization" (Keywords, 3rd ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1984], 69). “Class,” then, can represent the more traditional issues of order, degree, and estate, as well as the developing protocapitalist social strata brought about by the “middling” level of society. See Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1982). 21 See, for instance, Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

To be “A Man in Print”

143

the aristocracy and become the cultural trendsetters of their day or, alternately, that printing would render courtly practices obsolete because anyone with money could partake of social jokes, debates, and conversations. In reality, the press offered to make the precarious boundary between the aristocracy and the lower gentry more fluid, but this borderline was figured as a primary cultural linchpin, a privileged faultline on which the viability of widespread cultural changes was tested.22 The press thus engendered outcries that far exceeded its apparent political force, for the circulation of texts created anxieties and benefits that tapped into vast cultural problems. In particular, publication became attached to the more threatening problem of social reorganization catalyzed by demographic, economic, legal, and administrative changes in early modern England.23 These changes meant that Renaissance writers could not easily identify themselves as “authors” in the modern or ancient sense of the term. Certainly past writers were well established within a more aesthetically defined literary canon: Dante, Virgil, Petrarch, Ovid, Chaucer. But classical and medieval authorial roles were not accessible to contemporary writers because of the prestige attached to poetic amateurism, the vitality of the institution of patronage, the court’s curb on channels of ambition, and the special difficulties created by writing vernacular love poetry. Instead of banking on the legitimization offered by divine subject matter 22

The resumption of outdated sumptuary laws testifies to the nobility's interest in preventing marginal gentry from encroaching on aristocratic privilege; numerous studies have documented these concerns about social mobility. See Lisa Jardine's summary of sumptuary laws in Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (1983; reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 141-68. But for a critique of scholarly practices that validate this faultline, see Rosemary Kegl, “‘Those Terrible Aproches’: Sexuality, Social Mobility, and Resisting the Courtliness of Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie,” English Literaty Renaissance 20 (Sprirng 1990): 179-208. For a broad if ahistorical study of the vital flow of information in a social system, see Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950). 23 See Keith Wrightson's account of the growth of a national market and the shift in the highly stratified social makeup, in English Society, 1580-1680. While historians debate the extent of the dislocating effects of modernizing change during this period, they agree that the social, political, and economic order underwent some kind of transformation that necessitated rearranging social and institutional ties to accommodate new demographic and economic changes. In particular, there were precarious settlements between monarch and parliamentary powers, between growing merchant classes and fighting noble groups, and between various religious factions.

144

Chapter Seven

and Latin, gentlemen and aspirants to gentility wrote English poetic works as part of social commerce and entertainment in the domain of the private coterie, a group that J. W. Saunders describes as “a finishing school where members polished each other’s art, which, like the taste for clothes, or the ear for a compliment, or the aptitude for dancing or fencing or riding, was very much a matter of doing the right things in the right way, in a game where every man tried to dazzle and outvie his competitors. More seriously a group restricted, ideally at least, to those who were equals or near-equals in social status…cooperated in the formulation of critical principles, a sense of value”24 The political benefits of these “finishing schools” may now seem obvious: poetry, imagined as the product of an aristocratic social ethos, sustained and policed the social boundaries that defined “equals or near-equals in social status.” Writing private poetry was thus an act of social classification.25 In fact, it was Sidney’s social credentials that created an ambiguous legacy for later writers: his refusal to publish set a powerful precedent for withholding poetry from the press, yet the posthumous publication of his works carved out a newly defined gentlemanly, authorial role. Later writers had to tapdance around this ambiguous cultural authorization. Spenser, who was in all probability eager to take advantage of the press, found it expedient to ratify the privilege associated with private texts when he begged his friend Gabriel Harvey to keep his verse “close.” Even Thomas Nashe, an aspiring professional writer with seemingly few real qualms about appearing as “a man in print,” voiced the language of authorial reluctance and shame.26 Such writers confirmed the prestige given to the genteel system of manuscript exchange, a system that protected social capital through staged 24

J. W. Saunders, The Profession of English Letters (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 43. See also Phoebe Sheavyn, The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1909). 25 On the importance of rank, see Lawrence Stone, An Open Elite? England, 15401880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Whigham, Ambition and Privilege; and Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964). Louis Montrose documents the controversy over definitions and genealogies of gentility in “Of Gentleman and Shepherds.” 26 In the introductory apparatus to Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell (1592), Nashe tells his dedicatee: “Faith I am verie sorrie (Sir) I am thus unawares betrayed to infamie. You write me my book is hasting to the second impression:…It was abroad a fortnight ere I knewe of it, & uncorrected and unfinished it hath offred it selfe to the open scorne of the worlde." Reprinted in Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow, revised F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 1:153.

To be “A Man in Print”

145

poetic rivalry among men.27 If authorship was a vexed textual issue in both medieval and contemporary manuscript circulation, then its incompatibility with a gentlemanly amateurism made it socially problematic as well. Despite such obstacles and prohibitions, writers began to find it advantageous to circulate their names and texts through a more farreaching medium when print production became cheaper and the literacy rate increased at the turn of the century. According to H. S. Bennett, the output of printed titles almost doubled between 1558 and the 1580s; after 1580 there was a steady increase in book production.28 Although the technology had been available for more than one hundred years, print became “Englished” only in the last half of the sixteenth century, when native printers began to cut their own type and produce their own paper.29 Publishers and printers, eager to increase their markets, sought to devise a kind of book that was intelligible to their new audiences. The result of these changes was not only an increased awareness of the possibilities of commercially viable mass production and its new affordability, but also a crystallization of the social tensions that had made print a controversial avenue for midcentury writers to pursue.30 27 The term “social capital” is from Pierre Bordieu, “Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 248. My work acknowledges that the coterie used the circulation of texts to consolidate the bonds formed among an elite and primarily male group. For a theorization of homosociality within the dynamic of male poetic rivalry, see Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 28 H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers 1558-1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 269-71. According to Bennett, the number of books increased from 125 to 202 between 1560 and 1580, and for every four items published in the first two decades of Elizabeth's reign, there were six published in the last two. In an earlier study, English Books and Readers 1475-1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), Bennett notes that there were fifty-four books published in 1500, a figure that increased fourfold in the 1550s. 29 Colin Clair, A History of Printing in Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 1-2. 30 Ann Baynes Coiro outlines how the dramatically different political climate of the 1630s and 1640s fostered new social meanings for manuscript and print circulation. During this time, Coiro argues, manuscript transmission was not solely or centrally identified as an elite practice, but as a potentially subversive mode of writing, determined as such simply by the fact that it evaded state censors. Coiro's study complements mine by offering a crucial explanatory narrative about the social valence of print and literary authorship later in the seventeenth century.

146

Chapter Seven

It is not surprising that publication figured in Renaissance mythography as a transgressive power. Legend has it, for instance, that when John Fust tried to distribute the first series of Bibles from the Gutenberg-Schoeffer press, the Parisian book guild, astonished that he had not one but twelve such valuable items, branded him a devil and ran him out of town. The yoking of demonry with the fantastic power to create multiple copies of the same book was matched by other, more positive associations between printing and divine power.31 More commonly, however, writers registered their anxieties through earthly sets of oppositions, particularly those constructed along the axis of gender. Given that part of the threat of publication was its encouragement of a female readership, it is hardly surprising that gender served as an important idiom for managing and organizing anxieties about the press. One of John Harington’s epigrams, for instance, voices the courtier’s disdain for publication, noting of his Muse Myne never sought to set to sale her wryting In part her friends, in all her self delighting She cannot beg applause of vulgar sort, Free born and bred, more free for noble sport.32

Fending off the expanding marketplace that he felt would jeopardize the institution of patronage, Harington opts to preserve the “sport” of a private “Milton and Class Identity: The Publication of Areopagitica and the 1645 Poems,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22 (Spring 1992): 261-89. 31 In The Book of Martyrs, for instance, John Foxe describes the press as a miraculous tool designed to facilitate God's redemptive plan in human history. “Through the light of printing,” he claims, “the world beginneth now to have eyes to see, heads to judge…By this printing, as by the gift of tongues, and as by the singular organ of the Holy Ghost, the doctrine of the gospel soundeth to all nations and countries under heaven." John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. G. Townsend (London: Seeleys, 1885), vol. 3, pt. 2:720. Cited by John N. Wall, “The Reformation in England and the Typographical Revolution: ‘By this printing…the doctrine of the Gospel soundeth to all nations,’” Print and Culture in the Renaissance, ed. Gerald P. Tyson and Sylvia S. Wagonheim (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 210-1 1. Elizabeth Eisenstein tells the anecdote about John Fust and the Paris book guild in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 49. 32 John Harington, Letters and Epigram of Sir John Harington, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), no. 424, 320. See also his “A Comfort for Poore Poets" (164), a poem which similarly reveals Harington's anxiety that the amateur gentlemen has lost his place to the profiting author.

To be “A Man in Print”

147

literary exchange that excludes the “vulgar sort,” and he interestingly articulates this defense through an appeal to his Muse’s female modesty. Manuscript culture offers his Muse a “free” arena in which she can conduct herself in a noble and dignified manner. Print, on the other hand, threatens to make her a prostitute. In one of his poems, John Davies similarly expresses an aristocratic resistance to publication. Davies notes that publishing subjects the writer to the common and vulgar verse circulating in the marketplace: …you well know the Presse so much is wrong’d, by abject Rimers that great Hearts doe scorne To have their Measures with such Nombers throng’d, as are so basely got, conceiv’d, and borne.33

In complaining that the press itself has been degraded by the outpouring of poor verse, Davies defends the print medium against its unfair stigmatization. But in doing so he unwittingly becomes circumscribed by his own language, for he portrays the literary marketplace as a site of social deterioration and sexual scandal. To publish is to place one’s measured and civil self amid the vulgar “throng” of numbers (here both meter and crowds)—verse that is produced by illicit sexual behavior and that results in the contamination of family lineage: “basely got, conceiv’d, and borne.” Davies’s rich description of how bastard poetry wrongs the press has the paradoxical effect of reproducing the stigma against which he ostensibly writes. Like Harington, Davies makes bookselling a kind of brothel, a place of sordid mingling. According to Harington’s nervous commentary, the literary marketplace restricts texts by wresting away their free play; the movement from leisurely game to commodified product is carried out by a measure of control that cheapens the entire project of writing. In Davies’s illconceived defense, publication remains tainted by the abjectness of the vulgar throng. These poetic commentaries constitute just two versions of the many different figurations of publication written during this time. While Harington’s fears were in part unfounded—increases in print technology did not produce a sudden democratization of literary and social practices or a drastic change in literacy rates34—his articulation of the 33 John Davies, The Muses Sacrifice, in The Complete Works of John Davies, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Chertsey Worthies Library, 1878). 2: 1,5. 34 See David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Cressy

148

Chapter Seven

problem of textual authority, like Davies’s, was crucial within the larger and ongoing reconceptualization of authorship and gender. Implicit in their comments on the press were particular constructions of gender difference itself. Ben Jonson’s proud announcement of a new authorial role in the publication of his 1616 Works offers the most critically acclaimed and self-conscious version of the reconceptualization of Renaissance public writing. But it also serves as evidence that the political stakes of publishing had drastically changed since the mid-sixteenth century. It becomes clear that the “stigma of print” at the end of the century was curiously produced as much by the rhetoric of printed texts themselves as by the fact that texts were actually withheld from the press. The bizarre apologies, justifications, and dedications of the early modern printed text certainly indicate that publishing writers did indeed face a difficult problem: the fact that culturally sanctioned verse was “unauthored” while authored published works were socially “unauthorized.” However, writers began to manipulate the “stigma of print” by encoding it in terms that allowed them other kinds of authorization; that is, they reproduced this stigma in published works as a way of safeguarding class distinctions and at the same time displaced it onto sexual ideologies that reinforced the writers’ masculine authority. While responding in part to real and perceived class issues, writers, printers, and publishers used the rhetoric of publication to reshape notions of writing itself—to redeem the unauthorized nature of the manuscript and generate a new dispensation for textual production and governance. In locating this dispensation within a matrix of social, political, technological, and typographical changes, I build on the important work of Richard Helgerson, whose monumental study of the “laureate” identity in the Renaissance has called attention to the social conditions of

explains that while publication records, education, and book ownership are all inadequate ways to prove shifts in literacy, when taken together, they point to an increasingly literate population in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Cressy makes this claim only after painstakingly qualifying the extent of that increase, pointing out, for instance, that “oral culture…with its traditions and tales, its proverbs and jokes, customs and ceremonies, offered enough in the way of entertainment and enrichment to sustain a satisfactory alternative" (13). I would suggest that because a relatively small but powerful portion of the population perceived printing as bound up with the larger question of social mobility, publication became vastly important in reconceptualizing the domain of knowledge, even if only a small percentage of the population was literate.

To be “A Man in Print”

149

authorship.35 I suggest that the emerging “laureate” can be seen as an extension of a reconceptualization of authorship itself, whose formation can best be understood by seeing the bizarre ways in which writers encoded class and gender when representing the materiality of their work. I also offer a narrative that complements important work on Ben Jonson's role in shaping authorship.36 Recent critical attention to Jonson has tended to concentrate on the fact that theater served as a foil for the printed text. Precisely because the theater was viewed as heterogeneous and hybrid, collaborative in its mode of production and liminal in its cultural and geographical space, it proved a popular site for introducing and foregrounding the governing force of the author.37 The theatrical script was considered both textually and socially unruly—unstable because it was multiply produced and illegitimate because it was connected with 35

Richard Helgerson argues that the sixteenth century saw a newly dignified and enduring category of authorship rise from the normative crisis precipitated by Protestant reform, humanism, and a growing nationalist ideology. According to Helgerson, a group of young, elite Englishmen in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries turned their attention to the collective project of rescuing poetry from its association with a disreputable and wasteful amateurism, and recruiting it in the service of a national literature. Self-Crowned Laureates, crucial for its unprecedented attention to self-identifying authorial strategies, has paved the way for further analysis of the precise configurations of rank and gender that went into that scripting. For the authority that Renaissance writers held was not just the result of a “self-crowning,” but also part and parcel of the problems catalyzed by changes in patronage, print, and the marketplace. In noting that Renaissance poets worked to dismantle the view of poetry as a merely gentlemanly pastime, we may forget that “gentlemanly” pastimes had vast cultural value. The role of authorship becomes intertwined with the class politics of manuscript and print and the highly gendered language used to address that embraiding. 36 See Murray, Theatrical Legitimation, especially 64-93; Don Wayne, “Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson: An Alternative View,” Renaissance Drama 13 (1982): 103-29; Orgel, “What Is a Text?”; Loewenstein, “The Script in the Marketplace,” 265-78; Richard Newton, “Jonson and the (Re-) Invention of the Book," in Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben, ed. Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982) 31-55; and Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. 37 For a study of collaborative practices, see Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profesion of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time: 1590-1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); and Jeff Masten, “Beaumont and/or Fletcher: ColIaboration and the Interpretation of Renaissance Drama,” ELH 59 (1992): 337-59. On the theater's cultural place, see Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

150

Chapter Seven

class hybridization and sexual license. Critics have thus argued that Jonson’s active participation in the printshop and his editorial interventions allowed him to generate a “bibliographic ego” (Joseph Loewenstein) and a “textual sovereignty” (Timothy Murray) over and against the transgressive, unofficial force of theater. Jonson established himself as a central figure by highlighting the qualities of the printed artifact, to which he had more of a proprietary claim, over those of the collective performance (Stephen Orgel). By establishing a printed text set in contradistinction to the protean theatrical script, and by allegorically rejecting popular festivity and theatricality within his plays, Jonson presented the author as a powerful cultural and literary figure. Aware of both the textual and cultural inhibitions to theatrical “authority,” Jonson published his folio Works to legitimate the author as both a stable textual function (through his control over textual architectonics) and a respectable social role (through strong evocations of classical precedent). By explaining how Jonson constituted an identity against the theater, we may forget that he participated in a general modification of the idea of the book itself, not just the theatrical script. Looking at coterie textual practices reminds us that Jonson could not simply gather plays within the legitimate rubric of poetry; he had to redeem published poetry as well. Jonson's Works situated his writings not merely against “theatrical vulnerability” (Murray), but also against unauthorized and protean coterie textual practices. While theatrical texts were more illegitimate than poetic ones (dramatic works were excluded, for instance, from Sir Thomas Bodley’s Oxford library), they were not categorically more unstable than other kinds of texts. Nondramatic manuscript poems were just as alterable as the textually unstable and transitory scripts of the playhouse. Private transmission did not afford either an authorized text or a category of poetic authorship against which theatricality could neatly be pitted. Instead, both coterie texts and play texts were collaboratively produced, and both registered the permutations implicated in their individual modes of production. Jonson’s editorial labor can thus be seen as an extension of the efforts made by other publishing poets as they tackled the tricky business of scripting literary authority. While absent from my analysis, Jonson occupies the margins of this work: he was exceptional in his selfconscious reformulation of authorship, but his self-monumentalizing was part of an ongoing revision of textual authority deeply enmeshed in the social controversies surrounding publication. If authorship was both enabled and haunted by the fantasized “low” of theatricality, as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White claim in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, it was also enabled and haunted by the fantasized “high” of

To be “A Man in Print”

151

aristocratic coterie culture. I employ a seemingly unstable and contradictory definition of authorship in this book for the simple reason that Renaissance authorship emerges in radically different ways—as the cumulative product of individual writers’ “intentionalist” strategies and as a by-product of the social controversies surrounding the literary marketplace. In Chapters 1 and 2, for instance, I explore how authorship appears as a typographical effect when textual producers adapt ephemeral, collective, and highly social aristocratic texts—miscellaneous poems and panegyric pageants— for publication. Chapter 1 argues that certain gendered elements of Petrarchan rhetoric became central to poets and publishers when they put manuscript-identified love sonnets into print. The second chapter looks at courtly pageants to see how the eroticized political engagement between male courtier and female sovereign became important in shaping the literary authority of Philip Sidney and George Gascoigne. I then turn to consider the writer’s agency in scripting a sanctioned authorial role through carefully designed modes of self-presentation. The first two chapters highlight the typographical authorizations produced in printed books, the next two emphasize the gendering of publication that occurs in prefatory material. Chapters 3 and 4 describe how writers devised two tropes—voyeurism and cross-dressing as a means of deflecting the problems of literary and print authority onto more volatile cultural divides. Each of these chapters offers concrete examples of how versions of masculinized authorship were created. Chapter 5 analyzes the forms in which women published as they renegotiated the gender ideology built into the concept of the “author.” We can understand the problems that women writers faced in breaking into print more clearly, I argue, by reading their works within the context of widespread anxieties about authorship and publication. Conversely, it is time that accounts of authorship in early modern England include these writers’ alternative models for fashioning literary authority. Throughout the book, I search typographical, rhetorical, and narrative figurations of public writing to see how they stage literary authority; what I have found is that a simple and fixed paradigm of Renaissance authorship is both ahistorical and inadequate. Calling attention to the importance of rhetoric in assessing literary authority and print practices sends out a signal, I think, that we should move away from analyzing print solely in philosophical and abstract terms. Instead, the effects of the press can be understood most clearly when they are related to the press’s contradictory social place at different moments in history. My work thus argues against technological

152

Chapter Seven

determinism.38 The new status of Renaissance authorship may have been enabled by print, but print certainly did not ensure a specific textual authority governed by the intrinsic logic of the technology itself. Rather the emergent “author” turns out to be merely one possibility among many for understanding literary works. Because authorship is now such a seductive and naturalized category of reading and because after the Renaissance it acquired status as the most enduring and characteristic means of interpretation, one can easily forget that this concept has a complicated history, in which it serves different textual and ideological functions. My reading can thus be counterposed to studies of “print logic,” which claim that print transforms the social order into a uniform, fixed, and totalized world.39 In this book I shy away from essentialist claims about the stabilizing nature of print, and work instead to make visible a set of “local histories” that illuminate the social place of literary publication and denaturalize the textual authority it affords. My interest is in complicating the humanists postulate that print’s massive single effect was to disseminate knowledge and spread literacy; instead, I want to make visible the various politics that defined and were defined by this medium. Underlying this investigation is a belief that we can understand Renaissance authorship in its more elevated literary sense by seeing it as intricately linked to practices of textual transmission and to the ways in which those practices were understood and represented. I do not mean to suggest that the modern author really existed in an earlier period than is generally critically accepted, or to make the case that it was invented during the Renaissance.40 Rather, I use the term “author” warily to indicate 38 One important foundationalist Marxist account is offered by Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1969). 2 17-52. 39 One case in point is Elizabeth Eisenstein's monumental study of the epistemological and cognitive transformations brought about by print technology (The Printing Press as an Agent of Change). For print historians taking this line, see Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Ong, Interfaces of the Word and Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). But for a critique of the essentialist notion of print, see Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990) 1-19. Timothy Murray also questions the collision of writing and printing in McLuhanite works (Theatrical Legitimation, 61-62). 40 Although there is still critical debate over the precise date and cause, the appearance of the modern “author” is usually understood to be an epiphenomenon of the eighteenth-century institutionalization of letters, as Martha Woodmansee

To be “A Man in Print”

153

a set of provisional and sometimes contradictory roles that had not yet fully melded into our modern definition. I point to the importance of remembering the contingency, historicity, and instability of the very category of the “author,” a concept that, in various permutations, goes on to become a critical and lasting literary convention. In the early modern period, writers, printers, and compilers rethought manuscript authority and printed literary wares through a wealth of tropes, forms, and textual apparatuses; as a result, they devised a language of justification and disavowal that activated various gendered dynamics and subsequently promoted gendered models of Renaissance authorship. “It is not my ambition,” we hear Dekker declare, “to be a Man in Print.” In disclosing some aspects of the historical formation of this literary concept, we make clear the ideological residue from early modern England that informs it. Because part of this residue involves gender difference, histories of authorship speak to the issue of women’s writing, querying in particular the place of “the author” in feminist critique.41 In more general terms, an examination of Renaissance publication vivifies how literary authority is inextricably bound up with political authority. Historicizing the author— investigating what it meant to be a Renaissance “man in print”—can allow us to comprehend the complexities attached to the author-figure and to see how versions of this figure are invented to fit the determinate needs of specific historical situations. It seems that authors are made and unmade in some form in every time period. By being conscious of the relationship between literary authorship and its past and present cultural authorizations, we can ideally unthink the seeming inevitability of our own critical categories and imperatives, and instead glimpse radically different ways of organizing, conceptualizing, and reading literary texts.42 argues in “The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author,’” Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1984): 425-48. In describing the types of authorial identity that became available in the late sixteenth century, I attempt to broaden and problematize both the notion of the author and the historical narratives to which it gave rise. 41 For a lucid critique of Sandra Gilbert's and Susan Gubar's notion of authorship that demonstrates the problems this conceptual paradigm raises for feminist practices, see Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985), 57-69. 42 In her introduction to Shakespeare Verbatim, Margreta de Grazia explains her specific interest in unpacking the historicity of textual “authenticity” and thus countering interpretations that assume it as a critical imperative. The concept of Shakespearean authenticity was constructed, she argues, within the textual apparatus of Edmund Malone's 1790 edition. What de Grazia says of the apparatus can equally be applied to the category of authorship itself: “To recognize the

154

Chapter Seven

synthetic and contingent nature of the Shakespearean apparatus is to allow for the possibility of its being otherwise. Once the apparatus is situated in relation to historical exigency, its conceptual grip begins to weaken. The very act of turning it into a subject of attention undermines its authority, for the apparatus can work only if it appears inert, optional; dispensable, even” (13). It is only by investigating the material, social, and textual conditions of Renaissance literary authority and thus seeing its relation to historical exigency that we can be self-conscious about the politics from which it emerged and the varied politics it can be made to support.

CHAPTER EIGHT EDITING PERDITA: TEXTS, THEORIES, READERS JONATHAN GIBSON AND GILLIAN WRIGHT

Introduction This article, like the conference paper which preceded it, emerged from our experience of working together on an anthology, Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry, which was published in 2005 by Manchester University Press. This anthology was a collaborative effort, which was planned and produced jointly by a team of six scholars: Victoria E. Burke, Elizabeth Clarke, Marie-Louise Coolahan, Jonathan Gibson, Jill Seal Millman and Gillian Wright. Millman and Wright were general editors of the anthology; Clarke and Gibson wrote the introduction; and all six contributors edited sections within the final volume. Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry was itself inspired by a previous initiative: namely, the collaboration of its six contributing editors on the Perdita Project. The remit of Perdita, an AHRC-funded project led by Elizabeth Clarke first at Nottingham Trent University and later at the University of Warwick, was to create a detailed electronic catalogue raisonné of manuscripts compiled and/or written by women in Britain between 1500 and 1700. The more than 400 manuscripts identified by the Perdita team to date encompass a surprisingly varied range of genres, including recipe books, account books, spiritual journals, translations, prophecies and polemics.1 Poetry, in fact, forms a comparatively small proportion of the total. 1

The full Perdita catalogue is available online at: http://human.ntu.ac.uk/research/perdita/catindex.htm. Images of 270 of the Perdita manuscripts, with links to the catalogue descriptions, have recently been published online by Adam Matthews Publishers: (http://www.amdigital.co.uk/collections/Perdita).

156

Chapter Eight

Poetry was a potentially controversial genre for women writing in the early modern period. In their introduction to the anthology, Clarke and Gibson write that “ironically, almost the only common thread linking the [poems is] deep-seated cultural opposition to their very existence”.2 Women poets themselves were aware of this opposition, and responded to it in many different and often inventive ways. However, one of the revelations of recent scholarship on early modern women’s writing has been to show that on an individual level many women writers in this period received considerable support from assistants as various as scribes, editors, spiritual advisors, siblings, and—perhaps most frequently— husbands. One common pattern, for instance, was for widowed husbands to compile posthumous collections of their wives’ texts as testimony to their spouses’ religious virtue. Modern feminist scholarship often sees the “help” women received from such quarters as a mixed blessing, given that many husbands and other assistants tended to reframe and recast women’s writings in line with their own presuppositions and preoccupations, or with the values and conventions of later periods.3 Ironically the Perdita team, whose raison d’être has always been its commitment to promoting and publicising early modern women’s writing, found itself in a situation oddly akin to that faced by those long-distant assistants and intermediaries, when planning and producing an anthology for the contemporary academic market. As scholars, we by necessity had to recast our materials both in the light of our own intellectual imperatives and to meet the needs of contemporary readers. In this article, we reflect on this “recasting” process. Initially, in section 1, we discuss the opportunities and challenges represented by the anthology form itself. In section 2, we outline the scholarly aims of our own anthology, and describe how and why the structure and contents of the anthology were devised. In section 3, we relate these arguments to some of the principal trends of twentieth and twenty-first-century editorial theory. In the conclusion, we look towards ways in which ideas canvassed in this article may be developed in future anthologies of women’s writing.

2 Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) [hereafter EMWMP], p. 9. 3 One of the best-documented examples is John Egerton’s revision of his wife Elizabeth’s devotional writings after her early death. See Betty Travitsky, Subordination and Authority in Early Modern England: The Case of Elizabeth Cavendish and Her “Loose Papers” (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies).

Editing Perdita: Texts, Theories, Readers

157

1. The Uses of Anthologies .

The issue of the anthology as a genre is especially pertinent to the editing of early modern women’s texts since anthologies have, over the past twenty to thirty years, played a key role in disseminating this category of writing to both a student and a research readership. Even today, students are more likely to encounter early modern women’s writing through the medium of an anthology than by means of a standalone edition. As early as 1993, Margaret Ezell argued that the dominance of the anthology form has been a mixed blessing for the reception of early modern women’s writing.4 While the anthology offers the obvious advantage of making otherwise hard-to-find texts more readily available to a wider audience, there are equally obvious disadvantages in such audiences encountering early modern women’s writing only through the kinds of literary genres which can be readily anthologised (e.g. short lyric poems and decontextualised excerpts). Ezell also warned against the understandable but damaging tendency of anthologisers to select texts according to criteria determined more by the demands of the contemporary academic marketplace than by the nature of the original materials. Aspects of anthologising practice singled out for criticism by Ezell include the emphasis on print rather than manuscript materials – easier both to locate and to present to a modern readership – and the tendency to favour those genres, such as poetry and drama, which are most familiar (and thus accessible) to contemporary students of literature but which form a relatively small proportion of extant women’s writing from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She also criticised the tendency of many anthologisers to bias their selections in favour of texts which anticipate (or seem to anticipate) the preoccupations of modern feminism. Ezell cited the example of Katherine Philips, generally regarded as one of the most significant women writers of the early modern period, but whose acceptability to the male readership of her own time has often made her seem less interesting to a contemporary readership which privileges selfassertion and transgression.5 Thus Philips—a poet who, on grounds of 4

Margaret Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 40-65. The study of early modern women’s poetry owes much to a very influential anthology, Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth- Century Women's Verse, edited by Germaine Greer, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff and Melinda Sansome (London: Virago, 1988). 5 Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History, p. 27. Since 1993, Philips’s reputation has been somewhat revived, partially due to a focus on potentially transgressive aspects of her work, such as the possible proto-lesbianism of her friendship poetry

158

Chapter Eight

historical importance and literary skill, would be considered one of the most important women writers of the period—might, ironically, be marginalised in an anthology constructed to favour the radical and the rebellious. As Ramona Wray points out, the problem of genre choice, highlighted by Ezell, has persisted well beyond the early years of “recovering” early modern women’s writing.6 Wray makes the further point that this issue has proved especially problematic for those anthologies which have aimed to survey the most ambitious generic and chronological range of women’s writing, which they have then struggled to mediate adequately to their readers. She concludes from this that the most successful anthologies are likely to be those which confine themselves to one genre or to a narrowly circumscribed historical period.7 Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry, exclusively confined to the genre of non-dramatic poetry, answers some of the concerns expressed by Wray, Ezell and others about the anthologising process.8 While it does, admittedly, perpetuate the trend of prioritising a kind of writing – poetry – with which readers are likely to feel comfortable, our aim in doing so was to question rather than to confirm readers’ generic presuppositions. By focusing on just one genre, but taking care to include a diverse range of types of poetry within our selection, we hoped both to problematise a generic formation in which familiarity is apt to be deceptive and also to make informed gestures towards other contiguous genres practised by women in the same period. We would, more particularly, claim that presenting the poetry within the contexts of manuscript construction and dissemination help defamiliarise post-Romantic notions of the nature and purposes of poetry. The range of poetry included in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry encompasses sibylline prophecy (Jane Seager), love sonnets and pastoral and her alleged role in instigating the 1664 print edition of her poetry. See Elizabeth Wahl, Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) and Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550-1714 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001); and Germaine Greer, SlipShod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (London: Viking, 1995). 6 Ramona Wray, “Anthologising the Early Modern Female Voice”, in The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, edited by Andrew Murphy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 58-59. 7 Ibid, pp. 61-64. 8 One of the most searching critiques to be published to date is produced by Danielle Clarke in “Nostalgia, Anachronism, and the Editing of Early Modern Women’s Texts”, Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies 15 (2002): 187-204. See citations of Clarke later in this article.

Editing Perdita: Texts, Theories, Readers

159

(Mary Wroth), biblical paraphrase (Anne Southwell and Mary Roper), autobiographical lyrics (Jane Cavendish), elegy (Lucy Hutchinson), alchemical poetry (Hester Pulter) and country house poetry (Marie Burghope). The introductory headnotes to the work of each of these poets include the explanatory material which Wray rightly sees as essential in mediating unfamiliar genres to a student readership – or, we would add, in defamiliarising genres (e.g. sonnets, pastoral, country house poetry) which operate differently when practised by women writers.9 Similarly, in the case of poets whose oeuvres encompass a diverse array of poetic subgenres, the section editors endeavoured to provide some indication of this diversity through their selection of materials. Gibson, editor of the Southwell section of the anthology, included some of Southwell’s love lyrics as well as her biblical paraphrases, while Coolahan, editor of the Philips section, took care to select not only from among the relatively well-known friendship poems, but also from among Philips’s political and religious poetry, her elegies, and her retirement lyrics. Our hope was that the inclusion of such a visibly diverse selection of materials within a monogeneric anthology would achieve the best possible compromise between the dangers inherent in the anthologising process: avoiding the perils of generic over-ambition while deconstructing generic assumptions.

2. Editing Women, Editing Manuscripts In attempting to provide readers of the anthology with material designed to help them read early modern poetry in new ways, we had two aims in mind: to introduce readers to the work of the women poets included in the Perdita catalogue (effectively, a traditional AngloAmerican feminist – or, in Elaine Showalter’s term, “gynocritical” – aim) and to early modern manuscript culture in general (a bibliographical aim, consonant with recent scholarship on the history of the book).10 In terms of audience, we wanted the anthology to be useful both to researchers in the area – a source of primary materials and an introduction to texts, poets and methodologies they might not previously have encountered – and also to 9

Wray, “Anthologising the Early Modern Female Voice”, p. 57. On Showalter’s notion of gynocritics, see her 1979 essay “Towards a Feminist Poetics”, reprinted in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter (London: Virago, 1986), pp. 125– 143. On the subdiscipline of “history of the book”, see David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, An Introduction to Book History (London: Routledge, 2005), and note 30 below. 10

160

Chapter Eight

university teachers, as a textbook suitable for inclusion in undergraduate and postgraduate courses on early modern women, manuscript culture and early modern literature in general. The attempt to combine such diverse imperatives – feminism and bibliography, research and teaching – produced some instructive contradictions and challenges. One of our priorities in planning the anthology was to give as much information as possible about the poems’ manuscript contexts. Much of the introduction is concerned with attempting to classify the different types of manuscripts in which poetry by early modern women occurred and to place the manuscripts featured in the volume within early modern manuscript culture and manuscript practice more generally. Each of the fourteen sections of the anthology proper contains an extensive selection of poems from a single manuscript by a named woman poet, supplemented by both textual and explanatory notes. Headnotes to individual sections provide general background information about the relevant manuscript, offering hypotheses about how, when and why it was put together. In the case of three presentation manuscripts excerpted in the volume – prepared, respectively, by Jane Seager for Elizabeth I, by Jane Cavendish for her father, the Duke of Newcastle, and by Mary Astell for Archbishop Sancroft – we included a text of the prefatory prose dedication in addition to a selection of the poetry.11 We included photographs of selected manuscript pages across the range of different manuscript types, from immaculate presentation manuscripts to very rough drafts.12 Textual notes, printed on the same page as the poems themselves, were prioritised over explanatory notes, which were relegated to the back. In the textual notes we were scrupulous about registering features such as corrections and cancellations (e.g. the cancellation of whole stanzas in Anne Southwell’s paraphrase on the fourth commandment) and additions in other hands (e.g. Hester Pulter’s autograph alterations to the scribal manuscript of her poetry).13 We devised our own conventions for registering textual alterations, trying to make them as precise, clear and user-friendly as possible. Our aspiration, in putting all these features in place, was to render the manuscript contexts of the poems in the anthology both comprehensible and unignorable. The decision to prioritise textual rather 11

British Library Additional MS 10037 (EMWMP, pp. 15-20), Yale University, Beinecke Library Osborn MS b. 233 (EMWMP, pp. 87-96), and Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson poet. 154 (EMWMP, pp. 183-93). 12 E.g. EMWMP, pp. 16 and 154 (Seager, for presentation to Elizabeth I; Mary Roper, for presentation to Catherine of Braganza) and pp. 20 and 58 (John Harington’s copy of the Sidney Psalms; Anne Southwell’s Decalogue manuscript). 13 Southwell, EMWMP, pp. 74-75; Pulter, EMWMP, pp. 115-22.

Editing Perdita: Texts, Theories, Readers

161

than explanatory notes, for instance, was intended to make the textual history of the poetry as visible as possible to readers. Similar considerations underpinned our decision to present the texts in original spelling. The question of accessibility, whilst an issue affecting men’s as well as women’s writing from this period, is likely, in fact, to be especially problematic with respect to women manuscript writers. Educated privately and often idiosyncratically, women were less likely than men to use the emerging orthographical forms which were to become the norm in later centuries; and because their writings were not subjected to the styling and regularisation process of the early modern printing process, they often survive in a form which looks archaic and inaccessible to a contemporary – especially a student – readership. Editors of women’s writing from this period, even of texts based on printed sources, have often responded to this apparent problem by deciding to modernise spelling and punctuation, in the hope of making their editions more accessible to more readers. In this their practice does not, of course, differ altogether from the norm with respect to men’s writing: students (and many researchers) are in general more likely to read Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden in modernised than in old-spelling editions. The particular difficulty with editions of early modern women’s texts, as Danielle Clarke notes, is that because demand for such writers’ work is relatively limited, any edition that does reach print is likely to occupy the only available place in the market, “with publishers hard-pressed to see why another edition is either viable or necessary”.14 Clarke, herself the editor of an old-spelling edition of the poetry of Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer, warns that modernisation risks producing “homogenization of differences between manuscript and print, different regional or dialectal identities, varying levels of education and accomplishment and so on”, ignores the “bibliographical codes” of the original materials, and misleadingly flattens the historical distance between early modern women and modern-day readers.15 We would also add, from our own manuscript-based perspective, that modernisation also risks obscuring the variations between different manuscript sources: e.g. differences between sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury manuscripts, between the treatment of diverse genres, or between a draft manuscript and a presentation copy. Concerns such as these very largely explain why we planned from the outset to make our anthology an original-spelling edition. We saw it as one of our tasks to convey something of the “manuscriptness” of our sources, 14

Clarke, “Nostalgia, Anachronism, and the Editing of Early Modern Women’s Texts”, p. 192. 15 Ibid, pp. 201-02, 204.

162

Chapter Eight

and creating texts which preserved as much as possible of the spelling, punctuation and layout – the “bibliographical codes” – of the original manuscripts was consequently essential.16 But accessibility was also an issue which we took seriously: not only because we were consciously aiming our edition at a student as well as a research readership, but also because we recognised that, in the case of many of the women/manuscripts included in our anthology, ours was likely to remain the only published edition for the foreseeable future. Rather than producing the “interim” edition castigated by Clarke, which sacrifices bibliographical considerations to the all-important imperative of making texts user-friendly and available, we sought both to devise methodologies and structures appropriate to the scholarly demands of our material, and also to make these methodologies and structures visible and comprehensible to our readership.17 Thus we responded to the challenge of accessibility not by hiding the difficult aspects of our original materials away from our readers, but by foregrounding and explaining these very difficulties. This can be seen in the substantial explanatory notes we provided for each poem (albeit at the end of the volume), but more importantly in our treatment of the textual notes. Not only did we include in these notes very detailed information about handwriting, about authorial and scribal corrections and about variant readings, but in our drafting of these notes we deliberately avoided the elliptical format which many less experienced readers find forbidding. Instead we developed a format which we hoped would be comprehensible even to comparatively inexperienced readers – e.g. favouring words rather than sigla – and explained its conventions as clearly as possible in our textual introduction.18 Some readers, however, might have felt that these features of our anthology, and the foregrounding of bibliographical issues which they represent, co-existed somewhat uneasily with our second key aim: the gynocritical desire to present and celebrate women writers. Such critics could point to features in early modern manuscript culture that might be thought to pull against the stable authorial identity that the woman-by16

The term “bibliographical codes” is cited by Clarke from Jerome McGann. See McGann, The Textual Condition, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), chapter 2. 18 Clarke, “Nostalgia, Anachronism, and the Editing of Early Modern Women’s Texts”, p. 192. 18 Thus where an edition following conventional sigla might signal an alteration by a formulation such as “then] And”, we explain “then] inserted in Pulter’s hand, replacing And deleted” (EMWMP, p. 117). Model formulae are provided and paraphrased (EMWMP, pp. 12-13).

Editing Perdita: Texts, Theories, Readers

163

woman, “gynocritical” structure of our anthology may seem to imply. The new scholarship on early modern manuscripts which emerged in the early to mid 1990s was keen to distinguish the attitude to authorship which it saw as prevalent in early modern manuscript circulation from the very different assumptions characteristic of modern print-based culture.19 Anyone who has worked with early modern manuscripts will be aware that such documents frequently show scant regard for either textual or authorial integrity (in the modern sense). Appearances of the “same” text in different manuscripts often differ from each other, sometimes quite radically: reshaped, sometimes repeatedly, by successive “authors” and/or “compilers”. Bits break off from some poems and attach themselves to others as they circulate through the manuscript networks. Attributions of authorship, meanwhile, can be as variable as the texts they supposedly designate. In Anne Southwell’s miscellany, for instance, Henry King’s famous exequy on his late wife is (mis)attributed to “Master Barnard, brother to Mistress Jernegan that died at Acton”.20 Many texts, meanwhile, were circulated anonymously, and some even now remain stubbornly resistant to scholarly attempts at attribution. Factors such as these lead Arthur Marotti to conclude that “[t]he manuscript system was far less author-centred than print culture and not at all interested in correcting, perfecting, or fixing texts in authorially-sanctioned forms”.21 Whilst the notes and other apparatus in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry provide ample evidence of the instability of early modern manuscript texts, the basic structure of the anthology, for all our assiduous privileging of manuscript contingencies, remains very authorcentred and – it might be argued – inappropriately redolent of print-based conceptions of authorship. Each section of the anthology (with one exception) includes poems from a single manuscript, and it is the attempt

19

See, most notably, Mary Hobbs, Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts (Aldershot: Scolar, 1992), Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). A more conventionally author-based perspective is offered by H. R. Woudhuysen’s Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 20 Folger Shakespeare Library MS V. b. 198, fol. 24; see also The SouthwellSibthorpe Commonplace Book, edited by Jean Klene (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), pp. 36-39. 21 Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, p. 135.

164

Chapter Eight

to evoke that manuscript that dominates the notes. 22 Crucially, however, the manuscripts themselves were selected on author-based principles; namely, because each contains a large number of poems known to have been composed by a woman. Each section therefore simultaneously privileges both the manuscript itself and the woman behind the manuscript: “Mary Sidney’s Psalm Paraphrases, British Library Additional MS 12047”; “Anna Ley’s Posthumously Collected Writings, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library MS L6815 M3 C734”; “Lucy Hutchinson’s Elegies, Nottinghamshire Archives DD/HU2”.23 Woman and manuscript are collapsed into a single category. Feminist and bibliographical criteria are merged. This state of affairs is, in part, a consequence of the anthology’s origins in the editorial team’s previous work on the Perdita catalogue. To be admitted into the Perdita catalogue, a manuscript must be a “compilation” (a substantial document, not just a loose leaf or a separate), for which there is strong evidence of significant input from one or more women, as author, translator, compiler or scribe.24 This combination of bibliographical and feminist criteria was inherited by the Perdita anthology. But other, more overtly gynocritical, reasons played a part in our foregrounding of women within the structure of the book. As scholars of women’s writing, we were interested not only in manuscript culture per se but also in understanding women’s roles and activities within it. We wanted to illustrate which poetic genres were available to women working in a manuscript context, how these genres were practised by female writers, and how women’s manuscript writing was facilitated, impeded or otherwise affected by the writers’ material circumstances. Identifying and representing the practices of named women writers was a simple but effective means of providing indicative illustrations of women’s poetic practice. Author-based considerations also played a part in our choice of poems within each selection. Several texts in the Folger miscellany of Anne Southwell’s work, for example, were not composed by Southwell herself: not only the Henry King “Exequy”, mentioned above, but also Arthur Gorge’s “Like to a lampe”, and “The Lie”, the famous libel traditionally 22

The one exception is the Anne Southwell section, in which Gibson included materials from both surviving Southwell manuscripts (Folger Shakespeare Library MS V. b. 198 and British Library Lansdowne MS 740). 23 EMWMP, pp. 21, 77 and 97. 24 Harold Love defines a “separate” as ‘an individually circulated short manuscript which was written as a unit” (Scribal Publication, p. 13). The “compilation” criterion was a necessary limitation to make the catalogue feasible and its construction affordable.

Editing Perdita: Texts, Theories, Readers

165

attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh. Southwell actually signs her scribe’s transcription of this poem with her own name: “Anne Southwell”.25 This appropriation of Ralegh’s text by a female poet is a fascinating manuscript culture case-study—yet, when selecting poems for inclusion in the Southwell section of the anthology, Gibson was careful only to choose poems he could confidently identify as Southwell’s own work. Other poems in the anthology were chosen because we could make them enter into dialogue with canonical (often male-authored) texts. Wright, for example, selecting from a manuscript by the late seventeenth-century writer Mary Astell, included poems obviously influenced by Herbert and Cowley. Marie Burghope’s country house poem is included partly because it allows for interesting comparisons to be made with other, more famous examples of the genre. One whole section, meanwhile—on Ursula Wyvill—was left out of the anthology because there were too many doubts about authorship.26 Commercial factors also played their part. The anthology switched publishers during its preparation, largely because Manchester University Press was willing to publish simultaneously in both hardback and paperback, pricing the latter at a level affordable by students. Taking the student market seriously influenced our selection of material. A planned separate section of women’s devotional poetry was omitted. And to increase the anthology’s appeal, a further major writer, Mary Wroth, was added to the initial list of poets at a late stage of planning. Wroth wrote highly accomplished verse in accessible poetic genres, and her writing can be readily linked with the contemporary male canon likely to be more familiar to students; yet her practice as a manuscript writer is rarely studied in university classrooms and is arguably still under-explored in the scholarly literature. Our inclusion of selections from Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry thus exemplifies what we hoped to achieve in the anthology as a whole: constructing a range of texts and authors likely to interest a wide variety of readers, while refusing to compromise on bibliographical standards.

25

The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, pp. 2-4. In our initial plans for the anthology, we intended to relegate the biographies of the poets to an appendix at the back of the volume, so that the headnotes to each section could eschew author-based issues and focus exclusively on manuscript issues. In practice, it proved all but impossible to separate the textual from the biographical, especially without an unfeasible duplication of material. Thus the decision was taken to include biographies in the section headnotes, though subordinated to textual introductions in each case. 26

166

Chapter Eight

3. Theory in Practice It is tempting to map the tension between our two imperatives—the gynocritical and the bibliographical—on to the distinction between two strains in editorial theory: respectively, the author-centred approach of the “new bibliography” developed in the mid-twentieth century by W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers, and the prioritising of material processes characteristic of the “social” approach to editing—sometimes known as the “new textualism”—developed during the 1980s by Jerome McGann. The “Greg-Bowers” approach to editing took as its aim the recovery of what might be deduced from various types of evidence to have been an author’s “final intention” for his or her work.27 In an essay reprinted elsewhere in this volume, McGann argues that this approach was “so author centered that it … increasingly neglected the importance of nonauthorial determinants”—“the complex network”, that is, “of people, materials, and events that have produced and continue to reproduce the literary works history delivers into our hands”.28 By contrast, McGann’s view was that the contributions of this “complex network” form a vital part of textual meaning and cry out for detailed study and discussion. Hence McGann’s own work on nineteenth-century literature, for instance, disperses authority from the lone author figure privileged by Romanticism and seeks instead to recuperate the processes and products of the nineteenth-century printing house.29 The implications for editors of, on the one hand, the new bibliography and, on the other, the new textualism pull in different directions: for the former, away from the accidents involved in textual construction towards an ideal form of the text perhaps close to an author’s manuscript or an authorially revised edition but likely as not existing in no actual material form;30 for the latter, towards material 27

On the conflation of “Greg-Bowers”, see D. C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (New York: Garland, 1994), p. 332. 28 “The Monks and the Giants”, in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, edited by Jerome McGann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 198, 191. 29 Similarly sociological arguments were put forward by D. F. McKenzie, pioneer of the subdiscipline of “history of the book”, and historian of Cambridge University Press. The sociological thrust of McKenzie’s later writing is best represented by Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, 1986). The parallel work of McGann and McKenzie is acutely analysed by D. C. Greetham in Theories of the Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chapter 9. 30 That is, “the “text that never was” (but by implication, ought to have been, in the best of all possible worlds, since it constructed authorial intentions in despite of the

Editing Perdita: Texts, Theories, Readers

167

contingency, the physical forms taken by texts at specific historical moments. McGann’s interest in actual physical documents and their material forms is obviously echoed in the form of our anthology and our attempts to evoke the physical features of specific manuscripts. Partly, this is due to the nature of our material. Manuscript poetry by early modern women— like manuscript poetry by less celebrated early modern men—tends to appear in just one copy, so for most of the poets in our anthology there is no opportunity to compile a “critical” text out of an examination of variant readings in different versions (“witnesses”) of the “same” text.31 This circumstance was not, however, the determining factor in our approach. For the authors whose poems do exist in multiple texts—most notably, Mary Sidney and Katherine Philips—we did not seek to create critical texts: instead, we stuck to the form of the text appearing in the particular manuscript that we had selected. This method was not adopted for reasons of expediency or out of any wish to shirk the tasks appropriate to scholarly editing, but was instead consistent with our materialist bibliographical aim of trying to represent the unfamiliar world of early modern manuscript culture to new readers.32 In preferring to reproduce actual documents in this way, we were, as well as implicitly following McGannian principles, working with the grain of many other editors of anthologies of early modern texts. Peter Davidson, for example, in the prefatory remarks to his important anthology of verse within hailing distance of the Civil War, Poetry and Revolution, justifies his principles of selection by pointing to the experience of early modern readers: “The mid-seventeenth century reader … would, like the Renaissance reader, be accustomed to very divergent testimony of individual documents)” (Greetham, Textual Scholarship, p. 334). “Accidents” was Greg’s term for features such as “spelling, punctuation, worddivision, and the like, affecting mainly [the text’s] formal presentation” (Greg, “The Rationale of Copy-Text”, Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950-51), p. 22). 31 Wray oddly elides non-canonical men from her discussion, stating that “where male-authored texts arrive with an arsenal of manuscript, folio and quarto variations, women’s texts are normally confined to a single leaf” (“Anthologising the Early Modern Female Voice”, p. 56). The error highlights the need for more editorial work on texts by little-known men – arguably worse served by contemporary scholarship than little-known women. 32 In Peter Shillingsburg’s terms, we were adopting a documentary orientation. Shillingsburg’s classification of editorial orientations into the authorial, the documentary, the sociological and the aesthetic was first outlined in his Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), pp. 1830.

168

Chapter Eight

levels of formality in the presentation of texts, and would also be puzzled by the idea of a ‘correct’ text fixed in all its details”. Accordingly, in Poetry and Revolution, “texts are in general reproduced from copy–text with all their idiosyncrasies of presentation intact. Rather than trying to identify an earliest or ‘most authorial’ text in every case, weight has been given to the form in which a poem circulated in the period”.33 In their online edition of Early Stuart Libels, Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae likewise reproduce just one text of each libel rather than collate all available texts.34 A similar approach is taken by Michael Rudick in his edition of Ralegh’s poems. No “authorised” text of the Ralegh canon exists—no autograph manuscript, no printed poetry preceded by an authorial dedicatory letter—and the relationships between the various texts of his poems are not obvious, so a new bibliographical approach working backwards towards an authoritative authorised text—“the construction of putative authorial usage out of the collation of multiple witnesses”—is problematic.35 Instead, Rudick presents texts of the poems in some of the different forms in which they circulated, with tentative indications of the relationship between them. He is editing, he claims, “a socially constructed canon, not an authorised ‘body of work’”.36 This formulation echoes Gerald MacLean’s proposal that early modernists edit “discourses” rather than authors; that is, that they choose as copy-texts witnesses closest to the events they describe, regardless of other considerations such as authorial intention.37 33

Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse 1625-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. lxxv. Strikingly, in Davidson’s later anthology, co-edited with Jane Stevenson, Early Modern Women Poets (15201700) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), a slightly more author-centred principle is applied: “Where there has been a choice of copy text…our principle has been to try and identify the text nearest to what the author chose to circulate in her lifetime’ (p. l). 34 “Early Stuart Libels: an edition of poetry from manuscript sources,” edited by Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae. Early Modern Literary Studies, text series I (2005). . 35 This definition of new bibliography is Greetham’s (Textual Scholarship, p. 334). Ironically, Rudick’s own doctoral thesis was exactly such a new bibliographical edition of Ralegh (subsequently repudiated in his very differently conceived published edition): “The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, An Edition" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1970). 36 The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1999), p. xviii. 37 Gerald M. McLean, “What is a Restoration Poem? Editing a Discourse, not an Author,” Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies 3 (1987): 319-46.

Editing Perdita: Texts, Theories, Readers

169

At first blush, our practice of implicitly merging women into the manuscripts they produced has a family resemblance to the Greg-Bowers approach. Although we did not create “manuscripts that never were” along new bibliographical lines, the structure of our book perhaps gives the impression that the manuscript texts we provide are imbued with the presence and intentions of their creators—and that this is something to be cherished. Not only that, we also perhaps give the impression that other elisions or mergings are underway: between literary texts written by women and the lives of those women, and between the work of very different women lumped together simply by virtue of their sex. On the other hand, what we deal with in the anthology is not the abstraction worked towards by new bibliographical editors but a physical artefact, a manuscript, striated in many cases with innumerable overlapping layers of revision, rewriting and correction. These manuscripts are not objects that allow us unmediated access to an author’s mind (as postulated by the Greg-Bowers methodology). Instead, they can be interrogated to lay bare the physical processes and the constraints through which the poetry was written. The manuscripts are, ironically, much more like the printed works valorised by McGann—in which the author’s work is variously framed, extended, traduced or refined by the acts of other people involved in the publication process. New textualist decentring of the author is linked, as D. C. Greetham has pointed out, to broader anti-authorial developments in late twentiethcentury literary theory.38 Greetham’s observation applied originally to deconstruction, but it is similarly possible to see links between new textualist approaches and the opposition of some feminist theorists such as Toril Moi to gynocritical—i.e. author–focused—approaches to women’s writing.39 More recent developments in theory have involved a revaluation of individual agency—and it is striking that Moi herself, in her more recent work, has been part of this trend.40 In the introduction to our anthology, Elizabeth Clarke and Jonathan Gibson indicated the links

38

Greetham, “[Textual] Criticism and Deconstruction”, Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991): 2-31. 39 Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen,1985). For a lucid account of this historical moment, in the context of a discussion of early modern women’s writing, see the introduction to Early Women Writers: 16001720, edited by Anita Pacheco (London: Longman, 1998), p. 2. 40 Moi, What Is A Woman? and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

170

Chapter Eight

between our editorial work and these developments.41 We would argue, in fact, that the new textualist emphasis of our anthology, stressing the necessity of engaging fully with the material, culturally embedded nature of women’s writing in the early modern period, enables gynocritical approaches to this literature to be pursued with greater methodological rigour and historical understanding.42 To cite Peter Shillingsburg’s useful terms, our editorial practice deconstructs traditional distinctions between the authorial, sociological and documentary orientations in scholarly editing.43 For this reason, we would argue that the tension between “gynocritics” and bibliography in our anthology is not a problem: our authorcentredness, far from undermining our work on manuscript contexts, enriches it. (Conversely, we would also argue that our bibliographical biases enrich “gynocritics” by finding a more detailed way in which to situate women’s agency.) We arrived at this point, however, as a result of our engagement with primary texts rather than through editorial theory. In this connection, it is important to realise that Arthur Marotti’s view, quoted above in Section 2, that early modern manuscript culture was “not at all interested … in authorially-sanctioned forms”, is deceptive in its emphasis. As Steven May has argued, early modern manuscript culture was interested in authorship. Why else are there so many attributions—to Master Barnard, to Henry King, to courtiers at interesting points in their careers, to Sir Walter Ralegh on the eve of his execution? Marotti’s own observation that “[m]ore poems are misattributed to Donne than to any other English Renaissance poet” may be susceptible to a number of interpretations, but it does not suggest that the compilers of these manuscripts were indifferent to the matter of authorship.44 May’s broader argument—that early modern manuscript compilers placed a high value on authorially–sanctioned textual accuracy—is in its own way as overstated as Marotti’s; practice varied more than his formulation has scope to acknowledge.45 Nonetheless, the instances of textual conservatism and exactness he cites form a useful counter-balance 41

EMWMP, pp. 2 and 9, n. 4, citing Nigel Wheale, Writing and Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590-1660 (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 9-11. 42 On this point see also Clarke, ‘“Nostalgia, Anachronism, and the Editing of Early Modern Women’s Texts”, passim. 43 Cf. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing. 44 Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, p. 158. 45 Mary Hobbs makes much the same point as May, with relation to seventeenthcentury manuscript miscellanies (Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts, p. 8).

Editing Perdita: Texts, Theories, Readers

171

to the examples of textual “inaccuracy”, inventiveness and diversity quoted by Marotti. They usefully make the point that the so-called early modern “manuscript system” was never a uniform structure, but was irreducibly diverse and irregular in its practices and norms. Insofar as anything as essentialised as a “manuscript system” ever existed, it was made up of an interlocking sequence of historical acts, not a black hole of textual indeterminacy and aporia, as studies such as Marotti’s tend to imply. Focusing on specific authors, as our anthology does, negotiating the maze of manuscript happenstance with named individuals as guides, is, we would argue, an excellent way of introducing readers to the complexities of early modern manuscript practice.

Conclusion: Anthologies of the Future? One question which scholars, both hostile and sympathetic, have repeatedly asked since the publication of McGann’s Critique in 1983 is what a McGannian-style edition—as opposed to an intentionalist edition in the Greg-Bowers mould—might look like. Peter Shillingsburg provides one of the most useful answers to this question when he writes: McGann brought our attention to the multiple voices of texts. Thus, an editor editing the work to privilege one voice, whether the author’s or the publisher’s, runs counter to the new insight into how literary works work. If the new insight is that a work is the product of multiple voice, including non-authorial ones, then the editorial policy must be one that enables readers to hear multiple voices.46

Reviewing our anthology with this formulation in mind, we can see again how feminist and bibliographical criteria both intersect and diverge. Many of the manuscripts we included in the anthology do indeed involve multiple voices—scribes, husbands etc., as we mentioned in the introduction. However, because of the importance we attached to the feminist imperative, we chose to privilege just one voice in each case: that of a woman. Our defence would be that we did create structures which allowed these other voices to be admitted and given something of their due, even while we prioritised the female voice. That is, we privileged the female voice, but not to the exclusion of all others. The physical constraints imposed by the material form of the printed 46 Shillingsburg, Resisting Texts: Authority and Submission in Constructions of Meaning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 154

172

Chapter Eight

book were contributory factors here. McGann’s current interest in developing online archives of bibliographical material grew out of his realisation that producing print editions necessitated presenting a very limited view of the text and its material features.47 An online edition of our anthology might potentially be designed in such a way as to highlight a variety of voices—presenting views of the texts from the points of view of compilers, dedicatees, contemporary readers and/or scribes of poetry as well as of authors.48 An online edition, that is, would provide us with an exciting opportunity to emphasise and interrogate notions of agency. Some kinds of electronic presentation are much better at giving an audience a sense of how one act in the construction of a manuscript, or one step in a textual tradition, might have followed on from another. Potentially, digital technologies provide one way of escaping from what we might want to call the synchronic presentation of manuscripts—the tendency to produce editions and descriptions of manuscripts concerned entirely with detailing the present state of a manuscript, without making any hypothesis about the steps that might have led to that state. Another, related benefit of electronic publication loops back to the comparison with which we opened this essay: between the early modern mediators of Renaissance women manuscript poets and our own anthology’s editorial team. Even the best scholarly editions are, in effect, new texts in their own right. Shillingsburg, citing McGann’s distinction between the “linguistic” and “bibliographical” aspects of the editor’s source materials, cautions that: when an editor has extracted or edited the linguistic text believed best to represent the version being edit[ed], that linguistic text must be embodied in a new document that will be a new material text with implications all its own. The editor cannot reincorporate a new linguistic text into an old document to present a “restored” material text.49

By foregrounding the textual apparatus of our edition, we aimed to produce an anthology which constantly insisted on its own edited status, and which refused to render the editorial process invisible. Electronic publication, however, has the potential to make the dynamic and 47

Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (Palgrave: New York and Basingstoke, 2001). 48 For a valuable recent discussion of electronic editing, see Peter L. Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 49 Shillingsburg, Resisting Texts, p. 75.

Editing Perdita: Texts, Theories, Readers

173

temporary nature of an editor’s contribution even more salient. This is because it can build in the potential for readers (“users”) to take the editing process (or, rather, the text creation process) one stage further themselves. Electronic publication allows readers to take hold of, to grab poems, to pass on copies to others, to alter and adapt the texts for their own purposes and to purpose-build their own anthologies or compilation manuscripts supplemented in whatever way they choose—all activities that we, the editors of Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry undertook in putting together the anthology. What electronic publication can highlight, indeed, is the fact that that the comparison we made at the beginning of this essay between ourselves as editors and the helpmeets of early modern women poets is not so much a comparison as the recognition of a continuum—that these fascinating poems continue to circulate and to be used in new acts by new readers and new writers—both female and male.

CHAPTER NINE EDITING ANONYMOUS ERIN HENRIKSEN

Was Anonymous a woman, as Virginia Woolf believed? While recent research has shown that women were not more likely than men to choose anonymity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, important questions about why they sometimes chose to publish anonymously remain.1 As Margaret Ezell has asked, if cultural sanction against women being on public display in print was so encompassing and if the function of selecting anonymity of a pseudonym was to disguise the gender of the author to permit her to speak, what are we to make of the selection of ‘By a Lady’ as being one of the period’s more popular solutions, a label which confronts the reader with the writer’s gender, often as part of the very title of the work? Why was the choice of women writing during this period not simply ‘Anon’ or the strategy adopted by nineteenth-century women writers, the adoption of male names?2

Rather than Woolf’s image of a cloistered woman writer unable to take credit for her work, we might borrow an image from Milton’s Paradise Lost of Eve immediately after her transgression. She thanks Experience, which opens the way to Wisdom, And giv’st access, though secret she retire. And I perhaps am secret; Heav’n is high, High and remote to see from thence distinct Each thing on Earth; and other care perhaps 1

See, for example, Paula Feldman, “Women Poets and Anonymity in the Romantic Era,” New Literary History 33:2 (Spring 2002): 279-289. 2 Margaret J. M. Ezell, “‘By a Lady’: The Mask of the Feminine in Restoration, Early Eighteenth-Century Print Culture,” The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 64.

176

Chapter Nine May have diverted from continual watch Our great Forbidder, safe with all his Spies About him. But to Adam in what sort Shall I appear? shall I to him make known As yet my change, and give him to partake Full happiness with mee, or rather not, But keep the odds of Knowledge in my power Without Copartner? so to add what wants In Female sex, the more to draw his Love, And render me more equal, and perhaps, A thing not undesirable, sometime Superior: for inferior who is free?3

Though Eve considers remaining “secret” partly out of fear of punishment should her actions be known, her reasoning ultimately turns on her desire to keep knowledge on her side and thereby level the field with Adam. Eve’s realisation that she can remain unknowable to Adam, if not to God, and that she might need him to remain ignorant in order to be free, might help us to read the practice of anonymity by Milton’s female contemporaries more fully. Eve’s conception of secrecy and its advantages, particularly in the arena of romantic love, mirrors the device of female anonymity, both as an authorial practice and where it carries over into the characters, plots and theories of fiction in late seventeenth century English novels. Gender-specific anonymity—works that are not entirely unsigned but offer only the gender of the writer—make special demands on editors.4 One of the most valuable insights to emerge from recent scholarship on anonymity is that this form of publication represents an authorial choice and often a strategy with many benefits. This revelation has especially impacted our understanding of women’s use of anonymous publication. In keeping with these findings, the practice of gender-specific anonymity may be seen as an example of anonymity as a rich authorial device. Often conveyed by signatures such as “by a young lady” or “by a woman of quality,” female anonymity differs from total namelessness and, I will 3

John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957): Book IX, lines 810-825. 4 Anne Ferry, “Anonymity: The Literary History of a Word,” New Literary History 33:2 (Spring 2002): 193-202; Robert Griffin, ed. The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Marcy North, The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England (University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Editing Anonymous

177

suggest, offers a number of intriguing possibilities for writers.5 If the task of an editor is not only to disclose an author’s identity but to understand the process of composition and the relationship between the work and its text(s), in cases of gender-specific anonymity editors need to make as clear as possible the author’s reasons for choosing anonymous publication and the value of that choice relative to the novel, play or poem itself. This essay briefly explores the unique problems of editing works attributed to women through the use of signatures such as “by a young lady” or “by a woman of quality,” but otherwise anonymous. Most date from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and they pose an interesting dilemma for the canon of early modern women writers that has developed over the past several decades. These works can neither be claimed nor disproved to be by women writers. Should these novels and poems be included alongside the poems, plays and novels of authors such as Mary Sidney Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, and Aphra Behn? Does the category of anonymity bear any special relationship to the practices of women writers in the early modern period? Finally, what special challenges and opportunities does female anonymity raise for the project of editing such texts? My search for the unnamed “young lady” of the early English novel began as an editor, with my colleague Desma Polydorou, of Fiction of Unknown or Questionable Attribution in the series The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library.6 Having identified several English novels published in the late seventeenth century signed “by a Woman of Quality” or “by a young lady,” we set out to examine the case for attributing these texts to female authors. As we discovered more potential inclusions in the series and prepared the four novels that we finally selected for publication, we noted with interest that the category of female anonymity often plays a role within early novels. Beyond the question of attribution, female anonymity often repays an editor’s, and a reader’s, critical attention. In what follows, I offer a brief review of some special problems raised by editing anonymous works on the basis of this 5

Joan De Jean considers some of the benefits of anonymous publication—both in the circumstances of production and in the development of the novel’s themes—in the work of Lafayette in “Lafayette’s Ellipses: The Privileges of Anonymity,” PMLA 99:5 (October 1984): 884-902. See also Paul Hammond, “Anonymity in Restoration Poetry” Seventeenth Century 8 (1993): 123-142; and Randy Robertson, “The Delicate Art of Anonymity: The Case of Absalom and Achitophel,” Restoration 27:2 (Fall 2003): 41-60. 6 Series II, vols. 9 and 10 of The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2006).

178

Chapter Nine

experience, and then suggest how gendered anonymity operates within five novels of the late seventeenth century. I hope by doing so to suggest some of the parameters of an important but little discussed issue in editorial practice. We began by attempting to locate works by women that were not yet identified, with a special focus on fiction. We generated a list of works possibly by women, working with the Short Title Catalogue (as well as an early version of the Electronic Short Title Catalogue) and Halkett and Laing’s A Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publications in the English Language.7 We also consulted standard reference works on early modern women writers: including Bell, Parfitt and Shepherd’s A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers, 1580-1720; Blain, Clements, and Grundy’s The Feminist Companion to Literature in English; Esdaile’s A List of English Tales and Prose Romances Printed Before 1740; Mish’s English Prose Fiction, 1600-1700: a Chronological Checklist; and Trill, Chedgzoy and Osborne’s Lay By Your Needles, Ladies, Take the Pen.8 We also consulted library catalogues and the subject index of Early English Books, looking for works unsigned but perhaps by female authors or translators. This research generated a list of about two dozen works that required further inspection. According to the criteria of the series in which our novels were published, we eliminated works of poetry,9 drama and non-fiction prose, 7

Donald Wing, ed. A Short title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English books printed in other countries, 1641-1700 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1972); Samuel Halkett and John Laing, A Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publications in the English Language, ed. John Horden ( Harlow: Longman, 1980). 8 Bell, Maureen; George Parfitt and Simon Shepherd, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers, 1580 -1720 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990); Blain, Virginia; Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds., The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Esdaile, Arundell James, A List of English Tales and Prose Romances Printed Before 1740 (New York: B. Franklin, 1970); Mish, Charles Carroll, English Prose Fiction, 1600-1700: a Chronological Checklist (Charlottesville, VA: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1967); Trill, Suzanne, Kate Chedgzoy and Melanie Osborne, eds., Lay By Your Needles, Ladies, Take the Pen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 9 L. E. Semler’s “Who Is the Mother of Eliza’s Babes (1652)? ‘Eliza,’ George Wither, and Elizabeth Emerson,” JEGP 99:4 (October 2000) considers an important example of a poetic text attributed to an anonymous or pseudonymous woman.

Editing Anonymous

179

translations, and works printed after 1700. We also investigated and then eliminated from our list works of fiction that are unsigned or ascribed only to a set of initials, such as The Amours of Bonne Sforza, Queen of Polonia (1684). Its dedication is signed only “P. B.,” and there is no evidence to suggest that these initials represent a female author. Other works, attributed only to a “Person of Quality,” could potentially be the work of female authors, but no evidence has yet been found to validate this attribution for works such as The Secret History of the Most Renowned Queen Elizabeth and the E. of Essex (1680) and The Pastime Royal (1682). We attempted to determine whether claims of female authorship or translation could be substantiated, and we excluded some other works when this attribution seemed merely to be a marketing ploy or could not be corroborated by any internal or external evidence. The many publications associated with Mary Carleton, a number of which are libels, illustrate the use of a woman’s name to generate interest in a publication. The four novels we finally included in our facsimile edition—Peppa, The Amorous Abbess, Diotrephe, and Alcander and Philocrates—offer an important challenge to traditional editorial theory in that they mobilize anonymity as an authorial strategy in works that thematize anonymity, disguise, and masquerade. These novels seem to exemplify Ezell’s suggestion that the signature “By a Lady” operates not to shield the author’s identity from social scrutiny, but “more as a costume rather than as a disguise, a means to signify to the reader that a certain type of role was being performed.”10 The works’ themes and devices find an echo in their authorial strategy, making the choice of female anonymity a signal for interpretation. In the early novel there is often a coherence between a work’s fiction and its frame. Lennard Davis has noted, writing of Aphra Behn, how early English fictions are concerned with the issue of “fabrications, deceit, and lying.”11 The novels in our edition share several concerns, all of which are representative in general of early British fiction, and which may help to explain the high incidence of anonymity, and specifically female anonymity, in works of this period. Each of the novels is set in either France or Italy (at least two are translations from the French) and invites the English reader to be cautioned by the moral lassitude of the Continent. As translations, the novels already participate in a form of masquerade, and as works with both male authors and female translators, a type of cross-dressing. The anonymity of the translators in these cases heightens 10

Ezell, 64. Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 108-109. 11

180

Chapter Nine

the role that gender plays in the stories as well as in the process of preparing the novels; by not assigning the production of the text to a specific individual, but to a gender, the fictions ask to be read as the products of female authors more than anything else. Anonymity carries over into the novels as well; many characters in these works, even in some cases the protagonists, are unnamed, while the others have allegorical or coded names. The attention to type, to status, and to gender that emerges from this method of characterization parallels the device of anonymity in the category of authorship. The novels’ perspectives on romantic love range from the celebratory and sentimental to the suspicious and moralizing, but they all engage the theme by way of the problem of female inscrutability. The heroines of these tales are almost always faithful (as are their heroes), but because they are enveloped by secrecy and privacy, their behavior remains occluded and therefore suspicious. In early modern fictions, the “normative and traditional discourse on love (and on courtship and marriage) contends with the persistent sexual incontinence of men and the transgressive sexual agency of women.” The energy of this confrontation spills over from the novels’ plots to their frames: “while the narrative structures exist to try to contain desire in early modern fiction,” they ultimately fail to do so.12 It is not surprising then that the trope of concealment—often a concealment that is barely maintained, or that has the status of an open secret—would so frequently appear in the first generation of novels. The author of Alcander and Philocrates: Or, The Pleasures and Disquietudes of Marriage, which the title page attributes to “a Young Lady,” claims in the dedicatory epistle that she has protected herself from the “vain Censures of the Town” by writing under the protection of the dedicatee’s name and by allowing herself to be “known by no Name.”13 Here the anonymity of the author allows her both to speak on behalf of all women and to represent their fundamentally inscrutable nature, a theme that is central to the novel. The novel’s protagonists, Alcander and Philocrates, hold opposing views on marriage. Philocrates’ engagement to Fraudelisa prompts Alcander to attempt to dissuade him from marrying. Despite his defense of the fidelity and virtue of his own beloved, Lesbia, Alcander opposes marriage on the grounds that women are incomprehensible, insincere, and “change without reason [and] have no 12

Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic, “Introduction,” Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570-1640 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003): 1-2. 13 London: Richard Parker, Samuel Briscoe, and Samuel Burrowes, 1696: 4.

Editing Anonymous

181

solidity in their Wit, or in their Heart.”14 Philocrates, in contrast, argues that a man will not marry a woman who he does not know to be worthy and virtuous, and such a woman will help her husband maintain these qualities in himself. The friends appoint the Abbot Sophin to judge the merit of their arguments and, at his suggestion, observe several married couples in Paris. Not only are the couples invariably unhappy, but each demonstrates a remarkable openness about infidelity, deception, and manipulation. As the novel continues, readers discover that both men have been deceived by the women they love. Although troubled by the behaviour of Fraudelisa and Lesbia, Alcander and Philocrates ultimately accept the women’s carefully devised excuses and decide to marry. Female anonymity in this case serves as another example offered by the novel, like the many unconcealed letters from paramours that circulate through the book, of the power of the open secret and its association with female power that conceals itself as modesty. Diotrephe. Or, An Historie of Valentines, also features a plot largely devoted to the mystery of women’s true nature. 15 The novel decries the French practice of “valentines,” in which the names of all the women of the city are placed into a lottery and drawn by the men. Regardless of their ages, conditions, or even marriages to others, the women and the men who draw their names become one another’s valentines for one year. Diotrephe tells the story of two such couples: Theophane draws Nemese as his valentine after three years of marriage to Persidious. Theophane’s friend Diotrephe, who is in love with Nemese, draws Persidious. Diotrephe’s family is noble but impoverished, and he is befriended and funded by Calicrate, an Italian banker who also falls in love with and pursues Nemese. The romantic confusion and betrayal that ensue from the assignment of valentines end in a duel between Theophane and Diotrephe in which Theophane dies and Diotrephe is maimed. The women marry others and abjure the practice of valentines. From the outset Diotrephe concerns disguise and deception. The narrator notes that he has concealed the true location of the events he 14

Alcander and Philocrates, 5-6. London: Thomas Harper, 1641. This translation of a French novel by Jean Pierre Camus is unattributed on the title page, but the dedicatory letter is signed ‘S. du Verger.’ Jane Collins suggests that the translator is Susan du Vergeer, who translated Admirable Events (London, 1639), another novel by the author of Diotrephe, and that she may have written the English work Du Vergers Humble Reflections (London, 1657). See Susan DuVerger, ed. Jane Collins. Part 1, vol. 5. The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996). 15

182

Chapter Nine

relates and the identity of the protagonists, “if not so artificially as a finer wit might have don, yet at least in such a sort as it shall be impossible to guesse of whom I speake, although one of the subjects of this tragedy do yet breathe the aire.”16 The valentines tradition supplies an extended opportunity for the author to consider the dangers of concealment. His concerns relate primarily to the danger of infidelity, as he labors to defend the institution of marriage. “One cannot see two things at once, although one have two eies, nor have two loves in one heart; love possesseth all the soul, and is undividable like it,” he pleads, complaining that the singularity of marriage is violated by the practice of giving affection and courtly attention to one whose name is randomly drawn.17 While female anonymity as an authorial strategy may sometimes suggest a universal or unified female voice, in the case of the English translation of Diotrephe the device of unknown female authorship may rather heighten the novel’s anxiety about women’s public circulation. As Persidious makes her way to the valentine drawing, the narrator laments, “you should doe better to stay at home in your owne house, solitude were farre more expedient for you, then such a confused multitude of assembly.”18 Women’s public presence is also at issue in The Amorous Abbess, or, Love in a Nunnery, an English translation of part of a French novel called Le Cercle, ou conversations galantes, histoire amoureuse du temps (Paris 1673). In this case a dichotomy of good and bad women seems to echo the other novels’ fear of women’s inscrutability. 19 The novel tells the story of M. Le Chevalier, who, becoming lost in a wood is led to a nunnery where both the abbess and her sister, Egidia, a nun in the convent, fall in love with him. As they plot to win his affections, the Chevalier falls in love with the more virtuous Egidia and the Abbess schemes to separate them. After a failed attempt to escape from the convent with the Chevalier, Egidia falls ill and decides that they must not pursue a romantic relationship. In The Amorous Abbess the author’s anonymity carries into the paratext a trace of the novel’s theme of trying to determine a woman’s identity in the sense of her true nature. Egidia, though sincere and virtuous, must in the end remain cloistered. When the abbess, in contrast, ventures outside the convent, it seals her fate as a rejected lover. What comment does such a plot offer on the question of female anonymity? While it may reinforce the fear of women’s public circulation, the fiction also opens up an opportunity to see that discourse as unfairly punishing 16

Diotrephe, 17. Diotrephe, 35. 18 Diotrephe, 41. 19 London: Richard Bentley, 1684. 17

Editing Anonymous

183

the virtuous. Egidia is not rewarded for her fidelity. Another heroine of the early English novel is, however. Peppa, or the reward of constant love a novel: done out of French: with several songs set to musick for two voices / by a young-gentlewoman also turns on scenes of disguise and problems of mistaken identity.20 As in the dedication to Alcander and Philocrates, the author of Peppa asks to remain anonymous, though she simultaneously regrets that by doing so she must disguise her devotion to her dedicatee, Lady Isabella Roberts: One Favour more I importunely crave, that for some Reasons (which by you, Madam, shall be commanded from me at any time,) I may be permitted to refrain the publishingmy Name in Print; tho really nothing is so sensible a Grief to me, as that I am forc’d to stifle my greatest Ambition, which is, to declare to the World, the Name of her, who, among all the Crowd of your Admirers, is the most zealously, / Madam, / Your Honour’s / Most Humble, / Most Faithful, / And most devoted Servant, / A. C.21

Peppa is set in Genoa, in the household of Prince Mark Antony Doria, his daughter Peppa, and her stepmother Lady Spinola. Peppa falls in love with the ‘French Chevalier of ________,’ whom she encounters at a carnival. Before they can marry, Peppa suffers a series of misunderstandings based on assumptions about female behavior. Her clandestine exchange of letters with the Chevalier is discovered, leaving Peppa open to scandalous rumour. Only the reader knows she is chaste, as the novel creates a narrative situation in which the reader must reject the discourse about women that circulates in the other novels. Peppa’s goodness and sincerity offer the most countercultural of all of the female portraits in these novels. Unlike the women of Alcander and Philocrates, whose duplicity may be justifiable but who nevertheless confirm a stereotype of women as manipulative and inscrutable, Peppa remains true throughout. The drama of this novel lies in the obstacles to her happy marriage that arise from mistaken assumptions about female behaviour. The author gives her readers a heroine who is totally innocent of deception, but who is subjected to a cultural discourse of women’s nature that nearly derails her anyway. The writer’s anonymity in this case 20

London: William Crooke, 1689. Peppa, Sig. A5v-A6v. The initials A. C. may refer to Aston Cokaine or his wife Mary; the Bodleian Library copy of Peppa has a note in a nineteenth-century hand, ‘by Lady Cokaine,’ an attribution that the Beinecke Library also suggests in its catalogue record; to date I have found no evidence to confirm or dispute this attribution. 21

184

Chapter Nine

not only suggests that she speaks on behalf of all women, but reminds her audience that a woman’s privacy or modesty does not necessarily conceal coquettery or betrayal. A fifth novel fits all of the parameters of our facsimile edition but was discovered too late to be included. Love in Distress: Or, the Lucky Discovery, attributed to “The honourable Lady ***,” was published in 1697, by Samuel Briscoe (the publisher of Alcander and Philocrates).22 The title page signature calls attention to the existence of a real name behind its disguise, but the book’s paratexts reinforce its anonymity by turning to a series of pseudonyms and initials. A dedication to Flavia, which is signed by the name Corinna, is followed by commendatory letters to Corinna written by Philander and Strephon, as well as a letter signed J. R., addressed to “my much-lov’d Sister, Mrs. S. R. alias, my Sister the Lady P. on her Novel entituled, Love in Distress: or, The Lucky Discovery.” 23 Our author, according to these materials, has four anonyms—The honourable Lady ***, Corinna, Mrs. S. R., and the Lady P—and, further disguising her identity (or making its decoding possible for insiders), her close circle are also covered by obvious pseudonyms. As in the other novels under consideration here, the dedication prefacing Love in Distress calls attention to gender and suggests a matrix through which we might read not only the work’s female protagonist but also its female author and implied audience. The author asks Flavia to afford the novel “some leisure Hour after the soft Message of your Lover’s Sighs has been whispered to your Ears, and experimentally taught you, Love is not that Trifle to be ridicul’d at pleasure, but rather the most serious Business of our Lives.”24 This remark conjures an image of the novel’s readers as women comfortable and confident with themselves as lovers, invoking the stereotype of the novel-reading woman as no better than the fallen heroines of fictional tales. But in its claim that love is a serious business, the author seems to redirect that stereotype in the service 22

The only extant text of the novel is held by the Newberry Library, Chicago. Its title page has two handwritten annotations. The first, in the upper right corner, appears to read “Eliz. Hilgrove 1790” and is likely an ownership signature. The second, written beneath ‘The honourable Lady ***” appears to read “Magd: D’Auvergne her Book;” this is also likely to be an ownership signature. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004), reports a Madeleine D’Auvergne (d. 1712), wife of Philip D’Auvergne, vol.15 page 247. I thank Jill Gage at the Newberry Library for her assistance with this information. 23 Love in Distress, Sig. A5v. 24 Love in Distress, Sig. A2v-A3r.

Editing Anonymous

185

of a different agenda. Her subject “is a sort of Natural Philosophy, at least a Woman’s Philosophy, the only Theme they can Write of.”25 As the modesty topos often does, these lines invoke the assumption that little is to be expected from women as writers—or indeed the novel as a genre—only to suggest that the subjects about which women do write are in fact those we care about the most. The parallelism among author, dedicatee, heroine and reader established in the preface reinforces the novel’s theme of female secrecy; Corinna’s claim that the subject of Love in Distress is an investigation of life’s greatest mysteries hints at the potential power of women’s secret knowledge. The title of Love in Distress suggests that it shares the theme of disguise and revelation that is so characteristic of early fiction, and particularly of female-anonymous works, and its plots bears out the title’s tantalizing promise. This novel, like the others, is set abroad, in Lisbon and Leghorn, and features a love triangle driven by questions about the heroine’s sincerity. Its hero, Melantius, is engaged to Aspatia and sincerely loves her.26 While the novel occasionally reassures readers that Aspatia returns his love, it insists on her privacy, making much of this condition and exploiting it to drive the plot forward. Aspatia is private in several senses of the word. First, as an unmarried woman of high social standing she is secluded from the world, entering into society only under the cover of her father’s protection and supervision. The novel always reminds us that such enforced privacy renders Aspatia’s thoughts private as well, making her true desires inscrutable. The danger of this condition emerges as the novel implies that the social secrecy of women inclines them to hold “privacies”—intimacies or confidential relations, a sense of the word now obsolete but reported by the Oxford English Dictionary in several late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century works. An early scene in Love in Distress captures the many valences of privacy as Aspatia embodies them. Melantius is brought to her father’s home in anticipation of their match, which has been orchestrated by the two families. Wandering unknowingly into Aspatia’s private bower, he sees her for the first time, as do the readers: This place was all Retirement, secret and secure; none durst approach except the Duke [her father], at some appointed hours, wherein she never failed to entertain her self with all the privacy and freedom her Heart could 25

Love in Distress, Sig. A3r. The names of characters in anonymous novels can also act as pseudonyms of a kind. Here the names Aspatia and Melantius are borrowed from Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (1611). 26

Chapter Nine

186 wish.27

Shortly after this introduction, we learn that Aspatia already has a suitor, Octavio, from whom she receives a letter. Octavio writes, “I am now at Porto with all the Privacy imaginable, till I know with what Incouragement I may come to Lisbon.”28 In this usage, privacy seems to mean solitude and freedom from scrutiny, perhaps even the possession of a private space, but also implies that Octavio waits for Aspatia’s silence to break, revealing her intentions. Aspatia’s privacy also makes her similar to a novel. The author describes her as having the characteristics of a book, imprinted and available to be read, but never quite giving up her real meaning. We learn for instance that “Love had been no stranger to her Heart, a Heart perhaps too apt to take the Impression.”29 As in the other novels discussed here, Aspatia’s social seclusion soon ends. When Melantius discovers Octavio and breaks their engagement, she and her servant Laura dress in men’s clothes, take on male pseudonyms, and sail for Italy. There they encounter Don Ariosto, really Canace, who loves Octavio but who is required to marry Alcidas; her social privacy prevents Canace from communicating her true feelings to Octavio.30 Eventually all the misadventures of these pairs of lovers are resolved, the identity of each being discovered at a lucky moment, and they marry accordingly. At the conclusion of the novel the author asserts that here “The curtain’s drawn, the rest must not be known, / Inquire no more, the time may be your own.”31 The central question in each novel, whether addressed sincerely as in Peppa, philosophically in Alcander and Philocrates, moralistically in Diotrephe or parodically in The Amorous Abbess, is how one may know the true intentions of his lover. The female authors and translators of these fictions draw out the mystery past the pages of the novels and into the relationship that the books have with their readers, who are themselves engaged with unknown and unknowable women as they read. As these examples show, female anonymity prioritizes gender far more than does a female personal name. It may disguise the identity—including the real 27

Love in Distress, 6. Love in Distress, 11. 29 Love in Distress, 5. 30 At this point in the novel, four pages (89-92) are missing from the Newberry Library copy, the only extant text of Love in Distress. Pages 113-116, which provide the continuation of Octavio’s story in which it is revealed that he is Aspatia’s long-lost brother, are also missing from this copy. 31 Love in Distress, 132. 28

Editing Anonymous

187

gender—of the writer of the work, but it insists that we read the book as a work by a woman. I find no reason to suspect that these novels should not be attributed to women. But even where female authorship cannot be proven, or attribution revealed, works such as these deserve to be included within the canon of texts by early modern women writers. They add an important dimension to this literature as a case in which the gender of the writer comes to the fore. As Josephine Roberts argued, “the issue of uncertain or unknown authorship no longer stands in the way of considering how these works (written either by men or women) contribute to the debate over gender relations.”32 The authors of these novels indeed take an active role in the gender politics of the late seventeenth century, both engaging in the games of disguise and open secrets that allowed them to publish, and creating a space in which a quiet but sustained counterargument to the notion of women’s duplicity could be articulated. They call attention to the way that enforcing too much privacy on women may be as damaging as too much liberty. As such they offer a valuable lesson to editors that the category of authorship includes much more than the personal name of the writer. The practice of editing, after all, extends beyond the preparation of individual texts to a curatorial function; editing makes works available to readers and scholars. Editors of early novels and the works of women writers can contribute to our understanding of specific works and the tradition in which they were written by considering not just attribution, but equally the various authorial approaches and strategies that so animate early English fiction.

Works Cited Primary Sources Anon., Alcander and Philocrates: Or, The Pleasures and Disquietudes of Marriage. London: Richard Parker, Samuel Briscoe, and Samuel Burrowes, 1696. Rpt. Fiction of Unknown or Questionable Attribution, eds. Erin Henriksen and Desma Polydorou. Series II, vol. 10. The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library. Series eds. Betty Travitsky and Anne Lake Prescott. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2006. Anon., The Amorous Abbess, or, Love in a Nunnery. London: Richard Bentley, 1684. Rpt. Fiction of Unknown or Questionable Attribution, 32

“Editing the Women Writers of Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Studies 24 (1996): 66.

188

Chapter Nine

eds. Erin Henriksen and Desma Polydorou. Series II, vol. 9. The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library. Series eds. Betty Travitsky and Anne Lake Prescott. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2006. Anon., Love in Distress: Or, the Lucky Discovery. London: Samuel Briscoe, 1697. Anon., Peppa, or the Reward of Constant Love. London: William Crooke, 1689. Rpt. Fiction of Unknown or Questionable Attribution, eds. Erin Henriksen and Desma Polydorou. Series II, vol. 10. The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library. Series eds. Betty Travitsky and Anne Lake Prescott. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2006. Du Verger, S. Diotrephe, or an historie of Valentines. London: Thomas Harper, 1641. Rpt. Fiction of Unknown or Questionable Attribution, eds. Erin Henriksen and Desma Polydorou. Series II, vol. 9. The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library. Series eds. Betty Travitsky and Anne Lake Prescott. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2006. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Hughes. New York: Odyssey Press, 1957.

Secondary Sources De Jean, Joan. “Lafayette’s Ellipses: The Privileges of Anonymity.” PMLA 99:5 (October 1984): 884-902. Ezell, Margaret J. M. “‘By a Lady’: The Mask of the Feminine in Restoration, Early Eighteenth-Century Print Culture.” In The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Robert Griffin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Feldman, Paula. “Women Poets and Anonymity in the Romantic Era,” New Literary History 33:2 (Spring 2002): 279-289. Ferry, Anne. “Anonymity: The Literary History of a Word,” New Literary History 33:2 (Spring 2002): 193-202. North, Marcy. The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Relihan, Constance C. and Goran V. Stanivukovic. “Introduction.” Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570-1640. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Roberts, Josephine. “Editing the Women Writers of Early Modern England.” Shakespeare Studies 24 (1996): 63-70.

CHAPTER TEN EDITING THE UNKNOWN: WRITING THE INTRODUCTION TO TWO PLAYS BY ELIZABETH POLWHELE ANN HOLLINSHEAD HURLEY

A title, “The Frolick’s, or The Lawyer Cheated”; an author’s initials in the subheading on the title page, “An new Comedey, the first Coppy, written by Mrs. E:P.”; a date, 1671; a reference to two other plays by the same author, “my Faithfull Virgins and my Elysium”; a self-description— possibly disingenuous—“I am young, no scholar, and what I write I write by nature, not by art”; and a signature, “E. Polewheele”: these are the few facts that can be attached to the author of an amusing Restoration comedy and an earlier, perhaps less accomplished, tragedy by the early modern woman writer now designated as “Elizabeth Polwhele.” Some additional data can be added from the material form of the two plays. They both exist only in manuscript; neither has any early print history.1 The earlier play, the tragedy, titled “The Faithfull Virgins,” is located in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (MS. Rawl. Poet. 195, ff. 49-78) and is a fair copy in the same quite distinctive handwriting as is displayed in the manuscript of “The Frolicks.” On folio 78v of that manuscript is attached a page, which is not part of the play but appears to have been some attempt at opening lines for a prayer. It reads, in part, “Lord Jesus rescue my soule Amen, E.P.” The play was evidently intended for performance, and more than likely was indeed professionally performed, as on folio 49r there is the official licensing for production signed by the Master of Revels, Henry Herbert.2 What is of significant interest (to be returned to below) is the comment under the license, which reads “the 1 Cornell University Press produced an edition of The Frolicks in 1977 from the manuscript belonging to its collection and edited by Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume. 2 The Cornell editors point out that the license is not in Herbert’s handwriting and that it is undated.

190

Chapter Ten

Chaster witts, say; that luxury must be pronounc’ed for letchery in the masque throughout according wthe judgement off—Doctor, H:C:” (H.C.’s identity has not been established.) The manuscript for “The Frolicks” is similarly both forthcoming and withholding. It is located in the Rare Book Collection of Cornell University, to which it was bequeathed by Benno Loewy, a book collector, in 1919. It was published for the first time by Cornell University Press in 1977. (Its provenance, with some gaps, is traced by the editors of that edition, and its mention by earlier scholars is also detailed there.) This manuscript, a “first Coppy,” includes a dedicatory letter to Prince Rupert, a member of the court of the reigning monarch, Charles II, and an autograph signature, “Arthur Hewes,” appears on folio 4r, dated “1681.” (Margaret Hughes, one of the earliest actresses to appear on the London stage professionally, was the mistress of Prince Rupert, but no connection between her and Arthur Hewes has been established.) The dedicatory letter, while mentioning the youth of the author and the two earlier plays, contains no other identifying information. Neither manuscript gives any evidence for the author’s first name beyond that initial “E.” Nor is the spelling, “Polwhele,” now the accepted version, verified there. The spelling and the name “Elizabeth” have simply evolved, as has the familiar “Shakespeare” spelling, out of modern needs for uniformity. Nor is there any mention of the playwright in any other contemporary sources. Who “Elizabeth Polwhele” might have been remains lost to history.3 It is difficult, then, to write an introduction to these two plays in the familiar format of “life and works.” Like the task of editing other early modern women writers, the editing of Polwhele’s works is left without a script. The new, less author-centered, approach to editing, now being labeled “the new textualism,” on the other hand, offers considerable scope for commenting about Polwhele’s plays. The focus that that approach brings to editing, with its emphasis on the social, cultural and political location of a given text, is particularly advantageous for the discussion of women’s writing of the mid-seventeenth century, given that we lack much of the biographical data that has been more available for their male contemporaries. First, to briefly summarize the more relevant aspects of the new 3 The Cornell editors propose a candidate for authorship, one Elizabeth Polwhele, the daughter of Theophilus Polwhele, a prominent nonconformist minister. The problematic nature of Polwhele’s first name and the apparent lack of connection of this family to the court and the London theater scene, make this suggestion somewhat questionable.

Editing the Unknown

191

textualism: one of the most important is that it takes explicitly as its starting point the previously less emphasized fact that editorial theory has always been an important aspect of literary interpretation. The generation of editors immediately preceding the new textualism, described as the “new bibliography” school of editing, and summarized by Leah Marcus elsewhere in this book, saw itself as restricted to providing definitive texts that would “relieve future scholars of the painful task of consulting manuscripts and early printed versions for themselves.”4 Thus their implied general consensus was that editors edited and literary scholars interpreted (a position that of course ignored the fact that some of the most durable and persuasive discussions of literary texts were provided by these same editors). Secondly, the editing done by this generation of new bibiliographical scholars, aiming as it did at the objectivity of a fixed stable text, saw that goal as best achieved by making the best possible assessment of final authorial intention. Yet that emphasis on authorial intention, coupled with the goal of a text uncorrupted by printer’s errors or the alleged misreadings of editors contemporary with early modern printed texts or coterie circles involved in manuscript transmission, inevitably closed off areas of interpretive interest and almost equally inevitably marginalized those texts written by women whose lives, like Polwhele’s, were unknown. “Textual scholarship is itself a form of interpretation,” summarizes Marcus.5 The new textualism, which opens the door to what the previous generation of editorial theorists had defined as extraliterary, begins with this essential premise. Given that the new textualism thus acknowledges that producing editions is one of the ways through which we produce literary meanings, and given that this approach also opens the door to influences that the previous generation of editors had dismissed as “extraliterary,” what areas of potentially interpretive interest might an editor of Polwhele’s plays wish to include in introducing these plays to the reader? A partial list might involve such non-authorial textual determinants as the cultural, commercial and political contexts from which these plays emerged; the genre determinants that take into account performance-based as opposed to print-based forms of “publication”; the slowly evolving shift from amateur to professional status as markers of value and from patronage to commercial means of financial support for a playwright; changes in the actual stage and staging of drama, including the locations of theaters, audience involvement, lighting, set design and, most dramatically, the shift 4 5

See Marcus, above, p.91 Ibid. p. 87

192

Chapter Ten

from boy to female actors for the women’s parts; the particular demands that an early Restoration male-dominated culture placed on female playwrights and the specific ways in which Polwhele’s plays negotiage them. As Josephine Roberts points out, “the social history of women’s writing is often crucial to its interpretation.”6 An editor’s introduction to Polwhele’s plays would need to consider all of the above and more. It is this conjunction of textual and cultural studies that the new textualism promotes, such that the materiality of a given text is seen as participating in discursive practices that form the crucial elements of its interpretive potential. Polwhele attached the date 1671 to her third play, The Frolicks, and the first two decades of the Restoration were characterized by theatrical practices and a cultural climate that allow us to make some useful conjectures about some of the material aspects of her two manuscripts. To begin with, they are composed in her own handwriting, and each has marks of a specific purpose for its composition. For example, while the editors of the Cornell edition of The Frolicks concur with a nineteenthcentury bookseller’s clipping (appended to the manuscript by Loewy) that the play had evidently been “sent to Prince Rupert, from whom it would appear never to have been returned for printing,” I would argue that, given what we know of performance and print practices of the period, Elizabeth Polwhele never intended her manuscript for print.7 It seems more likely that both manuscripts were reading copies, since it appears to have been the practice for playwrights who sought to have their works performed to submit their scripts for readings, where members of the theatrical companies, members of the nobility, and other already established playwrights would critique and eventually recommend the play for production.8 If this inference is correct, it implies an initial audience for Polwhele’s play that would be more similar in its operations to a peer-review group of today than to the coterie groups of intimate friends characteristic of the circulation of poetry in the pre-War decades and differing also from the aristocratic family groups for whom some of her female contemporaries were writing. It also suggests that Polwhele saw her play and her play writing in a less amateur, more professional, context than her dedicatory letter, if taken literally, implies. By 1671, she had already had at least one 6

See Roberts, p. 32 Catalogue clipping appended to the Cornell manuscript, cited in Cornell edition, 38. 8 See The London Stage 1660-1800, eds. William Van Lennep, Emmet L. Avery, and Arthur H. Scouten, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. 7

Editing the Unknown

193

play, The Faithfull Virgins, professionally produced, probably by Davenant’s Company. Moreover, Prince Rupert and Margaret Hughes were both associated with the other theatrical company, Thomas Killigrew’s King’s Co., and Killigrew had dedicated his last play to Prince Rupert, thus verifying Polwhele’s choice of him as an informed and professional selection.9 Margaret Hughes had acted with Killigrew’s company in major roles until the spring of 1670. The selection of these two figures, then, was not as “presumptuous” as Polwhele’s dedicatory letter implies. Indeed, the letter’s formulaic nature also suggests the astute awareness of its writer, capable of manipulating one discursive practice, the letter with its disingenuous disclaimers, against another, the confidently written play, in a form that will be familiar from most acknowledgement pages today. Moreover, when in that letter, Polwhele declares that she is “encouraged much by Mistress Fame,” a reference that she twice makes, she also acknowledges her professional goals in the coded language of her time. (See Shakespeare’s dedications appended to his long narrative poems where “love is not love,” but ambition, as Arthur Marotti has taught us.10) Polwhele’s participation in these two ostensibly self-contradictory discourses—the self-effacing dedicatory letter, characterized by such statements as “an unfortunate young woman begs she may not be more luckless in the presumption of her dedication of a thing of such nature to your Highness…” and the skillfully composed, fashionably appointed, sexually provocative comedy, perfectly tuned to the tastes of its audience—puts into question the sharp dichotomizing of female Restoration writers as either typified by the professional and assertive Aphra Behn or by the shy self-effacing Katherine Philips. Diane Purkiss, writing about this issue of gender as it relates to the pseudonymous pamphlets on the controversy about the nature of women, offers a useful category to apply to a woman writer like Polwhele who lacks a “life.” What matters, Purkiss points out, is not the details of the literal gendered experiences of the writer, but the “performances of femininity” in the text.11 Polwhele in her dedicatory letter and in the more complex presentation of her women characters is “performing” differing versions of femininity and then successfully integrating them through working toward her announced goal, “Fame,” or, in the modern vernacular, professional success. Professional success on the commercial stage was being redefined for writers of drama, both female and male. Speaking broadly, the motives 9

Harbage, 104, Marotti, ”Love is not Love.” 11 Purkiss, 85. 10

194

Chapter Ten

for writers of the pre-Civil War period were focused on the court as source of royal patronage and power. In the post-Civil War period, with growing commercial, as opposed to social, competition, from the city and its money and fashionable appeal, the locus of prestige was shifting away from the court to urban audiences and to commercial success in the form of box office receipts. A playwright who could stage a play for more than three nights stood to make money. Polwhele’s third play, The Frolicks, with its urban setting and the nature of its female casting with an early emphasis on the “breeches” part, seems designed to attract this kind of attention. Not only was the aristocratic Forest of Arden giving way to city comedy and contemporary settings, but also, as some scholars have argued, the “commercialization of dramatic authorship” was beginning to generate “an intensifying preoccupation with individualized authorial agency.”12 Polwhele’s self-inscription on her title page of this play, coupled with the decorous dedicatory letter calling subtle attention to her authorship even while ostensibly disclaiming any such proficiency, allows us to see her plays in this complexity of contemporary developments. A second, and more obvious, category of influence on Polwhele’s plays is the very different nature of the early Restoration stage in sharp contrast to its pre-War predecessor. To examine how Polwhele’s plays might have been shaped by newly emergent modes of stage conventions and dramatic performance, it is necessary to first briefly review what we know of the Restoration stage. The Elizabethan public theatres, as is well-known, were typically open air, circular, octagonal or square in shape, with tiers of galleries and a standees’ pit. The platform stage jutted out into the pit and doors from backstage allowed for some of the entrances and exits. These stages typically lacked scenery but allowed for discovery scenes, usually with a curtained inner stage. They also lacked the elaborate scenery of the court masques, its machinery and costly costuming, and depended on language to set scene and atmosphere. The new Restoration theatre, by contrast, as continentally influenced, was characterized by elaborate scenery using wings, borders and dispersed shutters.13 The playhouses themselves were small, particularly the early ones that were converted tennis courts, and thus the audience was close to the actors, allowing for an intimacy not as 12

Brooks, xiii-xiv. The elaborate scenery was not characteristic of Killigrew’s converted tennis court at Vere St., but Davenant’s theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields was constructed for scenic production as were the playhouses constructed in the 1670s and later. All details for this section of this essay are drawn from Hume, The London Theatre World and Thomas and Hare, Restoration and Georgian England 1660-1788. 13

Editing the Unknown

195

characteristic of the Elizabethan stage. That intimacy was reinforced by the proscenium, an acting area before the curtain line, which brought the actors close to the audience such that even after the larger, more elaborately equipped theatres were built in the 1670s, the intimacy continued. Since most theatres were fan-shaped, the sight lines were usually good, and lighting illuminated both audience and stage throughout the performance. As Colin Visser observes, “the physical description of the stage, in turn, fostered theatrical conventions.”14 Exits and entrances became more frequent, scene changes happened quickly and fluently, accomplished by sliding wings and dispersed shutters, certain kinds of discovery scenes were favored, the scenery behind the proscenium evolved from decorative background to elaborately crafted, sometimes even sculptured, scenes. Walls in conjunction with wings and shutters could alter a setting from an exterior of a house to an interior. Shutters allowed for more elaborate discovery scenes, and more than two successive discoveries were thus possible. Polwhele’s plays, written for performance in the first decade of the Restoration, can be analyzed in these terms such that they imply both a perfecting of her talent and the contemporary evolution and elaboration of technical aspects of staging. The Faithfull Virgins, for example, evidences the vogue for discovery scenes. Its opening line is “A hearse, discovered….”and that brief beginning concludes with the stage direction: “The hearse is shut in. Statenor enters at one door. At another Floradine.” Soon a “dumb show” is indicated wherein “a temple [is] discovered,” and the play continues in this fashion. While the editors of the Cornell edition of The Frolicks, in describing the earlier play are persuasive in characterizing the diction, plot and handling of rhyme as “old-fashioned,” its use of stage conventions like the handling of discovery scenes speaks to the playwright’s awareness of contemporary taste. As a further example of that taste, the 1673 production of Elkanah Settle’s tragedy, The Empress of Morocco, is one of the few plays for which we have any illustrations, and as such it gives evidence of how elaborately the scenic stage could be used in both discovery and “state” (i.e. scenes involving large groups) scenes. The discovery scene in this play of a particularly spectacular visual tableau of bodies impaled on spikes provides a context for assessing some of the features of Polwhele’s tragedy. The Elizabethan stage, of course, also had utilized discovery scenes particularly in the late romances like The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale. Since, however, Polwhele’s 14

Hume, The London Theatre World, 66.

196

Chapter Ten

Faithfull Virgins was performed by Davenant’s company, the first to use the scenic stage, we might infer that her play was not “old fashioned” in its adoption of some of these new theatrical technical innovations. Certainly that adjective cannot be applied to The Frolicks, where scene changes, entrances and exits, rapid shifts from interiors to exteriors and back again, all conform to the enhanced and more sophisticated handling of these elements of staging that are characteristic of the Restoration stage and thus serve to reinforce the impression of a playwright who is up to date in her handling of the technical features of her play’s production. On the page, the play seems choppy, but on stage it performs with a lively fluency consistent with its title. We do not know whether it was in fact performed, but it was obviously written with contemporary tastes for staging in mind.15 Probably the most dramatic departure from the conventions of the Elizabethan stage, however, was the shift from boys to woman for the female parts. In 1662, Charles II inserted a directive into the patents, which established the two theatrical companies, that “all the women’s parts to be acted in either of the said two companies for the time to come may be performed by women.”16 That change was both commercially advantageous in the 17th century and, from the point of view of a 21st century editor, both socially and culturally illuminating in analyzing the play. The fashion for mingling with the actresses in the tiring rooms, in the auditorium and in town so frequently alluded to by Samuel Pepys and others also yields significant insight into the cultural, sexual and gender roles within which Polwhele’s plays are, arguably consciously, situated. The arrival of female actresses, coincident with the new stage technology, in a theatre that was using a sophisticated handling of perspective to focus an already male-gendered gaze, was generating an eroticized viewing experience that clearly posed a challenge to the female playwright. Pepys in his many comments on early Restoration theatre nicely exemplifies the erotic atmosphere that extended beyond the stage, given the common practice whereby gentlemen went backstage into the tiring rooms to converse with the actresses. A complicated desire to both sustain and dispel the erotic illusions set in motion by the stage is caught in one of his characteristic descriptions of these practices: Going in [to the King’s playhouse] met with Knepp and she took us up into the tiring rooms and into the women’s shift where Nell [Gwyn] was 15

Scenes from The Frolicks were performed informally and to great effect at Wagner College, Staten Island, NY in 1996. 16 Cited in Thomas and Hare, 138.

Editing the Unknown

197

dressing herself and was all unready and is very pretty, prettier than I thought…. But hard to see how they [Knepp and Gwyn] were both painted would make a man mad and did make me loath them; and what base company of men comes among them and how lewdly they talk!17

As Alison Findlay observes, “more than any other literary forms, drama relies on material presences: visual spectacle, sound and the presence of actors and audience within specific physical spaces.”18 The materiality of theatre with its focus on the newly accessible real female body would inevitably reinforce the juxtapositions of female actress as working for pay by male audiences, with female playwrights writing for pay through a male-managed commercial theatre, with the female prostitute performing sex for money. Moreover, it was not simply that the commodification of female performers whether actresses or playwrights linked them to prostitution, the label of sexuality, in itself difficult for a woman to negotiate, “tended [also] to disavow her labor.”19 The “Fame” that Polwhele sought was on several different levels being denied her by her culture. Nevertheless, as Findlay and others have pointed out, “the convention of the women’s positioning as the object of the erotically-charged male gaze” could be challenged and exploited by both female actress and female playwright. Each of Polwhele’s extant plays demonstrates an instance where the playwright does exactly that, challenging even the most powerful male gaze, that of Charles II, who was known for his extramarital affairs with actresses as well as with aristocratic women. In The Faithfull Virgins, for example, the focus is on femininity, as underscored by its title. The four main roles are all female, and the play, often somewhat less than subtly, is largely an indictment of male behavior set in a court where the behaviors are much like those of the reigning Stuart monarch. One male role, the Duke of Tuscany, has been identified by several readers as “an unsubtle hit at Charles II.”20 Evidently the 17thC censor concurred as the lines designated as “cross’d” and the substitution of “luxury” for “letchery”, which he also required in granting the license for performance, verify a similar conclusion. The Frolicks is more subtle, and here Polwhele puts to good use the female skills of wit and intelligence that the culture was beginning to value. Again, Pepys can be used as evidencing male approval for female 17

Cited in Thomas and Hare, 141-142. Findlay, 3. 19 Diamond, 523. 20 Cornell edition, 43 and Findlay, 135. 18

198

Chapter Ten

wit. Describing another attendance at a performance, he says: To the King’s House to The Maid’s Tragedy…[where in the audience] one of the ladies would and did sit with her mask on, all the play and being exceedingly witty as ever I heard woman, did talk with [a nearby gentleman] but was, I believe a virtuous woman and of quality. He would fain know who she was, but she would not tell; yet did give him many pleasant hints of her knowledge of him, by that means setting his brains at work to find out who she was and did give him leave to use all means to find out who she was but putting off her mask. He was mighty witty and she also, making sport of him very inoffensively, that a more pleasant rencontre I never heard.21

Female actresses and female playwrights displaying such intelligence and wit to channel erotic charm into playful control of such situations were similarly able to challenge the dominant male culture. As Findlay summarizes, Restoration women, who had profited by the necessities of exercising power during the civil war, had as actresses and female playwrights in particular “considerable authority in a culture whose nexus of power was located in the visual.”22 In The Frolicks, for example, Polwhele creates a heroine who reverses the male gaze by watching her potential lover when he is not watching her, by playing the breeches part to upstage both father and lover, by engineering a scene in which the male rake must literally take the responsibility for the offspring of his cast-off mistresses on his own back, and in each scene by using her wit and charm to get the best of her male opponents in situations that specifically recall instances where men had exercised control over women. The most neatly effective “frolick” is a scene in which Polwhele and the actress through the female character invert the breeches part itself, trapping male fools in female garb and refusing to let them extricate themselves. Polwhele’s familiarity with the technicalities of staging and her ability to negotiate the challenges posed by the male gaze is thus evidenced by her sophistication in contemporary theatrical matters. One more small detail from The Frolicks is perhaps suggestive of how an intimate knowledge of the lives of the actors themselves could be used by a skilled dramatist to enhance the amusement of those in her audience who, like Pepys, knew well the small world of the Restoration stage and its players. As Findlay points out, an exchange between the witty, virginal, female character and the male rake/lover amusingly exploits the gap between 21 22

Cited in Thomas and Hare, 175-176. Findlay, 140.

Editing the Unknown

199

character and actor/actress playing the role. When Rightwit, the rake/lover of Clarabell, the witty heroine, says to her in a “frolick” about virginity, “I lost my bachelorship so long ago that I defy the name of one. But if all bachelors must lead bears and all maids apes in Hell, thou and I shall both go to Heaven, since thou art sure no more of a maid than I a bachelor.” Of course, in the context of the play, Clarabell is a maid, but the actress playing her could well have been Nell Gwyn, the former mistress of the actor, Charles Hart, possibly playing Rightwit, who knew “right well” that the actress herself was indeed “no maid.”23 The gap between the fictive and the real that drama here exploits provides a mini-metamoment of amusement for the knowing audience—shared knowledge that brings playwright, players and spectators together in amused superiority over the fictions of the stage. The network of theatrical practices, persons, plays, performance conditions and culture in which Polwhele’s two plays exist is, to return to the new textualism, thus an appealing context in which to situate an editor’s introduction to the “works” of this playwright without a “life.” Such a siting, moreover, is advantageous because it avoids the narrowing confines of an editorial approach that restricts itself to authorial intention or even to an editing of women’s writing that accentuates, sometimes without intending to do so, the impoverishment of women’s lives when women writers are seen as victims of male culture. One of the gains of accentuating the extraliterary contexts of a text in editing the work of women writers is, by contrast, precisely an enabling of the voices of early modern women. Plays like Polwhele’s can be demonstrated to be “taking the stage in order to foreground interests particular to their sex.”24 Understanding drama within the specific moment of its production and performance also enhances an understanding of the variety of ways in which female playwrights negotiated the social, economic and political constraining and liberating forces of their times. One might also argue that the female playwright might register those forces even more clearly than might her male counterparts, and thus tracing the embedded network existence of her text might throw light on the embedded nature of his. Finally, the Foucaultian premise that “texts belong to networks” situates the reader of Polwhele’s plays in a context of possibility and potentiality rather than in a context of forced conclusions, a gain that enables the student reader to explore rather than simply repeat and the professional scholar to build and expand on rather than to reject.25 23

Findlay, 141-142. Ibid., 1. 25 Wray, 65. 24

200

Chapter Ten

This essay is, in keeping with such premises, not an introduction to Polwhele’s plays but an open-ended invitation to collaboration in introducing her texts in the broadest sense. To the extent that it allows us to define authorship culturally rather than biologically, then, the new textualism serves us all well.

Works Cited Primary Sources Polwhele, Elizabeth. “The Faithfull Virgins.” Bodleian Ms. Rawl. Poet. 195, ff. 49-78. —. “The Frolicks: or The Lawyer Cheated, An new Comedey, the ‘first Coppy’ written by Mrs.: E:P. 1671.” Cornell MSS. Bd. Rare P77, ff. 5r89v.

Secondary Sources Brooks, Douglas A. From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Diamond, Erin. “Gestus and Signature in Aphra Behn’s The Rover.” ELH 56,3 (Autumn, 1989): 519-541. Findlay, Alison and Stephanie Hodgson-Wright with Gweno Williams, eds. Women and Dramatic Production 1550-1700. Essex: Pearson, 2000. Harbage, Alfred. Thomas Killigrew: Cavalier Dramatist, 1612-83. London: Oxford University Press, 1930. Hume, Robert D. The London Theater World 1660-1800. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980. Marotti, Arthur. “’Love is not Love’: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order.” ELH 49,2 (Summer, 1989): 396-428. Polwhele, Elizabeth. The Frolicks or The Lawyer Cheated (1671). Eds. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Purkiss, Diane. “Material Girls, The Seventeenth-Century Woman Debates,” in Women, Texts and Histories. Eds. Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss. London: Routledge, 1992. Thomas, David and Arnold Hare, eds. Restoration and Georgian England 1660-1788: A Documentary History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Editing the Unknown

201

Van Lennep, William, Emmet L. Avery and Arthur H. Scouten et. al., eds. The London Stage 1660-1800, vol l. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1965. Wray, Ramona. “Anthologizing the Early Modern Female Voice,” in Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality. Ed. Arthur Murphy. Manchester: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE CANONIZED MARY ASTELL: GENDER, CANON, CONTEXT MICHAL MICHELSON AND WILLIAM KOLBRENER

When Mary Astell presented a small volume of poems to Archbishop Sancroft in 1689, she wrote in an accompanying dedicatory letter that it “was not without pain and reluctancy” that she broke off from what she called her “beloved obscurity”.1 In writing of Astell in his Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain of 1752, George Ballard would transform that fondness for “obscurity” into a recurring theme in his account of Astell’s life. Astell, according to Ballard, expressed “modesty” in the publication of all of her works, being “extremely fond” of that “obscurity” which “she courted and doted on beyond all earthly blessings”. Her only ambition was, Ballard writes (citing from Astell’s own preface to Letters Concerning the Love of God [1695, 1705, 1730]), “to slide gently through the world without so much as being seen or taken notice of”. As Ballard would have it, without the “restless curiousity” of others, Astell would have maintained the anonymity that she desperately cultivated and always desired.2 Indeed, Astell asserted her wish to “most industriously shun a great Reputation”, figuring herself as unwilling to receive “Plaudit from any but an infallible Judge” (L b3). Ballard’s description of Astell’s propensities for obscurity emerges as a biographical trope, and also, from about the time when the Memoirs were published, a historiographical principle that governed the reception of her work. That, as Ruth Perry writes, no woman “picked up where 1

Reprinted in Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986), 400. 2 George Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, ed Ruth Perry (Detroit: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 383. See also [Mary Astell and] John Norris, Letters Concerning the Love of God (London: Samuel Manship and Richard Wilkin, 1695), b3. Hereafter cited parenthetically as L.

204

Chapter Eleven

Astell left off”, and that she was “forgotten so quickly”, was not simply a function of Astell’s proclivities for withdrawal and obscurity.3 Astell herself observes in Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700, 1703, 1706, 1730), that it is the “Subtilty” of men that “advances them to the Post of Honour” and also “gets them a Name”, conveying it “down to Posterity”. It is men, Astell continues, who “dispute for Truth as well as Men who argue against it; histories are writ by them, they recount each others great Exploits, and have always done so”.4 From this perspective, Astell’s propensity for self-concealment, or what Elisa New calls (in a different context) “feminist invisibility”, would lend itself to the reception that would await her work in a tradition of male historians—and editors—who were interested, in Astell’s own words, only in “each others great Exploits”.5 Astell, however, would emerge from that obscurity as a first wave of feminist scholarship resuscitated both her life and work. Source Book Press printed her Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part I and Part II (1694, 1695, 1696, 1701; 1696, 1697, 1701) and Some Reflections in 1970, the first in a series of publications about Astell that burgeoned in the1980s. Ruth Perry’s Celebrated Mary Astell of 1986 provided details of Astell’s life, paralleling Moira Ferguson’s First Feminists (1985) and Bridget Hill’s The First English Feminist (1986) that anthologized selections from her works. Since then, Patricia Springborg has produced scholarly editions of Astell’s A Fair Way with the Dissenters, An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War (both 1704), and Some Reflections in her Political Writings (1996) and a separate volume devoted to her Serious Proposal (1997). Astell’s correspondence with John Norris, Letters Concerning the Love of God, has of late been published in a modern edition by E. Derek Taylor and Melvyn New (2005), and portions of the penultimate piece, The Christian Religion as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705, 1717, 1730), have most recently been included in Hilda L. Smith, Mihoko Suzuki, and Susan Wiseman’s Women's Political Writings, 1610-1725 (2007).6 Canonized in 3

Perry, 330. Mary Astell, “Some Reflections On Marriage”, Astell: Political Writings, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 77. Hereafter cited parenthetically as SRM. 5 Elisa New, “Feminist Invisibility: The Examples of Anne Bradstreet and Anne Hutchinson”, Common Knowledge 2.1 (1993): 99. 6 See Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies and Some Reflections Upon Marriage (New York: Source Book Press, 1970); Bridget Hill, The First English 4

The Canonized Mary Astell

205

the Norton Anthology of English Literature since the fifth edition (1986), selections from Astell’s writings are now accessible to a wide readership of scholars and students. A number of her works, however, including Moderation Truly Stated (1704), Bart’lemy Fair: or, an Enquiry after Wit (1709), scattered letters, and the complete text of Christian Religion, are available in toto only in rare book libraries. The renewed attention to Astell evidenced by these editions owes its impetus to scholars’ preoccupation with her feminist declarations and her status as an early modern woman writer. Yet what Barbara Lewalski wrote in her 1993 volume on the writing of Jacobean women continues to have bearing on the study of Astell, for Astell’s texts have often been “too narrowly contextualized—studied chiefly in relation to other women’s texts, or to modern feminist theory”.7 Revisions in scholarly methodology, however, are beginning to move away from a narrow conception of what Devoney Looser calls “herstory”, or “efforts to construct female-centered accounts of the past”. This trend has enabled Astell to be analyzed not only as an early feminist, but also in the broader framework of early modern writing and the multivalent contexts— theological, political, philosophical, historical, and rhetorical—in which she wrote.8 Paradoxically, it is the movement away from earlier, conventionally feminist paradigms of scholarship that has engendered a larger audience for Astell, one which includes scholars not associated with traditional feminist concerns. She was indisputably aware of and attentive to the misogynist attitudes towards women pervasive during her epoch and pointedly self-identified as a “Lover of her Sex”. Nonetheless, the sum of Astell’s writing does not center exclusively, or even primarily, on gender issues. Astell’s protest that “Men, being the Historians…seldom condescend to record the great and good Actions of Women” provides a critique of what Looser calls the “masculine contours” of history. Yet Feminist: Reflections Upon Marriage and other writings by Mary Astell (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986); Patricia Springborg’s editions of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I & II (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1997) and Astell: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996); E. Derek Taylor and Melvyn New’s edition of Mary Astell and John Norris: Letters Concerning the Love of God (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); and Hilda L. Smith, Mihoko Suzuki, and Susan Wiseman’s anthology, Women's Political Writings, 1610-1725 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007). 7 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993), 1. 8 Devoney Looser, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University P, 2000), 1.

206

Chapter Eleven

Looser herself remarks that Astell “overlooked early modern women writers’” contributions to history” in her own historical work, An Impartial Enquiry.9 Indeed, that Astell has disappointed so many contemporary feminists shows the extent to which she does not fit neatly into the standard modern rubric of a feminist writer but rather complicates that concept. The aforementioned biographical and textual publications laid the groundwork for the new stage of scholarship represented by our edition, Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith (2007). The time had now come for a volume that incorporates a more inclusive treatment of Astell’s wideranging interests. Researchers working on Astell in the historicist project of recovering the discourses of early modern women have given new energies to the interpretation and elucidation of Astell on an extensive range of issues. These projects, however, have previously tended to divide her writings into philosophical, political, theological, rhetorical, or gender categories, compartmentalizing her works in a manner foreign to their original conception. When viewed in their historical context, Astell’s writings transcend the limitations of genre; her Some Reflections on Marriage, for example, is as much about contemporary politics as it is about the disparity of legal and social marital norms. Though her works do focus to varying degrees on the restrictions and exclusions imposed upon women within a culture governed by patriarchal norms, they are not in any way restricted to that framework. The conditions which have allowed for the publication of her writings in modern editions and their entry into the feminist canon, therefore, may not be the same ones which engendered their original creation. They are also not those which have begun to permit her admission into the canon of major early modern thinkers. Scholars from varying disciplines are just beginning to investigate the ways in which Astell’s feminism was one of many mutually dependent, interwoven interests and commitments, and to consider her works in the complexities of the historical and ideological milieu within which they were conceived. Such discussions had, until the publication of our collection, been scattered in diverse scholarly journals, published mainly in volumes devoted to eighteenth century studies or early modern women. Our editorial goal was to consolidate a selection of original, multidisciplinary critical essays reflecting more nuanced analyses of Astell’s work and thus to bring her scholarship to a new, mature phase. When conceptualizing our collection we sought a roster of scholars 9

[Mary Astell], The Christian Religion as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of ENGLAND (London: Wilkin, 1717), 207. Hereafter cited parenthetically as CR; Looser, 2.

The Canonized Mary Astell

207

from diverse disciplines in order to both consider the full range of Astell’s writings and transcend the prevalent compartmentalization into distinct and consequently isolated categories and readerships. We did not eschew her fundamental focus on gender, but rather compiled research that incorporates her feminist discourse into the vocabularies of her concomitant allegiances to reason and faith. Our aim was to place Astell’s feminist interventions in the context of a number of related frameworks: aesthetic, theological, educational, and political. To that end, we solicited chapters dealing with Astell’s creative writing; her expressly religious pieces; her educationist arguments; and her political interventions. Attention to the full extent of her works necessitates acknowledging that her sensitivity to women’s concerns is always mediated through the ostensibly competing registers of her political, religious, philosophical, and class affiliations; it is her ability to confute pre-conceived categories that invited the widespread reception of her works during her period that our volume both reveals and reflects. Editing, according to the OED, includes “correcting, condensing, or otherwise modifying” a text for publication.10 This is certainly what Astell herself did in relation to her co-minded contemporaries, her interlocutors, and the broad range of her intended audience. A list of those whom Astell’s works “edit” thus includes—but is not restricted to—her direct responses in her published works to such personages as John Norris, Lady Damaris Masham, John Locke, Daniel Defoe, Charles Davenant, James Owen, White Kennett, Anthony Ashley Cooper (the third earl of Shaftesbury), and Jonathan Swift. Her contacts with William Sancroft, Francis Atterbury, Dr. George Hickes, Richard Steele, Charles Leslie, Henry Dodwell, and others with whom she either corresponded privately or exchanged ideas in a more circuitous forum are also significant to the shaping of her polemics. The antecedent philosophies of Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Nicolas Malebranche are additional, and pivotal, influences on her thinking. Though her acrimonious references and responses to Locke have received the most critical attention, all the above figures are part of the “community of letters” to and for whom Astell put pen to paper and published her thoughts despite her avowed proclivity for “obscurity”. The essays in our edition but echo the wide-ranging attention to and interest in Astell’s writings at the time of their first publication. By elucidating a selection of the debates that engendered her written responses, in this chapter we examine the processes that “edited” her work 10

OED def. online: http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/edit?view=uk.

208

Chapter Eleven

in her own day, a modus operandi that our edition reiterates in our own. In a chronological treatment of Astell’s texts that provides a schematic sense of her intellectual development we first present the early modern figures who were inspirations for, objects of, or respondents to her works, and follow with the modern analyses of these debates as represented in the essays in our collection. Both processes reflect aspects of textual production that come under the broad rubric of editing early modern women’s works that this volume addresses. When Astell came down to London from Newcastle in 1688 as a single young woman determined to pursue an independent life of scholarly pursuit, among the individuals who enabled her to establish her public voice was the Archbishop of Canterbury William Sancroft. The poems she presented him with in gratitude for his aid are the only known example of her creative writing. Sancroft, a respected Anglican divine and nonjuror renowned for his acts of charity, was a sympathetic and likeminded individual in an advantageous position to provide Astell with desperately needed help. He is credited with introducing her to the local gentry women Lady Catherine Jones, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, and Lady Ann Coventry, who became her friends and patronesses, as well as to the bookseller Richard Wilkin, who subsequently handled all of her publications even when they were not financially profitable. A devout Anglican educated in her childhood by her uncle, a cleric who had studied under the Cambridge Platonists, Astell was of a pronounced philosophical and spiritual bent. Her poetry reflects the thoughts and struggles of a young woman who only too clearly sees the disadvantages prescribed to her gender in this world and posits compensation in the next. Characterizing her verse as “the best I have to give”, she acknowledges to Sancroft that she has been “emboldened” by “the Condiscention and Candor, with which your Grace was pleased to receive a poor unknown, who hath no place to fly unto and none that careth for her Soul”.11 She thus establishes both her literary ambitions and spiritual perspective through this oeuvre. The surviving manuscript consists of verses Astell wrote between age 17 and 22 that lament the futility of worldly ambitions and document her feelings of loneliness and isolation as she directs her energies towards spiritual ideals. Outside of her own self-described impetus for disclosing her verse there is no record of contemporary response to her poetry, and modern critical attention has been scant. For our volume we solicited Claire 11

See MS Rawlinson Poet 154:5. Cited in Perry, Celebrated Mary Astell, 68 n. 23. Perry’s volume includes the Rawlinson manuscript of Astell’s unpublished poetry in Appendix D, 400-54.

The Canonized Mary Astell

209

Pickard’s essay to address this lack.12 Astell’s overall otherworldly perspective notwithstanding, Pickard notes her “editing” of the Cavalier poet Abraham Cowley’s verse that she deems misdirected and lacking appropriate priorities. Her poem, “In emulation of Mr. Cowleys Poem call’d the Motto page I” rewrites Cowley’s original by substituting the goal of spiritual immortality for that of literary recognition. Where Cowley aspires to worldly honor and emulates Aristotle, Cicero, and Virgil, beside whom he acknowledges his own inadequacy, Astell, looking to “Heav’ns all-righteous eyes”, stresses her own spiritual aspirations and worth. Writing that her “high born Soul shall never stoop” to desiring to be “Rich”, “Great”, “courted”, or “admir’d”, she proclaims her focus on religious objectives. Restricted even in these by her gender, since she cannot be “a Peter or a Paul” she resolves to “be at lest [sic] a Martyr in desire”.13 Astell thus circumvents earthly constraints imposed upon women by decreeing a more exalted goal than that of a male exemplar. Pickard describes the amelioration through an otherworldly focus that Astell posits in her verse as a “technique of transference” that Astell sustains in later prose works (115). Specifically, she replicates the transformation of women’s worldly exclusion from positions of prestige and power into heavenly advantage through feminine martyrdom in her Serious Proposal and Some Reflections. Though Astell’s ostensible focus in Serious Proposal is to better women’s material circumstances by providing them with a safe refuge in which to live and learn, her central concern in this work, as in her poetry, is to make women’s “Beauty…lasting and permanent” by transferring it “from a corruptible Body to an Immortal Mind”. Her ultimate purpose, she writes, is to prepare them for a “glorious Exit” from this life.14 This model of earthly sacrifice for a spiritual cause is echoed in Some Reflections, Pickard reveals, where Astell praises women who agree to marry for performing “a more Heroic Action than all the famous Masculine Heroes can boast of”. By acquiescing to a husband’s rule, such women submit to “a continual Martyrdom”, forfeiting their personal happiness and autonomy in order “to bring Glory to GOD and Benefit to Mankind” (SRM 78). The materially passive perspective and attentiveness to female spiritual advancement 12 Claire Pickard, “’Great in Humilitie’: A Consideration of Mary Astell’s Poetry”, in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, eds. William Kolbrener and Michal Michelson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 115-26. Hereafter quotations from this volume cited parenthetically by page number. 13 “In emulation of Mr. Cowleys Poem call’d the Motto”, Perry, 402. 14 Astell, A Serious Proposal, 5, 46. Hereafter cited parenthetically as SP I and SP II.

210

Chapter Eleven

introduced in Astell’s early verse are sensibilities that extend, Pickard demonstrates, through much of her canon. Even in her youthful, personal aesthetic writing, then, one sees the beginning of the focusing on gender which would become central to her later more canonical public works. In keeping with the tone and focus of her verse, in 1693 Astell initiates a correspondence with the popular and widely read philosopher and theologian John Norris. Astell shared a parallel allegiance to Christian Platonism and Cartesian rationalism with Norris, an influential thinker whose theistic publications appeared in numerous editions.15 In this important early work, Astell’s feminist commitments emerge concomitantly with her theological concerns. In her introductory letter to Norris she queries a discrepancy that she perceives in the third volume of his Practical Discourses Upon Several Divine Subjects (1693) about his allocation of human love to the divine and posits a corrective. Norris accepts Astell’s thesis, and his resultant esteem is what convinces her to agree to his suggestion to publish their correspondence as Letters concerning the Love of GOD. 16 Her motive, she writes, is to “excite a generous Emulation in my Sex” and “perswade them to leave their insignificant Pursuits for Employments worthy of them”, a goal whose magnitude overrides her declared inclinations for anonymity (L b5). In contrast to the nominal attention that Letters has garnered from modern critics, the work aroused significant interest immediately following its publication. The majority of Astell’s contemporaries were full of approbation for her contributions to the manuscript: Ballard’s hagiographic account commends her “good sense” and “sublime thoughts” and Sarah Chapone likewise writes that this is Astell’s “most sublime work”. Gottfried Leibniz, Thomas Burnet, and Mary Evelyn all praise her part in this epistolary exchange that established her early reputation as a serious philosophical theoretician.17 In large part for her parallel practice of writing with divines and prioritizing the afterlife, the protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-48) is widely considered to be based on Mary Astell, along with Valeria in Suzannah Centlivre’s The Basset Table (1705).

15 It is paradoxical, Taylor remarks, that Norris, a significant intellectual figure in his time, is now remembered mainly for his connection with the feminist Astell. See Taylor and New, 2. 16 See [Mary Astell] and John Norris, Letters Concerning the Love of God (London: Samuel Manship and Richard Wilkin, 1695. Hereafter cited parenthetically as L. 17 Ballard, 383. See Perry, 82.

The Canonized Mary Astell

211

The work invited response from adversaries as well. Lady Damaris Masham wrote Discourse Concerning the Love of God (1696) as a refutation of the occasionalist metaphysics of Malebranche and Norris, and in part as a polemical response to Astell’s and Norris’s volume. Her specific reference to Astell in this work is her mention of “a young Writer, whose Judgment may, perhaps, be thought Byassed by the Affectations of Novelty” for acquiescing to what Masham calls the “false Grounds, and wrong Reasonings of an overly devout way of talking; which having no sober, and intelligible sense under it will either by degrees beget an Insensibility to Religion…Or else will turn to as wild an Enthusiasm as any that has been yet seen; and which can End in nothing but Monasteries, and Hermitages; with all those Sottish and Wicked Superstitions which have accompanied them”.18 Whether the term “Monasteries” is a reference to Astell’s proposed Protestant “Monastery” or not is contested, though the status of Masham’s work as a retort to Astell’s Letters is not; the correlation is clearly reflected in their respective titles (SP I 18). Our editorial decision to address works and issues in Astell’s canon that have not yet received serious modern critical attention led to the inclusion of a number of essays discussing the theoretical nuances in Letters and focusing on the way in which Astell’s theological commitments informed her thoughts about gender. We invited papers from scholars in diverse fields with sensitivity to issues in both the history and theory of gender and to philosophy “proper” (as opposed to the subfield known as “woman philosophers”, normatively, and patronizingly, assumed to be less rigorous). In reading Astell’s works, we saw the rigor of her engagement with philosophical questions, such as the debate in Letters of the relative powers of material and immaterial substances and resultant postulations of the sources of causation. Our editorial goal was to provide readings that examine the force of Astell’s interventions in intellectual discussions among the leading philosophers of her age. We thus included Eileen O’Neill’s paper, which by placing Astell’s metaphysics in the historical backdrop of Aristotelian natural philosophy and medieval theology brings serious philosophical study to bear on Astell’s work. O’Neill examines the degree of efficacy Astell concedes to the physical in Letters and situates that position in the context of longstanding metaphysical disputations concerning the cause of

18 [Damaris Masham], Discourse Concerning the Love of God (London: Awnsham and John Churchil, 1696), 78, A2, 120.

212

Chapter Eleven

sensation.19 Showing the ways in which Cartesian philosophical concerns were at the root of Astell’s early thoughts about gender, O’Neill identifies Astell’s meditations on Norris’s quasi-occasionalist assertions in this tract as growing out of a tradition that begins with Thomas Aquinas’s attacks on Islamic occasionalist theologians such as al-Ghazali. She concludes that Astell’s specific philosophical construction in Letters, continued in Serious Proposal Part II and Christian Religion, is congruent with the “orthodox Cartesian account”. Astell does not ally herself wholly with occasionalism that denies efficacy to the physical or with empiricism that prioritizes the material, but rather postulates a “sensible congruity” between the physical and the spiritual that identifies her as a conventional Cartesian (L 280). Our volume thus unearths similarities in philosophical commitment between Astell and one of the major philosophers of the period about this important philosophical debate concerning the relationship between body and soul. Astell was not only in conversation with Descartes’s dualist philosophy; we discovered an empirical angle in her work as well, and E. Derek Taylor’s piece posits the surprisingly materialist emphasis in Astell’s educationist arguments in these same texts.20 In Letters she laments that “’Tis our Misfortune that we live an animal before we live a rational Life” for we “suck in false Principles and Tendencies” by being seduced by “those visible Objects that surround us” rather than their “true Cause and Sourse” (L 209-10). Thus, Taylor points out, in the acquisition of truth Astell admits that “the body does…teach lessons, albeit the wrong ones”. He postulates her lament throughout her writings about “how certainly, and badly, living a corporeal existence educates us” (183, 185). In continuation of the pedagogy of Letters, Taylor reveals, in Serious Proposal she contends that in order to “correct the mistakes” from “Notions” which “external Objects occasion” people must teach their mind to “tast those delights which arise from a Reflection on it self”. Women must, Astell professes, “busy themselves in a serious enquiry after necessary and perfective truths”—not those they learn from the corporeal, but those they understand after sharpening their God-given reason (SP I 29, 22). The overriding theological perspective that permeates both Astell’s early theistic writings and her works on education paradoxically serves to inform her feminist declarations in these pieces. She conflates theological 19

Eileen O’Neill, “Mary Astell on the Causation of Sensation”, Kolbrener and Michelson, 145-64. 20 Taylor, “Are You Experienced?: Astell, Locke, and Education”, Kolbrener and Michelson, 181-92.

The Canonized Mary Astell

213

and educational concerns with her firm conviction that the “great business” of humanity in this world which women must be trained to “attend” to is “the service of GOD and improvement of their own Minds” (SP I 18). To her, the latter is a prerequisite for the former. In order to effectively learn the “necessary and perfective truths” that women must “busy themselves” with, of course, they must have the means with which to be educated. The need to promote the development of women’s minds and teach them “properly” is the driving force behind Astell’s first published, tangibly feminist, and arguably most widely studied text, A Serious Proposal; we chose contributions to our edition that consider this treatise not only in relation to Astell’s other works but in conjunction with writings in interrelated contemporary milieu. Feminists have tended to look at Astell’s writings on education independent of their historical background—invoking them somewhat uncritically as models for contemporary arguments in favor of gender egalitarian educational opportunities. We wanted to place Astell’s theories in their authentic contexts, and so sought research which would address both the practical and theoretical sources of Astell’s educational innovations. We thus solicited two essays, one on contemporary frameworks for education, and one on Astell’s work in relation to Anglican conceptions of piety and moral training. The subject of women’s education was popular in the seventeenth century, and with her 1694 publication Astell joins the coterie of such women as Bathsua Makin, Hannah Wolley, and Judith Drake. Makin deplores “the barbarous custom to breed women low” in An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673) and Wolley declares that “we are debarred from the knowledg of humane learning, lest our pregnant Wits should rival to wring conceits of our insulting Lords and Masters” in The Gentlewoman’s Companion, Or, A Guide to the Female Sex (1675).21 Drake likewise bemoans “the advantages Men have over us by their Education” in An Essay in Defense of the Female Sex (1696).22 We thus determined that discussion of Astell’s Serious Proposal would figure centrally in our volume in order to bring together her commitments to education and her feminism. Astell’s Proposal aims to correct the wrongs her predecessors articulate by reforming women’s educational 21

Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, in Religion, Manners, Arts & Tongues, with An Answer to the Objections against this Way of Education (London: J.D., 1673), 1; Hannah Wolley, The Gentlewoman’s Companion, Or, A Guide to the Female Sex (1675), 3. 22 Judith Drake, An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (London, 1696), 3, 6, 20. See Perry, 111.

214

Chapter Eleven

opportunities with the establishment of a “Religious Retirement” that will also be an academic institution where the residents will be able to improve not only their souls but also their “immortal Mind[s]”. Reflecting both her spiritual and feminist convictions, Astell’s ideal female community will comprise, in her eyes, “a Type and Antepast of Heav’n” where women’s “Employment” will be “to magnify GOD, to love one another, and to communicate that useful knowledge” (SP I 20). The numerous editions of her Proposal sold well, and its prominence in the public eye is evidenced by the plethora of works that commended, parodied, were inspired by, or outright plagiarized it. Praised by John Evelyn in his Numismata: A Discourse of Medals, Antient and Modern (1697), Serious Proposal was emulated by Daniel Defoe in his Essay upon Projects (1697), where he expressed his “great Esteem” for the book. George Wheler acknowledged it in A Protestant Monastery (1698) and the publisher John Dunton advertised it widely. It is cited as the model for Samuel Richardson’s educational plan in Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54) as well as Sarah Scott’s in A Description of Millenium Hall (1762). Richard Steele “incorporated over a hundred pages of it in his The Ladies Library (1714) without ever acknowledging the theft”.23 Associates of Astell whose ensuing tracts are indebted to her plan include Lady Mary Chuldeigh, who acknowledges Astell as her inspiration for The Ladies Defence: or, The Bride-Woman's Counsellor Answer'd (1701) and Lady Mary Montagu, who defends women’s rationality on Astell’s model in her fortnightly paper The Nonsense of Common Sense (1737). Astell’s Proposal has received much modern critical attention as well, studied mainly in the context of early modern programs for women’s education, feminist utopian writings, or as a precursor of modern women’s colleges. We wanted the text be examined as part of an as-yet unconsidered framework, the widespread late seventeenth century English preoccupation with piety, manners, and moral reform. Numerous organizations were launched for the reformation of manners at this time, such as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, established in 1698, whose work included establishing charity schools. These groups reflect a fervent cultural impulse for promoting Christian ethics and specifically Anglican doctrines; Hannah Smith’s contribution to our edition shows that Astell is part of this tradition.24 Astell’s Anglican intentions are evident, Smith notes, in the liturgical and devotional 23

Cited in Perry, 100. Hannah Smith, “Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), and the Anglican Reformation of Manners in Late-Seventeenth-Century England”, Kolbrener and Michelson, 31-48. 24

The Canonized Mary Astell

215

practices outlined in the proposed syllabus, and her work parallels those by Anglican polemicists such as Richard Allestree’s The Ladies Calling (1660), Edward Chamberlayne’s An Academy or Colledge: Wherein Young Ladies and Gentlewomen May at a Very Moderate Expense be Duly Instructed in the True Protestant Religion (1671), Clement Barksdale’s A Letter Touching a Colledge of Maids or, a Virgin-Society (1675), and Hickes’s sermons (1684). These texts were precedent to and tentatively editorial influences on Astell as she composed her own, though in her Proposal Astell mentions only being “extremely pleas’d” to read William Wotton’s Reflections upon Antient and Modern Learning (1694), “whose Book” supports the idea of “a Learned Education of the Women” (SP I 22). Astell’s program for a sisterhood of “pious and prudent” students who after diligent study will go out into society to set an example, preach their faith, reform their peers in the drawing room, and educate their children in the nursery, is in keeping with these Anglican writings of the times, Smith notes (SP I 73). She conjectures that the negative treatment it received at the hands of such as Gilbert Burnet, purported to have dissuaded a “great lady” who had been willing to donate funds for the college’s establishment to desist, and Steele, who satirized its author twice in The Tatler in 1709, was due to political enmity engendered by Astell’s subsequent attacks against the practice of occasional conformity. Whigs, Smith writes, were more wary of the establishment of a breeding ground for female High Church zealots run by a “Tory pugilist” than they were disapproving of the pious principles or educational program of the seminary itself.25 Here again, we show that Astell’s politics and feminism intertwine, and that her feminist interventions were fully implicated in the political conversations of the time. Ridicule by Whig wits did not phase Astell, but the project’s ideal of withdrawal from the world and its overt religiosity conjured up connections to Catholicism that were politically volatile, which contributed to its failure to come to fruition. In the face of this opposition she was prompted to write Part II as an alternative “Perswasive to the LADIES” in order to guide them in an independent program of study (SP II 71). In this sequel Astell outlines a summary of the formal rules of thinking based on her understanding of Descartes’s Les Principes de la Philosophie and Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole’s 1662 L’Art de Penser (also known as Port Royal Logic). She details the nature of human cognition in such a way as to link the improvement of women’s rational 25

Smith, 47.

216

Chapter Eleven

faculties with practical action that will lead to their religious salvation, “modifying” or “editing” philosophical works by famous male predecessors for her own purposes. Situating Astell’s plan for women’s education in relation to previous and subsequent philosophers would, we determined, necessarily entail placing her in conversation with Christian thinkers’ configurations of desire and virtue. Corrine Harol does so by discussing Astell’s project in the context of revived Anglican teachings of the concept of “laws written in the heart”.26 Astell’s alignment of desire with morality, Harol writes, imagines a positive role for human aspiration that links her not only to recent Cambridge Platonist thought supportive of this ideal but also to Pauline and Thomist beliefs. These early Christians followed the biblical dictate that “the requirements of the Law are written on their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness” (Romans 2:15), and consequently held the conviction that knowledge of proper ethics is not restricted to those learned in scriptural precepts. Cognizance of righteousness, that is, is accessible to all and “the authentic desire of reasonable human beings” according to these theologians and Astell, Harol posits (96). Astell asserts that “Morality is so consonant to the Nature of Man” and “so adapted to his Happiness” that even in our postlapsarian state of sin the “Natural Motion of the Will” towards “God as its only Good…must needs be unspeakably delightful to it” (SP II 97, 98). Women’s education must be directed towards this natural, moral, and “delightful” goal. By demonstrating the congruity between Astell’s gender, theological, and educational perspectives, Harol’s piece contributes to our volume’s goal of revealing the complicated yet sustaining interplay between Astell’s feminism and her religious and educationist convictions, Though Astell was centrally concerned with the spiritual and ethical state of her society, and specifically her sister souls, she was acutely aware of her cultural environs, and her next track deals with overtly social and political issues. We saw these as perhaps the most important of the contexts our volume should address, and so we solicited essays which would deal with the complexities of Astell’s political commitments: how they fit in the contemporary contexts of Whig and Tory politics, legal discourses, and early modern liberalism. Our edition deals next with the first of Astell’s tracts that refer explicitly to these matters. Astell wrote Some Reflections upon Marriage in 1700 in response to the publicized proceedings of the scandal surrounding the alleged 26 See Corrinne Harol, “Mary Astell’s Law of the Heart”, Kolbrener and Michelson, 87-98.

The Canonized Mary Astell

217

behaviour of her neighbor Hortense Mancini Mazarin after fleeing an abusive arranged marriage to a tyrannical, mad husband. Unlike Milton’s precedent The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), this tract does not defend divorce—marriage being a consecrated religious sacrament that Astell unequivocally supports—but rather critiques the legal and cultural norms disadvantageous to women that epitomize the institution in her age. She likewise disavows here the pervasive analogy drawn between the marriage and social contracts, the famous homology agreement upon which early modern dissidents such as Milton and defendants of natural rights such as Hobbes and Locke depended. Her tract is not only a critical analysis of contemporary courtship and marriage practices, then, but an indictment of contractarianism and the grounds upon which emergent liberal politics were based. It is her critique of Whig and radical politics, her Toryism, Hilda L. Smith’s contribution to our edition reveals, that facilitates Astell’s feminist arguments; feminist and political discourses thus overlap and help constitute one another.27 In contrast to the sectarian movements which argued for a “liberty and equality” in the politic while supporting the “power relations of a patriarchal society”, Astell’s “outsider” analysis of the dynamics of liberal “universalism” enables her to unveil the limitations of her political opponents’ ostensibly progressive program (202). Hilda Smith’s readings of Serious Proposal and Some Reflections show how Astell’s royalism allows her to more clearly see the inequitable relations in the early modern family. “How much soever Arbitrary Power may be dislik’d on a Throne”, she cynically proclaims, “not Milton himself wou’d cry up Liberty to poor Female Slaves, or plead for the Lawfulness of Resisting a Private Tyranny” (SRM 46-47). Astell deems the exclusion of women from considerations of human rights sheer hypocrisy, and the idea that individuals have rights rather than responsibilities in a universe run by God simply, and gravely, erroneous. She therefore “corrects” dissident and other liberal constructions of obedience and liberty with this treatise. In this reading, it is in relation to contemporary discussions of power, agency, and sovereignty that the particular contours of Astell’s conceptions of gender come into focus. Those conceptions of gender were informed not only by explicitly political discourses but also by the languages of law. We thus sought a chapter for the volume that would address the particular interplay between Astell’s feminine politics and contemporary legal discourses. Do slaves, 27 Hilda L. Smith, “‘Cry up Liberty’: The Political Context for Mary Astell’s Feminism”, Kolbrener and Michelson, 193-204.

218

Chapter Eleven

or wives, have rights? Not according to current law, and thus necessarily not in Astell’s estimation, Ann Jesse Van Sant declares.28 Van Sant calls attention to Astell’s conception of “Arbitrary Power” in relation to law, equity, and women’s property rights as they existed before the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882. In her explication of Astell’s position with regard to current jurisprudence, Van Sant notes that Astell prioritizes following the letter of the law over compromising set edicts to provide more equitable solutions. Astell, she writes, aligns herself with the ancient custom of law as against exceptionality of equity, since flexibility, even that evidenced by a Christian “new dispensation” or “the King’s ‘grace’”, though ameliorative, represents in her mind disorder and disobedience to divine authority (132). Discriminatory they may be, but contemporary marriage laws decree that “Covenants betwixt Husband and Wife, like Laws in an Arbitrary Government, are of little Force, the Will of the Sovereign is all in all” and Astell adamantly upholds the “Will of the Sovereign” (SRM 52). The solution Astell advises for a woman unable to accept the absolute rule of a husband (understandably, in her eyes) is not to marry at all. Though Astell’s Some Reflections elaborates multiple injustices of present marriage laws and customs, she does not accept any remedy except that of an otherworldly nature. Convinced of the inherent equality of both genders’ minds and souls and of their subsequent obligation to develop their rational capacities in pursuit of divine truth, Astell is equally adamant about their necessary subservience not only to godly but to ecclesiastical and political rulings. Astell’s most direct political involvement came in her participation in a set of pamphlet wars of the first decade of the eighteenth century. Through these little known tracts, her conceptions of gender continue to be defined and refined. To fully understand the nature of such refinement we provide here some contextual background. A 1702 parliamentary bill proposed to end the dispensation of the Toleration Act of 1689 that allowed Dissenters who attended one Anglican service a year to hold governmental office, and public debate concerning its passage was heated. Astell’s three 1704 publications, possibly commissioned by her publisher Wilkin, specifically support Anglican preeminence and the authority of the monarchy, and thus the repeal of this Act “tolerating” sectarian pretense of allegiance to the state church. Two of Astell’s pamphlets contributed to the political turmoil surrounding the campaign for a bill against occasional conformity, Moderation Truly Stated and A Fair Way with the Dissenters; 28 Ann Jesse Van Sant, “’Tis better that I endure;: Mary Astell’s Exclusion of Equity”, Kolbrener and Michelson, 127-144.

The Canonized Mary Astell

219

the third, An Impartial Enquiry, was a panegyric to Charles I. Astell’s skill as a polemicist and moderate voice—as a balance to those of the Tory extremists Henry Sacheverell and Charles Leslie—was needed to counter liberal opposition. Her tracts are clearly meant as editorial “corrections” to those of her political rivals and efforts to “modify” public and parliamentary opinions. Astell wrote Moderation truly Stated: Or a Review of a Late Pamphlet, Entitul’d Moderation a Virtue, or, The Occasional Conformist Justified from the Imputation of Hypocrisy in refutation of the nonconformist minister James Owen’s moderate, reasonable (and therefore more threatening) tract Moderation A Vertue (1703) in favor of occasional conformity.29 Prior to publication she added a “prefatory Discourse” to Charles D’Avenant, a Tory pamphleteer whose equivocating stance in a commissioned bipartisan article, Essays Upon Peace at Home and War Abroad (1704) she—as others—saw as a betrayal of his party. Her premise in Moderation Truly Stated is that the term “moderation” as used by Whigs denotes a compromise of values, and is used by them hypocritically for self-aggrandizement. Conflating religious and political registers, she writes that “to be Moderate in Religion is the same thing as to be Luke-warm” or “Indifferent” in order to “strengthen your Party and procure you Profit and Power”.30 She goes on to cite numerous biblical passages in which practices of “moderation” and “occasional conformity” are revealed to be contrary to the necessary “Obedience, Order, and Uniformity” that the true Christian church requires (MTS 13). Her satire and exposé of Owen was widely read, and drew replies from Defoe, Leslie, and Owen himself.31 Her lively rebuttal to D’Avenant, which attacked not only the inconsistencies in and expediency of his argument 29

Owen’s tract was attacked by Daniel Defoe and Charles Leslie as well as Astell. For an overview of the influence of her political perspective in her writings, see William Kolbrener, “‘Forc’d into an Interest’: High Church Politics and Feminine Agency in the Works of Mary Astell”, 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 10 (2004): 3–31. 30 [Mary Astell], Moderation truly Stated: or, a Review of a Late pamphlet, Entitul’d Moderation a Vertue. With a Prefatory Discourse to Dr. D’Aveanant, Concerning His late Essay on Peace and War (London: Wilkin, MDCCIV), 5, 11. Hereafter cited parenthetically as MTS. 31 Owen’s Moderation Still a Vertue in Answer to Several Bitter Pamphlets: Especially Two Entituled “ Occasional Conformity a most Unjustifiable Practice” and “The Wolf Stripp’d of his Shepherd’s Clothing” (1704) called Astell a “Verbose and Virulent Author”. She replied in a postscript to her A Fair Way that she was only “answering the Dissenters Arguments against Schism and Toleration in their own Words” (quoted in Perry, 203, 207).

220

Chapter Eleven

but the wrongness of the premise upon which it was based, was likewise well received. The concept of a “State of Nature” that D’Avenant promotes, Astell writes, is a “meer figment of Hobb’s Brain, or borrow’d at least from the Fable of Cadmus, or Aeacus his Myrmidons”. She herself, she writes, had “hitherto thought that according to Moses, we were all of Adam’s Race”—thus equating D’Avenant and Whig politics with pagan mythology and the atheism that was attributed to Hobbes and aligning her stance with Christian scripture (MTS xxxv). Citing selections from Plato’s Republic, Machiavelli’s Discourses, Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, and Hobbes’s Leviathan, Astell “edits” these key political theorists as she refutes occasional conformity and promulgates a Tory politic based on order, tradition, and virtue. What comes through these various discussions and allegiances is that Astell maintained, by our own contemporary lights, paradoxical commitments: she combined her feminist objectives with strongly conservative political and religious ideals. We solicited a piece by Mark Goldie to show the ways in which Astell’s identity was forged through her opposition to nonconformist doctrines. Goldie discusses Moderation Truly Stated as an assault upon Dissenter and Whig misuse of liberty and identifies Astell’s targets as the Civil War rebels who acted as if “any exertion of brute force, any successful human exigency, might be deemed God’s work”—something Astell bitterly opposes (77). Her preface embodies what he calls “Machiavellian Toryism”, and he identifies her preoccupation with “virtue, frugality, counsel, and faction” rather than “rights and liberties” as an example of “Spartan virtue and Roman Stoicism” (77). These same traditional priorities are what make her antagonistic to Protestant sectarians and Whig politicians alike. In this work she allegorizes proponents of dissent and “Liberty of Conscience” as the “Goodlier Person” who “uses a little Art, goes Finer, has better Address and more plausible Eloquence” than “Religion”. True “Religion”, for Astell, is synonymous with the Church of England, which she personifies as a “Plain, Honest Matron”—much like herself (MTS xli). As an Anglican, a Tory, and a feminist, she saw the limitations—from religious, political, and gender perspectives—of the dissenting and liberals’ ostensibly progressive programs, and spoke out against them on all fronts. The debate, as Astell notes in her Fair Way with the Dissenters, is not new. For “Tho names of contempt have been often changed on either side as Cavalier and Roundhead, Royalist and Rebels, Malignants and Phanaticks, Torys and Whigs, yet the Division has always been barely the Church and the Dissenter, and there it continues to this Day” as these

The Canonized Mary Astell

221

“Petitioners and Legions” continue “to corrupt the People and fire the Mob.”32 Astell sees no difference between those who have fomented the current turmoil and those who rejected “Royal Authority” in the “Bloody Civil War” (FW 99). In order to erase denominational difference and return England to obedience to the Anglican traditions, she declares the necessity to “extirpate and destroy Dissention” in this pamphlet (FW 3; 131). We thought it important to publish research showing how Astell draws a strong correlation between theological, political, and gender registers with her declarations that obedience is not only an obligatory religious principle but mandatory in the national and marital domains as well. “Freedom” is dangerous in her eyes, other than the freedom to rationally choose to follow God’s commandments as put forth by the Church of England, a choice Astell cannot imagine any person of reason opting to forgo. Van Sant points to Astell’s analogous calls to obedience on gender and political fronts in the name of order. “If usurping all Royal Authority and maintaining a Bloody Civil War against their Sovereign” are considered by the Dissenters “Lawful Means”, then once they begin their “gradual Steps in suppressing what they called Tyranny” we will soon, Astell assures her readers, “catch them upon the first Round of the Ladder” on their way to become “Tyrants” themselves (FW 11). In her eyes the monarchy, epitomized by the rule of Charles I, is the ineluctable and divinely sanctioned form of government. Thus, when Dr. White Kennett’s sermon commemorating the martyrdom of Charles was attacked for idealizing the king, it provided Astell with a somewhat paradoxical opportunity to commend and corroborate the words of a learned Whig divine. Her An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in this Kingdom is a royalist manifesto that strengthens White’s tepid representation of Charles’s piety and pronounces the nonconformists’ culpability for the Civil War. She rails against those “Factious Men…equally ruinous to Prince and People, who effectually destroy the Liberties of the Subject under pretence of defending them”. “They Bribe, they Threaten, they Solicit, they Fawn, they Dissemble, they Lye, they break through all the Duties of Society” as they “violate all the Laws of GOD and Man”, she declares.33 She provides a list of resisters to royal authority, including “a Buchanan, a Milton, or any of those Mercenary Scribblers whom all sober Men condemn”; when invoking “the Privileges of either House” these 32

Astell, A Fair Way in Political Writings, 109, 112, 111. Hereafter cited parenthetically as FW. 33 Astell, An Impartial Enquiry in Political Writings, 138, 139. Hereafter cited parenthetically as IE.

222

Chapter Eleven

men “mean such exorbitant Power as may enable them to Tyrannize over their Fellow Subjects, nay over their very Sovereign” (IE 163, 195). Astell objected fervently to “tyranny” by “Factious Men”; in our edition we brought attention to the interplay between her political and gender convictions in order to demonstrate the complexities of her feminist commitments. In order to “Correct some Abuses” of detractors who alleged that her pro-woman and political arguments in Some Reflections were “not agreeable to scripture” Astell added a preface to the 1706 edition (SRM 7, 14). Here she denounces the theoretical basis of the social contract of Whig theorists and presents an extensive array of prominent women in scripture to illustrate divine sanction for feminine rationality and historical and political prominence; this text explicitly lends itself to interpretation according to the multi-faceted model of Astell that we developed in our collection. Her pithy rallying call, “If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves?”, with its anachronistically modern feminist ring, has, Sharon Achinstein’s essay argues, explicitly misogynist and political targets: the patriarchal monarchist Robert Filmer and contract theorists such as Locke.34 Astell claims, contra Filmer, that inequalities between the genders are not divine command but merely historical custom and prejudice; her stand contra proponents of natural rights is that such liberties are fictitious—the italicized sections in her text are quotations from Locke’s Two Treatises that she “corrects”. “The Relation between the two Sexes is mutual, and the Dependence Reciprocal”, Astell declares. “Both of them”, she continues, “Depending intirely upon GOD, and upon Him only” (SRM 13). Achinstein points out the untapped feminist potential of Astell’s theological commitment and political critique: in her eyes, men and women are equal, not as autonomous beings “born free”, but in their unconditional reliance upon divine grace. Through this lens Astell is able to challenge the gender bias of the democratic model and the epistemological adequacy of the autonomous self. Her synthesis of independent human reason and submission to absolute Godly authority seems a non-sequitur until we understand how her spiritual proviso supports her political and feminist agendas. Our task as editors, we felt, was to elicit Astell’s seemingly contradictory schemas in order to educe an authentic portrait of her as a woman author and “editor” in the early modern era. The “Abuses” Astell suffered in reaction to her Some Reflections were 34 Sharon Achinstein,”Mary Astell, Religion, and feministm: Texts in Motion”, Kolbrener and Michelson, 17-30.

The Canonized Mary Astell

223

emblematic of contemporary male Whig wits’—and subsequent history’s—rejection of her propositions and consignment of her writings to oblivion. In an analogous response to her Proposal Astell was lampooned as being overly intellectual, devout, and isolated from society in Swift’s Tatler 32, where she is parodied as “Madonella, a Lady who had writ a fine Book concerning the Recluse Life” for an “Assembly of Nuns”. Swift proposes that the “Rake” and “His Friends” will visit the grounds, after which he knowingly predicts that as a result of that visit all will be “a Mother or Father that Day Twelvemonth”.35 A later edition of this periodical ridicules the perceived inappropriateness of her “College for young Damsels”, where “instead of Scissors, Needles, and Samplers”, the appropriate tools for ladies’ learning in the author’s mind, “Pens, Compasses, Quadrants, Books, Manuscripts, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew” are the instruments of study, and the unladylike “Damsels” even learn “Ancient and Modern Amazonian Tacticks”. The unfortunate consequence of such unsuitable instruction, he predicts, will bring “many Persons of both Sexes to an untimely Fate”.36 “Mr. Tatler” did not take Astell’s pro-woman convictions seriously, nor did he grant legitimacy to her theological, educational, or political principles. Our volume shows not only the seriousness of her feminist ethics, but also of her manifold other convictions, and how these various commitments are intertwined and mutually supporting. Editing early modern women entails not only studying their material manuscripts and rhetoric but searching out the contexts within which they were writing and the topics they strove to address. As Quentin Skinner points out, “texts are concerned with their own questions, and not with ours”, and interpretation of figures such as Astell must focus upon the questions to which she responds rather than our twenty-first century issues.37 Swift’s facetious rejoinder to and dismissal of Astell’s writings about her most deeply-felt tenets foreshadow her later critics and her subsequent oblivion. Astell’s critical reception has until recently been informed by a 35 Swift is most likely the author of said articles, though Astell herself believed it to be Steele, who explicitly denied authorship. The pieces express sentiments in accordance with Swift’s well-known disapproval of abstract schemes separated from the rest of society and his “extremely complex” view of women that included a “sneering condescension towards their intellectual ambitions”. See Perry, 23031; 516-17, n. 81-83. 36 The Tatler, vol. 1, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1987), 239, 240, 241; 439, 440. 37 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 88.

224

Chapter Eleven

historiographical tradition that “dreads to Engage her”, as our introduction, quoting Atterbury’s reaction to Astell, outlines. Atterbury’s response to Bishop Smalridge after receiving her critique of his sermon is characteristic of his contemporaries. “There is not an expression that carries the least air of her sex from the beginning to the end” of her “sheet of remarks”, he writes. She “attacks” in “not the most decent manner” but rather one “a little offensive and shocking” so that he “dread[s] to engage her”.38 Astell did not, according to Atterbury, reveal “good breeding” or the “civil” manner that “her sex is always mistress of” just as she does not fit neatly into the paradigm of a modern feminist today. Our edition provides a forum for contemporary and modern engagement with Astell, revealing an early modern women writer who is not Virginia Woolf’s “lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers”.39 On the contrary, Astell was busy engaging with issues and writers of her time, “editing” and being edited by them in an interchange of ideas that is now being revived in her modern reception.

Works Cited Primary Sources Astell, Mary. Astell: Political Writings. Ed. Patricia Springborg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. —. Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poet 154, fols. 50–97. —. The Christian Religion, As Profess’d by a Daughter Of The Church of England. London: Printed by W.B. for R. Wilkin, 1717. —. Moderation Truly Stated: Or, A Review Of A Late Pamphlet Entitul’d,Moderation a Vertue. With a Prefatory Discourse to Dr. D’Aveanant ConcerningHis late Essays on Peace and War. London, 1704. —. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I & II. Ed. Patricia Springborg. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1997. [Astell, Mary and] John Norris. Letters Concerning the Love of God, Betweenthe Author of the Proposal to the Ladies and Mr. John Norris: Wherein his late Discourse, shewing That it ought to be Intire and Exclusive of All Other Loves, is Further Cleared and Justified. 38

Ballard, 453. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (NY: Harcourt, Brace & CO., 1929), 113. 39

The Canonized Mary Astell

225

London: J. Norris, 1695. —. Letters Concerning the Love of God. Eds. Derek E. Taylor and Melvyn New. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Bond, Donald (ed.). The Tatler. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Drake, Judith. An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex. London, 1696. Makin, Bathsua, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, in Religion, Manners, Arts & Tongues,with An Answer to the Objections against this Way of Education. London: J.D., 1673. [Masham, Damaris]. Discourse Concerning the Love of God. London: Printed for Awnsham and John Churchil, at the Black-Swan, 1696. Wooley, Hannah. The Gentlewoman’s Companion, Or, A Guide to the Female Sex. London,1675.

Secondary Sources Kolbrener, William and Michal Michelson, eds. Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Writing Women in Jacoban England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Looser, Devoney. British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000. New, Elisa. “Feminist Invisibility: The Examples of Anne Bradstreet and Anne Hutchinson”. Common Knowledge 2.1 (1993). Perry, Ruth. The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Skinner, Quentin. Visions of Politics. Vol. 1, Regarding Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace & CO., 1929.

CHAPTER TWELVE “BY NO MEANS IN A LIBERAL STYLE:” MARY MORRIS KNOWLES VERSUS JAMES BOSWELL JUDITH JENNINGS

Introduction: Texts and Contexts Uncovering the literary history of works by women is essential to current textual scholarship. In a series of significant books beginning with Writing Women’s Literary History, feminist scholar Margaret Ezell demonstrates the value of fusing historical and literary analysis in the recovery, assessment, and contextualization of women’s texts.1 In her influential essay, Josephine Roberts underscores the importance of continued investigation of texts produced by women, including edited writings and previously unknown manuscripts and publications.2 Reuniting women’s texts and contexts offers new insights into “the analysis of changes in the materially embodied texts as they were shaped and reshaped by authors, scribes, printers, editors, and publishers,” described by Leah Marcus.3 This essay examines an important case study in textual scholarship, analyzing alternative accounts presented by Mary Morris Knowles and James Boswell of a contested dialogue in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. The study is an analysis, as described by Marcus, of “the specific 1

Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore, MD, 1993); Ezell and Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning (Ann Arbor, MI, 1994; Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore, MD, 1999). 2 Josephine A. Roberts, “Editing the Women Writers of Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Studies 24 (1996): 63-71 3 Leah Marcus, “Textual Scholarship,” in David G. Nicholls (ed.), Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, 3rd edn. (New York, 2007), pp. 43-59

228

Chapter Twelve

forms” in which “an important written text” reached readers.4 The study also carries forward the kind of investigation called for by Roberts into the discovery and recovery of manuscript and printed texts by a woman, well known in her time. Finally, the study employs the literary history approach so productively used by Ezell, based on the premise that historical contexts are essential to understanding women writers and their textual agency. The story of the origins of Mary Morris Knowles’s text, her struggle for editorial control of the public account of her own words, the reception of her text by contemporary readers, and its marginalization by the canonization of Boswell’s Life raises important questions not only about literary production in the eighteenth century but also about editorial practices in the two centuries since. What role does gender play in the power relationships involved in literary production, editing, and canon formation? How has “gendered reading,” as Gary Waller describes the ways he as a “male critic reads the text of a woman writer,” influenced canon formation? 5 Has the focus on the textual stability of works by male writers, like Boswell, masked the textual agency of women writers, like Knowles? This essay provides essential historical context concerning the life and accomplishments of Mary Morris Knowles and her friendship with Jane Harry, a young Jamaican-born woman living in England. Knowles’s disputed dialogue with Samuel Johnson concerning Harry is presented from her point of view as well as Boswell’s. The essay examines Knowles’s private and public contests with Boswell for editorial control of the disputed dialogue. It ends with the canonization of Boswell’s account in the nineteenth century, continuing to the present, and explores the value of Knowles’s text for current textual scholarship.

Early Life of Mary Morris Knowles Born in Rugeley, Staffordshire, in 1733, Mary Morris grew up in a prosperous and long-established Quaker family. Family memoirs describe how her ancestors became Quakers and suffered for their beliefs during the religious unrest of the seventeenth century. In the early 1700s, after the establishment of limited religious toleration, her grandparents settled in Rugeley. Her grandfather became a successful surgeon, while her 4

Ibid., 43. Gary Waller, “The Countess of Pembroke and Gendered Reading,” in Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty Travitsky (eds.), The Renaissance English Women in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon (Amherst, 1990) pp. 327-346 5

“By No Means In A Liberal Style”

229

grandmother sought to reconcile their increasing prosperity with Quaker principles of simplicity. Morris, well schooled in her religion, studied the Bible, especially the New Testament, and became thoroughly familiar with Robert Barclay’s definitive text, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity, as the same is held forth and preached by the people called in scorn Quakers. Yet she also read secular texts, including poetry, classical literature in translation, current scientific theories, and The Tatler, still popular among polite young women and men. Moreover, she wrote a fine hand, excelled in painting and drawing, understood botany, and knew French.6 Unlike some other Quakers, she did not confine her friendships to her co-religionists. As a young woman, she formed a long lasting link with Anna Seward, the only daughter of the Canon of Lichfield Cathedral. Seward later became a popular poet and well-known literary lady. In her posthumously published letters, Seward reported that, in her youth, Morris “was stiled the beauty of Staffordshire.”7 Unmarried at age 32 after refusing two proposals, Morris demonstrated her knowledge of print literature, participation in manuscript culture, and sharp sense of humor. While writing a long letter to a favorite pair of cousins, she penned a brief satiric autobiography in the mode of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. In their facetious Memoirs of P. P. Clerk of this Parish, Pope and Swift satirized Tory High Church politics in the early eighteenth century. “In emulation of this eminent character,” Morris wrote, “I introduce the Memoirs of M. M., spinster of this parish.” Furthermore, she claimed to be writing as none other than the younger sister of “the celebrated Martinus Scriblerus,” the collective pen name used by John Arbuthnot, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Thomas Parnell, and Robert Harley, the Earl of Oxford. By presenting herself as the sister of Scriblerus, Morris grafted the issue of female self-representation onto the male-dominated satires of Pope and his friends. Despite misgivings about art voiced by some contemporary Quakers. Morris announced that, “my employment is working in divers colours, and fine-twined woolen, and it is work of curious devices, and of exquisite cunning in the art of the needle.”8 In her autobiography, Morris practiced the kind of self-representation identified

6 Judith Jennings, Gender, Religion, and Radicalism in the Long Eighteenth Century: An ‘Ingenious Quaker’ and her Connections, (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 7-11. 7 Letters of Anna Seward, 6 vols, (Edinburgh, 1811), vol. 1, p. 46. 8 London, Library of the Religious Society of Friends, Temporary MSS 403 [Braithwaite Papers], Box 7, Packet 15, File 3, Letter 43.

230

Chapter Twelve

by feminist scholar Eileen Janes Yeo as a radical act for women.9 While Morris enclosed her memoirs in a letter to her cousins, the existence of a second copy indicates that this manuscript became a social text, read, copied, and circulated by the recipients and/or the author. Moreover, because she used literary language and secular examples, Morris may have intended her memoirs to be read by friends, like Anna Seward perhaps, beyond Quaker circles. As a social text, her memoirs served an intermediate function between public and private10 and can be considered a form of “scribal publication,” which remained an important avenue for women writers even as print became more accessible.11 In 1767, at age 34, Mary Morris wed Thomas Knowles, an apothecary. As a wife, she expressed deep affection for her husband but struggled to balance female friendship, reading, and letter writing with the demands of domesticity. By 1769, she and her husband relocated to Birmingham. While living there, she changed her life and his through her art. According to a later account in a popular women’s magazine, in 1771 Mary Knowles’s “perfection” in needlework “procured an introduction to the Queen.”12 The queen asked if Knowles could create a needlework copy, or needle painting, of a recent portrait of George III by Johann Zoffany. Needle painting was just then emerging as a new art form. Knowles agreed to undertake the needle painting, “though,” according to a later source, “she had never seen anything of the kind.”13 Knowles completed her needlework portrait of King George to the great satisfaction of the royal couple. According to James Boswell, “the Queen made her a present of £800 but said her work was invaluable.”14 This needle painting made Mary a celebrity, and the queen’s gift enabled Thomas to become a physician. The couple used the money to pay for Thomas to study medicine in Edinburgh. Then, they both traveled to Leiden, where he earned his degree 9

Eileen Janes Yeo, (ed.), Radical Femininity: Women’s Self-Representation in the Public Sphere (Manchester, 1998) pp. 1–10. 10 Ezell, Social Authorship, pp. 25–45. 11 George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker, (eds,), Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 (New York, 2002). 12 Lady’s Monthly Museum, November 1803: 289. 13 Mrs. [Mary] Pilkington, Memoirs of Celebrated female Characters Who Have Distinguished Themselves By Their Talents and Virtues in Every Age and Nation (London, 1804), pp. 218–9. 14 William Wimsatt, Jr. and Frederick A. Pottle, (eds.), Boswell for the Defense, 1769–1774 (New York, 1959), p. 36.

“By No Means In A Liberal Style”

231

as a “doctor of physic.” After touring Europe, they settled in London. There, Thomas prospered greatly in his new profession, becoming a member of both the venerable Royal College of Physicians and the reform-oriented Medical Society.15 Even before moving to London, Mary had met Edward Dilly, bookseller, Dissenter, and radical Whig. Edward shared his business and home with his younger brother Charles, but the two differed significantly about politics. “My brother is really a good natured and well disposed man,” Charles wrote a friend, “but he is dreadfully contaminated with false ideas in politics.”16 Through her connection with Edward Dilly, Mary met James Boswell. On 19 March 1772, Boswell arrived in London, going directly to the home of the Dilly brothers, publishers of his popular Account of Corsica. Boswell found Charles at home and soon, “in came my friend, Mr. Edward Dilly.” “Along with him was Mrs. Knowles, famous for her needlework,” Boswell continued, noting the amount of the queen’s gift. With a wellpracticed eye for female features, he described Knowles, now nearing 40 and seven years his senior, writing, “She was formerly a distinguished beauty and still looked very well, and was a clever agreeable woman.”17 Knowles shared Edward Dilly’s radical views, including sympathizing with the revolutionaries in the American Colonies. In May 1776, as tensions between Britain and her Colonies reached the breaking point, Edward planned a dinner for some “patriot,” or radical, friends. Boswell later recounted how he persuaded Edward to invite Samuel Johnson and then tricked Johnson into attending. Boswell confessed that he wanted to see Johnson’s reaction when confronted with a roomful of radicals. According to Boswell’s later account, Knowles appeared after dinner at this now famous party. Boswell said Knowles joined the all male gathering in company with William Lee, a London alderman and brother of Arthur Lee, a leading American patriot. Writing years later from sketchy notes, Boswell recorded no conversation by Knowles. Instead, he described how Johnson appeared to admire her bosom.18 Johnson, however, also described his meeting with Knowles, indicating that the two conversed and he admired many things about her. Writing to his friend Hester Thrale the next day, Johnson chuckled over 15

Jennings, Gender, Religion, and Radicalism, pp. 27-44. Lyman Butterfield, “The American Interests in the Firm of E. and C. Dilly, with their letters to Benjamin Rush, 1770–1795,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 45 (1951), pp. 285–6, 292. 17 Wimsatt and Pottle, Boswell for the Defense, p. 36. 18 James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols. (London, 1791), vol. 2, p. 89. 16

232

Chapter Twelve

the unlikely collection of guests, noting, “And there was Mrs. Knowles, the Quaker, that works the sutile pictures.” Johnson used the rare word sutile, meaning stitched, to evoke Knowles’s needle paintings. He further described Knowles as “a Staffordshire woman,” drawing a playful parallel with his own origins. “Staffordshire is the nursery of art,” he observed, “here they grow them up till they are transplanted to London.” Confirming his positive impression, Johnson ended his report by telling Thrale, “I am to go and see her.”19

Mary Morris Knowles and Jane Harry During this time, too, Knowles became closely associated with Jane Harry, a young woman from Kingston, Jamaica. Jane was the elder of two daughters of Thomas Hibbert, a wealthy English slave trader and plantation owner, 20 and Charity Harry, a free Jamaican woman of color. Hibbert and Harry maintained a 24-year relationship, dating from Jane’s birth in 1756. Described as Hibbert’s housekeeper and a “free mulatto,” Charity Harry could read, write, and own property, possessing clothes, furniture, and slaves.21 There is no indication that Hibbert practiced the kind of sexual brutality graphically catalogued by a contemporary plantation overseer in Jamaica.22 Yet the relationship between Thomas Hibbert and Charity Harry nonetheless involved the unequal status of colonizer and colonized. 23 Jane Harry and her younger sister, like other children of affluent planter fathers and Jamaican mothers, were sent to England to be

19

Hester Lynch [Thrale] Piozzi, Letters to and from the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (2 vols, London, 1787). R. W. Chapman (ed.), Letters of Samuel Johnson, 3 vols (Oxford, 1952), vol. 2, p. 131. 20 Joseph J. Green, “Jenny Harry, later Thresher (c. 1756-1784),” Friends Quarterly Examiner (10th Month 1913): 559–82. Joseph J. Green, “Jenny Harry, later Thresher (c. 1756-1784 (concluded),” Friends Quarterly Examiner (1st Month 1914): 43–64. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New York, 1966), pp. 88, 232. 21 London, Colonial Office records, 139/31 (319). 22 Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, 2004). 23 Verene A. Shepherd, “Trade and Exchange in Jamaica in the Period of Slavery,” in Hilary McD Beckles and Verne Shepherd, (eds), Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader (Princeton: Marcus Weiner Publishers. 2000) p. 662.

“By No Means In A Liberal Style”

233

educated.24 Her father placed Jane, probably then in her early teens, under the guardianship of Nathaniel Sprigg, his former slave-trading partner, who had returned to England to enjoy his wealth. Jane’s sister, Margaret, nine years younger, entered a boarding school. As a young Jamaican-born woman living with a wealthy English family, Harry experienced what literary scholar Felicity Nussbaum calls “the politics of complexion.”25 As Sprigg’s ward, she spent time at the fashionable spa town of Cheltenham, where she later described being “introduced … to many acquaintances,” and “entertained and flattered.” She also socialized with distinguished men and women who visited Sprigg at his estate at Barnes, just outside London. There, she formed friendships with both Samuel Johnson and Mary Morris Knowles.26 At the same time, a Hibbert family member later told Harry that her father was “uneasy that you would be held up to the World as his Child and publicly known.” The family member added, “the Change of your Name is of itself a sufficient Proof.”27 This perhaps refers to a private bill in the Jamaica House of Assembly, passed on 5 November 1775, which extended to “Charity Harry a free mulatto woman (and any children that she has) … the same rights” and privileges as English subjects.28 While this significantly improved the legal status of Charity Harry and their two daughters, Thomas Hibbert’s name does not appear in connection with the bill, either as a sponsor or in relation to the children. As a leading member of the Assembly, Hibbert’s name is listed as sponsoring similar bills that year, but not this one. Moreover, similar bills usually listed the paternity as well as maternity of the children involved. So while Hibbert privately provided for his family, he took steps to conceal his relationship. While Harry adapted to her new life in England, her sister perished at her boarding school. Deeply affected by her death, Harry experienced serious spiritual soul searching and confided her religious worries to 24

Green, “Jenny Harry, later Thresher (c. 1756-1784).” Green, “Jenny Harry, later Thresher (c. 1756-1784 (concluded).” Trevor Burnard, “’Prodigious riches’: the wealth of Jamaica before the American Revolution.” Economic History Review, LIV, 3 (2001): 515-16. Christine Barrow, Family in the Caribbean: Themes and Perspective (Princeton, 1998), p. 245. 25 Felicity Nussbaum, “Women and race: ‘a difference of complexion,’” in Vivien Jones, (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800 (Cambridge, 2000). 26 Green, “Jenny Harry, later Thresher (c. 1756-1784).” 27 Thomas Hibbert (1744-1819) as quoted in Green, “Jenny Harry, later Thresher (c. 1756-1784 (concluded).” 28 Colonial Office records, 139/31 (319).

234

Chapter Twelve

Knowles, then visiting the Spriggs. Knowles advised her to follow her conscience. After much agonizing, Harry decided to leave the Anglican Church and become a Quaker. When she did so, her guardian banished her from his protection, and her father refused to provide further emotional or financial support.29 Harry went to live for a while with Mary and Thomas Knowles, leading some to suspect that Mary had influenced her change of religion. According to Anna Seward, then visiting her longtime friend, Harry “once came home in tears,” telling Knowles “she had met Dr. Johnson in the street and ventured to ask him how he did; but he would not deign to answer her.” According to Seward, Harry asked Knowles “to plead for me,” knowing she would soon see Johnson at a dinner to be given by Edward and Charles Dilly.30

Mary Morris Knowles versus Samuel Johnson By then, Boswell had embarked on his great enterprise of writing about the life and conversations of Dr. Johnson, making notes in journals as raw material for his biography. Boswell continued to practice “selective narration,” as described by literary scholar John Radner in his study of an earlier journal.31 In his notes on conversations, Boswell often attempted to capture Johnson’s comments in full, but he frequently paraphrased the responses given by others. According to Boswell’s journal, on Wednesday, April 15, 1778, Knowles dined at Dillys’. In addition to their hosts, the company included Boswell, Johnson, two learned men, and Knowles’s houseguest, Anna Seward. According to Boswell, early in the conversation Knowles “complained that men had much more liberty allowed them than women.” Boswell noted that Knowles and Johnson sparred over this topic. Johnson argued that, “women have all the liberty they should wish to have.” Unconvinced, “Mrs. Knowles still insisted as a hardship that less indulgence was given to women than to men, and hoped in another world

29

Green, “Jenny Harry, later Thresher (c. 1756-1784).” London, Library of the Religious Society of Friends, Portfolio MSS 3, 126, “Notes of a Conversation.” 31 John Radner, “Constructing an Adventure and Negotiating for Narrative Control: Johnson and Boswell in the Hebrides,” 59-78 in Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson, (eds.), Literary Couiplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship (Madison, 2006), p. 64. 30

“By No Means In A Liberal Style”

235

the sexes [would be] equal.”32 Perhaps Knowles introduced the subject of women’s liberty in anticipation of pleading for Harry and her decision to become a Quaker. Whatever her motivation, the passage demonstrates her radical commitment to liberty, including women. It also shows her willingness to disagree with Dr. Johnson when she saw an important principle at stake. Later in his journal entry, Boswell noted that, “Mrs. Knowles wished to vindicate herself from the suspicion of having made a proselyte of Miss [Harry], a young lady whom Dr. Johnson knew.” Boswell indicated that Johnson reacted angrily, calling Harry “an odious wench.” According to Boswell, Johnson stated, “‘She could not have any proper conviction that she should change her religion.’” Furthermore, Johnson insisted that, “‘she knew [no] more of the church she left than the difference between the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems.’” Boswell briefly noted Knowles’s answer that Harry “had the New Testament” before her. “Madam,” Boswell said Johnson replied, “she could not understand the New Testament, the most difficult book in the world, for which the study of a life is required.” Undeterred, Knowles “said twas clear as to essentials.” Johnson countered, “But not as to controversial points.” According to Boswell, Johnson warned about the danger “if you err when you choose a religion for yourself.” Boswell said Knowles asked, “were we to go by implicit faith?” Boswell indicated that Johnson ended the conversation by answering decisively, “Why, the greatest part of our knowledge [is] implicit faith. Have we heard all that a disciple of Confucius, all that a Mahometan can say for himself?”33 At the end of his paragraph describing this serious religious exchange, Boswell wrote in his journal, “I loved the mildness of Mrs. Knowles.” He indicated that, “I said I should like to be married to a rich Quaker, to have her in my arms like a lamb.” Boswell did not note whether he said these words aloud or whispered them as an aside. Nor did he record what response, if any, Knowles or others made to his incongruous statement. Continuing his musings, Boswell wrote in his journal, “But it should be a rich one, I’d have a lamb with golden fleece.”34 Given that Boswell had noted on their first meeting that Knowles looked well and that she had received £800 pounds from the queen, he could have been thinking of her as the rich Quaker lamb with the golden fleece. Whomever the object of 32

Charles McC. Weis and Frederick Pottle (eds.), Boswell in Extremes, 1776-1778, (New Haven, 1971), pp. 282-5. 33 Ibid., pp. 288–9. 34 Ibid., p. 289.

236

Chapter Twelve

his thoughts, his journal indicates that he had matters other than religion on his mind at this time. Knowles, too, wrote an account of her dialogue with Johnson. She began by saying that she conveyed Harry’s respects to the Doctor. Like Boswell, Knowles reported that Johnson responded angrily, calling Harry an “odious wench.”35 Yet after that, Knowles’s more detailed account differs significantly from Boswell’s journal entry. Knowles reported that she told Johnson that Harry “had an undoubted right to examine and to change her educational tenets whenever she had found them erroneous; as an accountable creature, it was her duty to do so.”36 Knowles said Johnson scoffed, exclaiming, “Pshaw! Pshaw!–an accountable creature!–girls accountable creatures!” Like Boswell, Knowles said that Johnson became very angry, insisting that Harry “ought not to have presumed to determine for herself in so important an affair.” Evincing the kind of mildness that Boswell professed to love, Knowles said she calmly replied, “True, Doctor, if, as thou seemest to imply, a wench of twenty be not a moral agent.” An increasingly angry Johnson escalated the debate, according to Knowles, by questioning, “whether those deserve that character who turn Quakers.” Stung by “This severe retort,” she said she could only “charitably … hope that thou must be totally unacquainted with the principles of the people against whom thou art so exceedingly prejudiced.” As Knowles patiently explained Quaker principles, she said one participant, later identified by Seward as Boswell, whispered, “I never saw this mighty lion so chafed before.”37 Knowles said she continued the debate and successfully showed Quakers to be Christians. She said Johnson eventually regained his good humor but could not accept the idea of Harry’s moral agency. Knowles reported him as saying, “I cannot forgive that little slut for presuming to take upon herself as she has done.”38

Later Life of Knowles, Death of Harry There is no record that Johnson ever forgave Harry, but she formed new connections. She became a governess to a wealthy Quaker family, cousins of Mary Knowles, in Birmingham. Harry also became engaged to 35

[Knowles], Gentleman’s Magazine (1791): 501–2 Ibid. 37 Ibid.., Portfolio MSS, 3, 126. 38 [Knowles], Gentleman’s Magazine, 1791. 36

“By No Means In A Liberal Style”

237

Joseph Thresher, a young Quaker surgeon in Worcester.39 Knowles continued to create needle paintings and practice selfrepresentation. In 1779, she stitched a self-portrait, depicting herself seated before her embroidery frame, working on her needle painting of the king. This self-portrait provides another example of Knowles’s determination to define how she would be seen by others. In 1780 Jane Harry’s father died in Jamaica, leaving her £2,000 and bequeathing her mother money, a house, and other possessions.40 Perhaps because of her developing Quaker beliefs in the divine spirit present in all, Harry determined to return to Jamaica to convince her mother to free her slaves. Harry could not immediately act on her determination, however, because the warfare between Britain and America made crossing the Atlantic too dangerous.41 Harry stayed in England and married Joseph Thresher, and they settled in Worcester. In summer 1784, she gave birth to a son but became mortally ill. On her deathbed, she asked her husband to pay the premium, if required, to free her mother’s slaves. Jane Harry Thresher died in August 1784, at age 28 or 29. Her child did not long survive her. Her husband, too, died a few years later.42 In September 1784, an obituary for Jane Harry Thresher, probably written by Mary Knowles, appeared in Gentleman’s Magazine, the most popular periodical of the day. The obituary recounted how Jane had vowed to persuade her mother to free her slaves and directed her husband to pay the premium. Although the untimely deaths of both Jane and her husband prevented her from acting, this published obituary stands as an important public declaration in favor of liberty for African slaves, three years before the British abolition campaign officially began.43 Perhaps influenced by Jane, Mary and Thomas Knowles became active advocates for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade. In 1783, Thomas joined in a secret association of six Quaker men dedicated to educating the public about the evils of slave holding and trading. Thomas died in 1784, leaving Mary a wealthy widow. After his death, she contributed to the London Abolition Committee and wrote a poem advocating liberty for

39

E. F. Howard, “Mary Knowles and the Lloyds of Birmingham,” Friends Quarterly Examiner, (1934): 91-2. Samuel Lloyd, Samuel. Some Account of Jenny Harry (privately printed, 1912 40 Green “Jenny Harry, later Thresher (c. 1756-1784 (concluded).” 41 Gentleman’s Magazine (1784): 716. 42 Jennings, Gender, Religion, and Radicalism, pp.87-9. 43 Gentleman’s Magazine, (1784).

Chapter Twelve

238

enslaved Africans.44

Mary Morris Knowles versus James Boswell In the years following her great debate with Johnson, Boswell continued his friendship with Knowles, noting sporadic visits to her in his journals.45 According to Knowles, as he neared completion of his longawaited biography, Boswell called on her to read his account of her debate with Johnson. As John Radner observes, Boswell often showed his journal entries to “special friends.”46 Knowles said she immediately protested that Boswell’s version was incomplete and presented him with her text. Knowles said Boswell suggested that they present their alternative versions to two gentlemen arbitrators. She said she agreed, and they did so. According to Knowles, “one gentleman” responded that hers “was the genuine statement.” He reasoned that, “it was in her own forcible style of language … and it was on the side of probability, that she, thus attacked, should defend her religious principles.” “The other also expressed the same opinion, adding that, with her permission, it should be inserted in the Gentleman’s Magazine.” According to Knowles, Boswell said he would not change his account, despite these opinions, but he agreed not to contest her account if she chose to publish it.47 Boswell’s Life of Johnson appeared in May 1791, published by Charles Dilly. Charles had become sole proprietor of the book business after the early death of his radical brother, Edward. In this two-volume first edition, Boswell devoted ten folio pages in volume two to the dinner that took place on April 15, 1778. Perhaps seeking to mollify Knowles, he added a flattering phrase to his description of her. Listing her first among the guests, he identified her as

44

Judith Jennings, The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade, 1783-1807 (London, 1997). British Library, List of Subscribers to the London Abolition Society, 1788. Jennings, Gender, Religion and Radicalism, p. 105. 45 Joseph Reed and Frederick Pottle, (eds), Boswell: Laird of Auchinleck, 1778– 1782 (New York, 1977), p. 65. Irma S. Lustig. and Frederick A. Pottle, (eds), Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782–1785 (New York, 1981), pp. 138, 288, 293, 302, 326, 337. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle, Boswell: The English Experiment, 1785–1789, (New York, 1986). p. 149. Marlies Danzinger and Frank Brady, (eds.), Boswell: The Great Biographer, 1789-1795 New York, 1989), p. 48. 46 Radner, “Constructing an Adventure and Negotiating for Narrative Control.” 47 Gentleman’s Magazine (July–December 1796): 1,074.

“By No Means In A Liberal Style”

239

“the ingenious Quaker lady.”48 He also described Knowles’s initiation of the subject of Jane Harry more sympathetically than in his journal. He now wrote that Knowles spoke “in the gentlest and most persuasive manner” and “solicited” Johnson’s “kind indulgence” for her friend. Furthermore, he distanced himself from Johnson’s harsh reaction by stating his own opinion that Harry’s decision “was sincerely a matter of conscience.”49 In describing the actual exchange between Knowles and Johnson, however, Boswell ignored the account she had provided. He included none of her defense of Quaker beliefs or Harry’s moral agency. Nor did he include his own statement that he had never seen the mighty literary lion so chafed. He also, understandably, omitted his remarks about holding a rich Quaker in his arms like a lamb with a golden fleece.50 Outraged by Boswell’s presentation of her, Knowles wrote to John Nichols, publisher of Gentleman’s Magazine. She told Nichols she had been “illiberally used” by Boswell. Referring to herself in the formal third person style, she protested that, “many besides Mrs. K. have complained of his fabricated dialogues.” Nichols credited her letter enough to include it in his Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century.51 One month later, in June 1791, Knowles published her account in Gentleman’s Magazine. Insisting on her right of self-representation, Knowles presented her text to the public as an act of defiance, using the language of radical resistance. She described her account as a “Very striking” example of “the mild fortitude of modest Truth … finely contrasted with the boisterous violence of bigoted sophistry.” Such sophistry, she protested, had been too “long accustomed to victory over feigned or slight resistance, and in a certain circle, to timid and implicit submission.”52

48

Weis and Pottle, Boswell in Extremes, p. 282. Boswell, Life of Johnson, vol. 2, p. 223. Anna Seward also wrote an account of the debate in which she described Knowles as “the ingenious Quaker,” Portfolio MSS 3, 126. For a comparison of all three accounts, see Jennings, Gender, Religion, and Radicalism. 49 Weis and Pottle, Boswell in Extremes, p. 288. Boswell, Life of Johnson, vol. 2, p. 231. 50 Weis and Pottle, Boswell in Extremes, pp. 288–9. Boswell, Life of Johnson, vol. 2, pp. 231–2. 51 John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols, (London, 1822), vol. 4, p. 831. 52 Gentleman’s Magazine, (1791).

240

Chapter Twelve

“Mrs. Knowles,” Courtesy of Haverford College Library, Haverford, Pa.m Quaker Collection, number 860.

“By No Means In A Liberal Style”

241

In publishing her account, Knowles openly contested Boswell’s control of the narrative of her debate with Johnson. As Knowles may have known, during his lifetime, Johnson, too, had contested Boswell’s writing about him. As John Radner shows, during and after their trip to the Hebrides both men were “striving to control the trip, the relationship, and the representation of all they experienced.”53 Now, Knowles, like Johnson, strove with Boswell for control of both the private and public narrative of her words. Between July and December 1791, six readers wrote to Gentleman’s Magazine concerning Knowles’s account. Four endorsed her version, while the other two expressed only mild reservations. Moreover, in a letter published in October, Captain Thomas Morris, a well-known Whig writer, acknowledged her triumph over Johnson. Morris addressed her as “the Lady who subdued that ‘Goliath of Literature, Doctor Samuel Johnson.’”54 In September 1791, The Lady’s Magazine published her version as “An Interesting Dialogue between the late Dr. Johnson, and Mrs. Knowles, the Quaker.”55 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman appeared in early 1792; and in March a Lady’s Magazine reader specifically addressed gender in relation to Knowles’s account. The reader asked, “Is it not a matter of astonishment that the ingenious author of the Rambler, should be defeated in argument by a woman?” The reader acknowledged that Johnson’s defeat at first seemed improbable. Yet, as she or he reread Knowles’s account, “the more do I admire the ingenuity, as well as justness, of her replies.”56 As Knowles’s account gained credence, the French Revolution turned more radical. By 1793, as Boswell prepared corrections and additions and began working on a second edition, he regarded radicalism as a dangerous threat. In his advertisement to the second edition, he revered Johnson’s “strong, clear, and animated enforcement of religion, morality, loyalty, and subordination.” He fervently hoped Johnson’s words “will … prove an effectual antidote to that detestable sophistry which has lately been imported from France, under the false name of philosophy.”57 According to Anna Seward, Knowles supported the revolutionaries in France, even as they became more radical. Writing to a mutual friend in 53

Radner, “Constructing an Adventure and Negotiating for Narrative Control.” Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 13, “Thomas Morris,” pp. 978–88, Gentleman’s Magazine (July–December 1791): 948. 55 The Lady’s Magazine (Sept. 1791): 489–91. 56 Ibid., (March 1792): 142. 57 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson. (2nd edn, 3 vols, London, 1793), p. xv–xvii. 54

242

Chapter Twelve

August 1792, Seward disapprovingly reported that Knowles “made flaming eulogisms upon French anarchy, which she calls freedom.” Moreover, Seward continued, Knowles “uttered no less vehement philippics against everything which pertains to monarchy.”58 In this charged atmosphere, Boswell, determined to preserve the principle of subordination and combat French radicalism, added a footnote to his account of Knowles’s debate with Johnson. The new note began by portraying Knowles as a dissatisfied female. “Mrs. Knowles [was] not satisfied with the fame of her needlework,” he claimed. “Nay,” she was not content “with the fame of reasoning better than women generally do, as I have fairly shewn her to have done.” She “communicated to me a dialogue of considerable length,” he continued, “which after many years had elapsed, she wrote down as having passed between Dr. Johnson and herself at this interview.” He now said that, “I had not the least recollection” of her dialogue and “did not find the smallest trace of it in my ‘record’ taken at the time.” Implying that her account was false, he stated, “I could not, in consistency with my firm regard to authenticity, insert it in my work.”59 Although intending to discredit her, Boswell substantiated her statement that she had given him her account prior to the publication of his first edition. Moreover, although he denied having any record of the dialogue he had made notes about it in his journal, as previously described. Thirdly, if, as Knowles claimed and he here acknowledged, he had previously discussed the conversation with her, he recollected it then. Referring to her publication in Gentleman’s Magazine, Boswell continued his note by saying, “It relates chiefly to the principles of the sect called Quakers.” He recognized that “no doubt the Lady appears to have greatly the advantage of Dr. Johnson in argument, as well as expression.” He ended, “From what I have now stated, and from the internal evidence of the paper itself, any one who may have the curiosity to peruse it, will judge whether it was wrong in me to reject it, however willing to gratify Mrs. Knowles.”60 With this show of double-edged politeness, Boswell presented himself as a gallant gentleman, while portraying Knowles as an ambitious female willing to sacrifice authenticity for fame. Although Knowles did not publicly respond to Boswell’s damning footnote, one unnamed book owner found a unique way to honor her 58

Letters of Anna Seward, vol. 3, p. 266. James Boswell, The Principal Corrections and Additions to the First Edition of Mr. Boswell’s Life of Dr. Johnson (London, 1793), p. 23. Boswell, Life of Johnson (2nd edn), vol. 3, p. 84–5 60 Ibid. 59

“By No Means In A Liberal Style”

243

account. In 1796, a bookseller’s catalogue listed: “Life of Dr. Johnson by Boswell – In these volumes are inserted, neatly written in MS. containing twelve pages, the spirited conversation between Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Knowles.” The book’s owner further noted that her account has been “omitted by Boswell from certain motives, in which Mrs. K. had evidently the superiority in argument over the great Lexicographer, in the vindication of her amiable friend.” 61

Mary Morris Knowles versus Boswell’s editors Boswell began working on a third edition of his Life, but he died in May 1795, after suffering from 19 bouts of gonorrhea, as noted by a recent scholar.62 Boswell’s literary executor, Edmund Malone, completed the third edition, published by Charles Dilly in 1799. To the dismay of Mary Knowles, Malone continued Boswell’s damning footnote. Knowles again republished her account, still insisting on public control over her own words. An eight-page Dialogue Between Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Knowles appeared in 1799, selling for six pence. The unsigned preface, surely written by her in third person style, stated that, “Mr. Boswell, for reasons best known to himself (but which are guessed at by others), refused to admit into his book, Mrs. Knowles’s account.” Moreover, “Mr. Boswell, then in his second edition, by a marginal note, and surely by no means in a liberal style, disavows any recollection of matter different from his own statement.” Since “In the third edition, his note is continued,” the writer hoped this “will be deemed a sufficient inducement and apology for offering now to the public, the abovementioned Dialogue.”63 As Knowles turned 70, she continued to be well respected and her text considered credible. In November 1803, The Lady’s Monthly Museum featured a biography of her, including an engraving of her likeness and a reprint of her account, implicitly endorsing its authenticity.64 Variations of the engraving of her circulated in Britain and the U.S.65 Mary Pilkington honored her in Memoirs of Celebrated Female 6161

Gentleman’s Magazine (July–December 1796): 1,074. Adam Sisman, Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Johnson (New York, 2001), pp. 282–6. 63 [Mary Morris Knowles], Dialogue Between Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Knowles (London, 1799). 64 Lady’s Monthly Museum (July–December, 1803): 289–94. 65 See, for example, British Library, “Mary Knowles,” and Quaker Collection, Haverford College. 62

244

Chapter Twelve

Characters Who Have Distinguished Themselves By Their Talents and Virtues in Every Age and Nation published in 1804. Pilkington reprinted an excerpt from Knowles’s text. “Superior as Dr. Johnson generally proved himself in argument,” Pilkington observed, “it evidently appears that, in this instance, he must have been foiled.” 66 When Charles Dilly retired in 1804, Thomas Cadell and William Davies took over publication of Boswell’s Life. Despite continued testaments to Knowles’s credibility, their fourth edition continued the damaging note.67 Knowles was now in her early 70s, but their edition did not go unchallenged. In 1805, the complete text of her version was again published as a tract, this time with her name listed first. The eight-page Dialogue between Mrs. Knowles and Dr. Johnson closely corresponds to the earlier edition and contains the same preface.68 Broadsides editions of A Dialogue between Mrs. Knowles and Dr. Johnson also circulated, making her account available in an inexpensive format to a wide range of readers.69 Some readers preserved and bound the tract editions of Knowles’s dialogue, while others clipped her text from Gentleman’s Magazine and carefully kept the pages.70 Still others copied her account in manuscript form to be passed on to descendants.71 Two of these manuscript copies crossed the Atlantic and became part of the collections at Duke University in North Carolina and Haverford College in Pennsylvania.72 Mary Morris Knowles died in February 1807, and after that Boswell’s account went unchallenged. Cadell and Davies published a fifth edition the year of her death.73 For the first time since 1791, Knowles’s account did not appear as an alternative text. 66

Pilkington, Memoirs of Celebrated Female Characters, pp. 218–9. Edmond Malone, ed., The Life of Samuel Johnson (4th edn, 4 vols, London, 1804), vol. 3, p. 323. 68 [Mary Morris Knowles], Dialogue Between Mrs. Knowles and Dr. Johnson (London, 1805). 69 Library of the Religious Society of Friends, “Tracts,” Vol. O, p. 295, [Mary Morris Knowles], Dialogue Between Mrs. Knowles and Dr. Johnson (Huddersfield, no date). 70 See for example, Library of the Religious Society of Friends, Tracts, Vol. 534 and Box 44. 71 Library of the Religious Society of Friends, MSS Vol. 348, Portfolio MSS 3, 126. 72 Hannah Bott MSS, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Special Collections, Haverford College Library. Haverford, Pennsylvania. 73 Edmond Malone, ed. The Life of Samuel Johnson (5th edn, 4 vols London, 1807). 67

“By No Means In A Liberal Style”

245

Conclusion: Canonization and Consequences In 1831, John Wilson Croker, a well-known literary critic, Tory politician, and “much hated man,” produced a massive re-editing of Boswell’s Life of Johnson.74 In one of many copious footnotes, he observed that Boswell “evidently slurs over the latter part of the conversation” with Knowles. Yet Croker dismissed her account, saying her text did not “preserve a word of what Mr. Boswell reports” and “attribute[s] to Johnson the poorest and feeblest trash.” 75 Croker’s judgment stands as an early example of gendered reading by an editor. He assumed that the text of the male writer and the expected behavior of the male subject were the most appropriate standards by which to assess the female author. Based on this supposition, Croker concluded that, “we may be forgiven for rejecting … [her account] as fabulous.”76 Later in the nineteenth century, Dr. George Birkbeck Hill devoted his life to investigating Boswell’s text, producing a six-volume edition, published in 1887.77 Hill examined at least one source relating to Knowles,78 and he took the trouble to read her text. He removed Croker’s lengthy note disparaging her. Yet Hill retained without comment Boswell’s note questioning Knowles’s authenticity.79 Retaining this note, without including the information that Boswell had added it later and that many contemporaries accepted Knowles’s account as authentic, privileged the stability of Boswell’s text over Knowles’s textual agency. By the twentieth century, Hill’s edition of Boswell’s text entered the literary canon and came to be regarded by some, including Lawrence F. Powell, as “sacred.” In a 1971 Oxford edition, Powell pronounced Boswell’s text “sacred” and the “authority” of Hill’s edition “undisputed.”80 This kind of canonization obscures the gender dynamics and power struggle in the dispute between Boswell and Knowles. Boswell’s footnote 74 Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford Companion to English Literature (revised edn, Oxford, 1995), p. 244. 75 John Wilson Croker (ed.), The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D., including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides by James Boswell (5 vols, London, 1831), vol. 4, p. 157. 76 Ibid. 77 George Birkbeck Hill, (ed). Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson ( 6 vols, New York, 1891). 78 London, Library of the Religious Society of Friends, Temporary MSS 28, File 7. 79 Hill, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, vol. 3, p. 340. 80 Hill, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, revised and enlarged by L. F. Powell, (6 vols, Oxford, 1971), vol. 3, pp. 284–300.

246

Chapter Twelve

has been a weapon in their struggle for narrative control of her debate with Johnson, but that weapon now became enshrined by editors along with the rest of his text. The focus on the textual stability of Boswell’s Life of Johnson continues to mask Knowles’s textual agency in the twenty-first century. In his 2001 revision of The Correspondence and other Papers of James Boswell relating to the making of the Life of Johnson, Marshall Waingrow described Knowles’s account only briefly as “totally discrepant from his [Boswell’s] own record.”81 Like Croker, Waingrow and other contemporary editors continue to use Boswell’s text as the sole standard by which to assess Knowles’s account. Recognizing Knowles’s textual agency offers new information and insights into both Johnson and Boswell. Her dialogue with Johnson contributes to current discussions about his female friendships and provides new evidence about his views on female moral agency, or lack thereof.82 Her persistent publications of her account provide another strong example of a struggle with Boswell to control the public narrative regarding Johnson. Recognizing Knowles’s textual agency and placing her text in historical context yields important new knowledge about both her and Jane Harry Thresher, and their place in eighteenth-century culture. Both women actively participated in manuscript and print culture, and in the literary life of London. Retrieving their stories sheds new light on how gender functioned, religious discourse including the key question of female moral agency, female involvement in radical politics, the politics of complexion, and manifestations of female commitment to liberty. This case study supports Josephine Roberts’s call to recover and investigate manuscript and print texts by women to understand fully the complexities of literary production in any given time period. The study also demonstrates how an historical approach to textual studies can be especially helpful in understanding the creation, editing, distribution, and preservation of texts by women, as shown by Margaret Ezell. This case study, in particular, supports the importance of historical contextualization because divorcing Knowles’s text from her life story contributes to 81 Marshall Waingrow, (ed.), The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the Life of Johnson (2nd. edn, Edinburgh and New Haven, 2001). p. 48. 82 James G. Basker, “Dancing Dogs, Women Preachers and the Myth of Johnson’s Misogyny,” The Age of Johnson, 3 (1990): 63–90. Kathleen Nutton Kemmerer, “A neutral being between the sexes:” Samuel Johnson’s Sexual Politics (London, 1998). Norma Clarke, Dr. Johnson’s Women (London, 2000).

“By No Means In A Liberal Style”

247

masking her textual agency. Considering literary texts in historical contexts provides rich opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaborations among literary scholars and historians in the recovery and reassessment of women’s writings.

Coda Mary Morris Knowles did not, as has been seen, depend entirely on written texts as her medium for self-representation. Her needle painted self-portrait, described earlier, remained in her family until after World War II, when Queen Mary purchased it. Knowles’s self-portrait became the centerpiece of a public exhibition of British art in 1949.83 Today, her self-portrait is preserved in the Royal Collection, where it can be viewed worldwide as part of an online picture gallery.84

83

Bernard and Therle Hughes, “An Artist in Needlework,” Country Life, 105/2714 (January 21, 1949): 138–9. 84 See http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/eGallery

248

Chapter Twelve

Appendix “An interesting Dialogue between the late Dr. Samuel Johnson and Mrs. Knowles” Published in Gentleman’s Magazine, June 1791 pp. 500-02. Mrs. K: Thy friend Jenny H– desires her kind respects to thee, Doctor. Dr. J: To me!–tell me not of her! I hate the odious wench for her apostasy; and it is you, Madam, who have seduced her from the Christian Religion. Mrs. K: This is a heavy charge indeed. I must beg leave to be heard in my own defense; and I entreat the attention of the present learned and candid company, desiring they should judge how far I am able to clear myself of so cruel an accusation. Dr. J (much disturbed at this unexpected challenge): You are a woman, and I give you quarter. Mrs. K: I will not take quarter. There is no sex in souls; and in the present case I fear not even Dr. Johnson himself. (“Bravo!” was repeated by the company, and silence ensued.) Dr. J: Well then, Madam, I persist in my charge, that you have seduced Miss H– from the Christian Religion. Mrs. K: If thou really knewest what were the principles of the Friends, thou would’st not say she had departed from Christianity, but waiving that discussion for the present, I will take the liberty to observe that she had an undoubted right to examine and to change her educational tenets whenever she had found them erroneous; as an accountable creature, it was her duty to do so. Dr. J: Pshaw! Pshaw!–an accountable creature!–girls accountable creatures! It was her duty to remain with the Church wherein she was educated; she had no business to leave it. Mrs. K: What? Not for that which she apprehended to be better? According to this rule, Doctor, hadst thou been born in Turkey, it had been thy duty to have remained a Mahometan, notwithstanding Christian

“By No Means In A Liberal Style”

249

evidence might have wrought in thy mind the clearest conviction; and, if so, then let me ask, how would thy conscience have answered for such obstinacy at the great and last tribunal? Dr. J: My conscience would not have been answerable. Mrs. K: Whose then would? Dr. J: Why the state to be sure. In adhering to the Religion of the State as by law established, our implicit obedience therein becomes our duty. Mrs. K: A Nation or State having a conscience is a doctrine entirely new to me, and, indeed, a very curious piece of intelligence; for I have always understood that a Government, or State is a creature of time only; beyond which it dissolves, and becomes a nonentity. Now Gentlemen, can your imagination body forth this monstrous individual or being called a State, composed of millions of people? Can you behold it stalking forth into the next world, loaded with its mighty conscience, there to be rewarded or punished, for the faith, opinions, and conduct of its constituent machines called men? Surely the teeming brain of Poetry never held up to fancy so wonderous a personage! (When the Laugh occasioned by this personification was subsided the Doctor very angrily replied): I regard not what you say as to the matter. I hate the arrogance of the wench, in supposing herself a more competent judge of religion that those who educated her. She imitated you, no doubt, but she ought not to have presumed to determine for herself in so important an affair. Mrs. K: True, Doctor, I grant it, if, as thou seemest to imply, a wench of 20 years be not a moral agent. Dr. J: I doubt it would be difficult to prove those deserve that character who turn Quakers. Mrs. K: This severe retort, Doctor, induces me charitably to hope thou must be totally unacquainted with the principles of the people against whom thou art so exceedingly prejudiced, and that thou supposest us a set of Infidels or Deists. Dr. J: Certainly, I do think you little better than Deists.

250

Chapter Twelve

Mrs. K: This is indeed strange, tis passing strange, that a man of such universal reading and research had not thought it at least expedient to look into the cause of dissent of a society so long established and so conspicuously singular! Dr. J: Not I, indeed! I have not read your Barclay’s Apology, and for this plain reason–I never thought it worth my while. You are upstart Sectaries, perhaps the best subdued by silent contempt. Mrs. K: This reminds me of the language of the Rabbis of old, when their Hierarchy was alarmed by the increasing influence, force, and simplicity of dawning Truth, in their high day of worldly dominion. We meekly trust our principles stand on the same solid foundation of simple truth, and we invite the acutest investigation. The reason thou givest for not having read Barclay’s Apology is surely a very improper one for a man whom the world looks up to as a Moral Philosopher of the first rank; a Teacher from whom they think they have a right to expect much information. To this expecting, enquiring world, how can Dr. Johnson acquit himself of remaining unacquainted with a book translated into five or six different languages, and which has been admitted into the libraries of almost every Court and University in Christendom! (Here the Doctor grew very angry even more so at the space of time the Gentlemen insisted on showing his antagonist wherein to make her defense, and his impatience excited one of the company, in a whisper, to say, “I never saw this mighty lion so chafed before!”) The Doctor again repeated that he did not think the Quakers deserved the name of Christians. Mrs. K: Give me leave then to endeavour to convince thee of thy error, which I will do by making thee, and this respectable company, a confession of our faith. Creeds, or confessions of faith, are admitted by all to be the standard whereby we judge of every denomination of professors. (To this, every one present agreed; and even the Doctor grumbled out his assent) Mrs. K: Well then, I take upon me to declare that the people called Quakers do verily believe in the Holy Scriptures, and rejoice with the most full and reverential acceptance of the divine history of facts, as recorded in

“By No Means In A Liberal Style”

251

the New Testament. That we, consequently, fully believe those historical articles summed up in what is called the Apostles’ Creed with these two exceptions only, to wit, our Saviour’s descent into Hell, and the resurrection of the body. These mysteries we humbly leave just as they stand in the holy text, there being, from that ground, no authority for such assertion as is drawn up in the Creed. And now, Doctor, canst thou still deny us the honourable title of Christians? Dr. J: Well!–I must own I did not at all suppose you had so much to say for yourselves. However, I cannot forgive that little slut for presuming to take upon herself as she has done. Mrs. K: I hope, Doctor, thou wilt not remain unforgiving; and that you will renew your friendship and joyfully meet at last in those bright regions where Pride and Prejudice can never enter! Dr. J: Meet her! I never desire to meet fools anywhere. (This sarcastic turn of wit was so pleasantly received that the Doctor joined in the laugh; his spleen was dissipated; he took his coffee, and became the remainder of the evening very cheerful and entertaining.)

Works Cited Manuscript Sources Duke University, Perkins Library, North Carolina Papers of Hannah Bott Haverford College Library, Pennsylvania Quaker Collection Library of Religious Society of Friends, London MSS Vols 150, 334, 347 Portfolio MSS 3, 6, 11 Temporary MSS 1, 5, 28, 403. Public Record Office, London RG 6, Quaker Records

252

Chapter Twelve

Printed Primary Sources Boswell, James, Life of Samuel Johnson (2 vols, London: Charles Dilly 1791). —. Life of Samuel Johnson (2nd edn, 3 vols, London: Charles Dilly, 1793). —. Life of Samuel Johnson (3rd edn, 4 vols, London: Charles Dilly, 1799). —. The Principal Corrections and Additions to the First Edition of Mr. Boswell’s Life of Dr. Johnson (London: Charles Dilly, 1793). Butterfield, Lyman, “The American Interests in the Firm of E. and C. Dilly, with their letters to Benjamin Rush, 1770–1795,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America vol. 45 (1951). Chapman, R. W. (ed.), The Letters of Samuel Johnson with Mrs. Thrale’s Genuine Letters to Him (3 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). Danzinger, Marlies and Brady, Frank (eds.), Boswell: The Great Biographer, 1789-1795 New York: McGraw Hill, 1989). Gentleman’s Magazine. Howard, E. F., “Mary Knowles and the Lloyds of Birmingham,” Friends Quarterly Examiner, (1934): 91–2. Kerby-Miller, Charles (ed.), Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966). [Knowles, Mary Morris], Dialogue Between Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Knowles (London: J. and Arthur Arch, 1799). [Knowles, Mary Morris], Dialogue Between Mrs. Knowles and Dr. Johnson (London: C. Hatton, 1805). [Knowles, Mary Morris], Dialogue Between Mrs. Knowles and Dr. Johnson (Huddersfield, no date). The Lady’s Monthly Museum. Letters of Anna Seward, written between the years 1784 and 1807 (6 vols, Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1811). Lustig, Irma S. and Pottle, Frederick A. (eds), Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782–1785 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981). —. (eds), Boswell: The English Experiment, 1785–1789, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1986). Malone, Edmond (ed.), The Life of Samuel Johnson. (4th edn. 4 vols, London: Cadell and Davies, 1804). —. (ed.), The Life of Samuel Johnson (5th edn, 4 vols, London: Cadell and Davis, 1807). Nichols, John, Illustrations of the Literary History of Eighteenth-Century London (8 vols, London: John Nichols and son, 1822).

“By No Means In A Liberal Style”

253

Pilkington, Mrs. [Mary], Memoirs of Celebrated Female Characters Who Have Distinguished Themselves By Their Talents and Virtues in Every Age and Nation (London: Albion Press, 1804). Piozzi, Hester Lynch [Thrale], Letters to and from the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (2 vols, London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1787). Reed, Joseph and Pottle, Frederick (eds), Boswell: Laird of Auchinleck, 1778–1782 (New York: McGraw Hill 1977). Ryskamp, Charles and Frederick Pottle (eds), Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774–1776 (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1963). Sael, G., Extensive Collection of Curious Books (1794). Wimsatt, William Jr. and Pottle, Frederick A. (eds), Boswell for the Defense, 1769–1774 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1959).

Secondary Sources Barrow, Christine, Family in the Caribbean: Themes and Perspective (Princeton: Marcus Wiener Publications, 1998). Basker, James G., “Dancing Dogs, Women Preachers and the Myth of Johnson’s Misogyny,” The Age of Johnson, 3 (1990): 63–90. Burnard, Trevor, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire : Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). —. “’Prodigious riches’: the wealth of Jamaica before the American Revolution.” Economic History Review, LIV, 3 (2001): 515-16. Clarke, Norma, Dr. Johnson’s Women (London: Hambledon, 2000). Croker, John Wilson (ed.), The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D., including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides by James Boswell (5 vols, London: John Murray, 1831). Ezell, Margaret J. M., Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) Ezell, Margaret J. M., and Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994). —. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Green, Joseph J., “Jenny Harry, later Thresher (c. 1756–1784),” Friends Quarterly Examiner, 10th Month/1913: 559–82. —. “Jenny Harry, later Thresher (c. 1756–1784) (concluded),” Friends Quarterly Examiner, 1st Month/1914: 43–64. Hill, George Birkbeck (ed). Boswell’s Life of Johnson (6 vols, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1891).

254

Chapter Twelve

—. (ed.), Life of Johnson (6 vols, New York: Bigelow, Brown and Co., 1921). —. (ed.), George Birkbeck Hill, rev. by L. F. Powell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, (6 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). Hughes, Bernard and Therle, “An Artist in Needlework,” Country Life, 105 / 2714 (1949): 138–9. Jennings, Judith, The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade, 1783–1807 (London: Frank Cass, 1997). —. Gender, Religion, and Radicalism in the Long Eighteenth Century: The ”Ingenious Quaker” and Her Connections (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Justice, George L. and Tinker, Nathan (eds), Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 (New York, 2002). Kemmerer, Kathleen Nutton, “A neutral being between the sexes:” Samuel Johnson’s Sexual Politics (London: Associated University Presses, 1998). Lloyd, Samuel, Some Account of Jenny Harry (privately printed, 1912). Marcus, Leah, “Textual Scholarship,” in David G. Nicholls (ed.), Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures 3rd edn. (New York: Modern Language Association, 2007), pp. 43-59 Nussbaum, Felicity, “Women and race: ‘a difference of complexion,’” in Vivien Jones, ed. Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Radner, John, “Constructing an Adventure and Negotiating for Narrative Control: Johnson and Boswell in the Hebrides,” 59-78 in Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson, (eds.), Literary Couiplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). Roberts, Josephine A., “Editing the Women Writers of Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Studies 24 (1996): 63-71 Shepherd, Verene A., “Trade and Exchange in Jamaica in the Period of Slavery,” in Hilary McD Beckles and Verne Shepherd, eds. Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader (Princeton: Marcus Weiner Publishers, 2000). Sisman, Adam, Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Johnson (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2001). Waingrow, Marshall, (ed.), The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the Life of Johnson (2nd. edn, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). p. 48.

“By No Means In A Liberal Style”

255

Waller, Gary, “The Countess of Pembroke and Gendered Reading,” in Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty Travitsky (eds.), The Renaissance English Women in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990) pp. 327-346 Weis Charles McC. and Pottle, Frederick, (eds), Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1971). Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery (New York: Capricorn Books, 1966). Yeo, Eileen Janes (ed.), Radical Femininity: Women’s Self-Representation in the public sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998).

CHAPTER THIRTEEN “THE UNIVERSITY IS A PARADISE, RIVERS OF KNOWLEDGE ARE THERE”: EVELYN MARY SPEARING SIMPSON1 CHANITA GOODBLATT

In a 1953 TLS review of the first published volume of The Sermons of John Donne, Norman Nicholson introduces his readers to the editors of this "splendid work of scholarship": This work is being edited by a transatlantic team consisting of Professor George R. Potter, of California University, and Dr. Evelyn Simpson, who is an accepted authority on the prose work of Donne.

Potter's official status is established by his University [of California, Berkeley] affiliation and rank, while that of Simpson solely by her authority. This certainly arouses the reader's curiosity and speculations: is this a gender difference; what is Simpson's academic background; what is the nature of their collaboration? In short, who is "Dr. Simpson," the woman editing Donne's sermons, accredited on the strength of her knowledge and scholarship? As present-day Donnean scholars on the whole find themselves hard put to answer these questions, this essay will attempt to do so by demonstrating that the details of Evelyn Simpson's life 1 Research for this essay was supported by the James. M. Osborn Fellowship in English Literature and History at the Beinecke Library, Yale University in January-February 2005. Citations of material from the Evelyn Simpson Papers, the Percy Simpson Papers and the James Osborn Papers (James Marshall and MarieLouise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University) are cited in the following manner: OSB MSS Number. Box Number. Folder Number. I would like to thank Annabel Patterson, Ann Hurley, Dennis Flynn, Hugh Adlington, Helen Brooks, Judith Baumel Schwartz and Ann Brener for their continued support of this project, as well as for helpful comments and insights on earlier versions of this essay.

258

Chapter Thirteen

(1885-1963) align her with the significant changes transpiring in English academic life and English Renaissance studies during the first half of the 20th-century.2 It is a fictional confrontation with the situation of women academics that provides both the title of the present essay and the opportunity to look more closely at Simpson's career. Dorothy Sayers introduces her mystery novel Gaudy Night with the following passage: The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are there, Arts and Sciences flow from thence. Counsell Tables are Horti conclusi, (as it is said in the Canticles) Gardens that are walled in, and they are Fontes signati, Wells that are sealed up; bottomlesse depths of unsearchable Counsels there. —John Donne

This passage from Donne's 1625 sermon on Matthew 19:27 (Sermons 6:227) creates an intertextuality between the biblical description in Genesis (2:10) of "a river [that] went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads" (The Holy Bible, n.p.) and the phrase in Canticles (4:12) "A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse: a spring shut up, a fountaine sealed" (The Holy Bible, n.p.). Encompassing the pastoral image of Paradise, the image of knowledge as life-giving waters, and its inclusion within definitive (biblical, geographical) boundaries, Donne raises complex issues about the ownership and definition of knowledge, which perhaps evoke his own experience as a Catholic youth unable to receive a degree from Oxford (Flynn 131-2). What is more, Donne's reference to Canticles (Song of Solomon) very naturally suggests the highly erotic quality of such knowledge, as well as adumbrating modern feminist questions about its access and availability for women. Within the novel itself, the Oxford graduate Harriet Vane reflects upon the women scholars of the ironically self-deprecating Shrewsbury (actually Sommerville) College, Oxford,3 thinking that she "was suddenly 2

In addition to various databases (Iter and MLA bibliographies; JSTOR; Google Scholar), Evelyn Simpson's biography and publication list were compiled from the following sources: DNB entry by David Phillips; the obituary written by Helen Gardner in the London Times; Perse School Archives; Newnham College Roll (handwritten document); Newnham College Roll Letter 1911–1916, 1948; Newnham College Register. Volume 1. 1871-1923:34-35; St. Hugh's College Chronicle 36 (1963-1964): 26-27. See also: Goodblatt, "Evelyn Mary Spearing Simpson." 3 Sayers studied at Sommerville College, Oxford, going up in 1912 on the Gilchrist

“The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are There”

259

afraid of all these women: horti conclusi, fontes signati, they were walled in, sealed down, by walls and seals that shut her out" (286). As Vane contemplates the monastic life of the faculty at Shrewsbury College in 1935, she concretely realizes Donne's metaphorical passage by presenting two alternatives for a woman scholar: either to remain chaste and unmarried within those horti conclusi; or to marry and leave behind the scholarly enterprise. The juxtaposition of the erudite but enigmatic TLS review with the equally enigmatic but rather heady mystery novel (love conquers all; Vane assists the female dons with their research and continues publishing her mystery novels) thereby invites a study of the intersection between the biographical and intellectual contexts of Evelyn Simpson's life.

Cambridge and London Evelyn Mary Spearing Simpson was born in Cambridge to James Spearing, solicitor for Cambridge University,4 and his wife Fanny Elizabeth Clayton. Of her father, Simpson writes in her unpublished memoirs:5 My father had all the outward trappings of the typical Victorian father, but inwardly he did not conform to type. He had a moustache and sidewhiskers, he wore a top hat and a frock coat on Sundays, he was a prosperous lawyer, a regular church-goer, and he steadily voted Conservative at elections. But instead of being a domestic tyrant, as by all the novelists' canons he should have been, he was the kindest and most delightful of fathers. He granted his children more real liberty, of the kind that matters, than most fathers are willing to do nowadays. He allowed me to read what I liked, from the age of nine years upward, he let me go to college and study what I liked, he let me choose my own career and my own friends, and finally my own husband, and always he gave me encouragement and support, financial aid when I needed it, a home for the holidays, and the knowledge that there was always one person on earth who was glad to see me and eager to know what I was doing.

scholarship and taking a first in modern (medieval) French (Kenney). 4 See: The Cambridge Chronicle and University Journal 11 May 1932, p. 6. 5 I would like to thank Mary Fleay, the daughter of Percy and Evelyn Simpson, for permission to cite from her parents' papers, as well as from her own correspondence with me. I would also like to thank her for providing the family pictures reproduced here.

260

Chapter Thirteen

Simpson's accolade for her father brings into relief the prevalent system of control over daughters (and sons?), which she associates with "attitudes supposedly characteristic of the Victorian era; prudish, strict; oldfashioned, out-dated" (OED). Vividly painting a picture of James Spearing, her words also vividly evoke a book-loving, imaginative daughter, distinctly aware of domestic tensions and conventions, and ultimately looking to her educated father for intellectual (and financial) support.

Spearing Family circa 1907 (Evelyn is standing)

What is most astonishing, certainly, for the present-day reader is Evelyn Simpson's necessity of acknowledging her freedom to marry Percy Simpson (1865-1962), the more so as her marriage to this Renaissance scholar and Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford6 became (as their good friend and colleague Helen Gardner wrote) "one of the most remarkable partnerships in the history of scholarship" ("Obituary"). Interestingly enough, this loaded term "Victorian" surfaces once again in a correspondence with their daughter Mary Fleay, when she writes: 6

Percy Simpson's biography was compiled from the following sources: "Percy Simpson, Dr." [Obituary]; DNB entry by Helen Gardner.

“The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are There”

261

She [Evelyn Simpson] was not a strong feminist–she was certainly never a suffragette–though she upheld the view that women should be highly educated & able to use their abilities. In this she was not in conflict with my father, who, for a Victorian, held extremely liberal opinions. Of the two my mother was the more brilliant & my father always acknowledged this (22 April 2003).

In both instances a woman's awareness of the cultural and familial restrictions imposed upon her gender is apparent, in contradistinction to the particular, extraordinary circumstances of Evelyn Simpson's life. One may consequently ask, therefore, what could be more strongly "feminist" than Simpson's insistence upon a woman acquiring both an education and the freedom to utilize it. Evelyn Simpson was first tutored at home and then attended the Perse School for Girls (1902-1905),7 subsequently receiving a B.A. (Class I) at Newnham College, Cambridge in Medieval and Modern Language (1908). Between 1908 and 1914 she moved between women's colleges at Cambridge and London: as an Associates' Research Fellow at Newnham; and as an Assistant Lecturer and M.A. student at Bedford College, London (M.A. 1912).8 This was a challenging time for women, for though women's colleges at Cambridge (and Oxford) had been established some forty years previously,9 the restrictions on women students were still arduous. Thus in the years preceding World War I they could only attend a 7

This information about Evelyn Simpson's home tutoring was received in a personal communication from Mary Fleay. In a report of the first (1905) Government inspection of the Perse School for Girls, the curriculum is recorded as covering the following main subjects: English, Geography, Latin, French, Mathematics and Science. The school day was from 9:15 A.M. to 12:45 P.M.; afternoon lessons were optional and included Drawing, Drill, Needlework and extra French. I would like to thank Pauline Chew, school librarian for this information. 8 As an Assistant Lecturer in English Literature and Language, Simpson was responsible for the Elementary Class and taught the following courses in 19101911: English composition and outlines of English Literature with exercises in essay writing; English syntax and analysis of sentences; and Précis writing and paraphrasing. I would like to thank Mariam Yamin of Royal Holloway College Archives, University of London, for this information. 9 At Cambridge there was Girton College (founded 1869) and Newnham College (founded 1871); at Oxford there was Lady Margaret Hall and Sommerville College (both founded 1879). For a history of women's education at Cambridge, see: Ann Phillips, A Newnham Anthology; Gillian Sutherland, "Emily Davies, the Sidgwicks and the Education of Women in Cambridge" and "Nasty Forward Minxes"; Rita Tullberg, Women at Cambridge.

262

Chapter Thirteen

lecture in the men's colleges with the lecturer's agreement, and were usually accompanied by a chaperon and segregated to the first rows of the lecture hall (Phillips 58, 75-9). Virginia Woolf's famous record of Cambridge women's colleges provides a retrospective look at this earlier period; in her 1928 lectures at Newnham and Girton Colleges, Cambridge, she strikes out against the barring of woman from entering Trinity College library, as well as the lack of endowments resulting in the sparse economics and bad food of these women's colleges (A Room of One's Own 9, 21-26). As the daughter of another Victorian gentleman (Leslie Stephen), for Woolf that "Cambridge was then a place reserved for men and one in which their sisters could hardly enter save as rare shy intruders was undeniable" (Bell, Volume I:70). Thus she makes the famous claim that "a woman must have money and a room of her own, if she is to write fiction [or in Simpson's case, scholarship]" (4).

Newnham College 1908 By permission of The Principal and Fellows, Newnham College, Cambridge (Evelyn Spearing. Top row, second from right)

The memoirs of U.K.N. Stevenson, who hosted Virginia Woolf on a visit to Newnham, comprise both a rebuttal of the writer's dismay and a

“The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are There”

263

reinforcement of her demand, by writing:10 But even more precious than anything outside the room was the room itself; to have a room of one's own—that was the supreme pleasure, the unspoilable joy of being at Newnham. To choose curtains and cushions, to buy flowers and books, gramophone records and fire lighters (whose enchanting smell no longer, I suppose, haunts the corridors of Newnham)—these were all delightful activities, a first taste of freedom, a first taste, too, perhaps, of ivory-tower-building (Ann Phillips 174).

Stevenson's deliberate use of Woolf's term continues a discourse of feminism that emphasizes an access to education, as well as to the accompanying physical and cultural comforts, in order to create (in a positive sense) that "Horti conclusi, Gardens that are walled in." She consequently builds a sense of identity–feminine, scholarly–through the development of her own sense of physical being, at once marking off and expanding territory into the intellectual, legendary experience of academia as an "ivory tower."11 This experience provided the opportunity and freedom, even in an earlier period, for Evelyn (Spearing) Simpson to make a name for herself as a scholar of Elizabethan drama; not only are her two early books – The Elizabethan Translations of Seneca's Tragedies and Studley's Translations of Seneca's Agamemnon and Medea–cited in more recent essays,12 but the former was twice reprinted in the late 1970's (Folcroft Library Editions and Norwood Editions). Concomitantly, Simpson began laying the foundation for her scholarship on Donne. This was a time when work on critical editions was coming to the fore in Renaissance studies, one of the most outstanding figures being W.W. Greg, literary scholar and bibliographer, who set the standards for copy-texts (Shillingsburg 15, 54, 65) and for "ascertaining the exact circumstances and conditions" in which books were produced 10 Another Newnham student, E.E. Duncan-Jones, presents a rather disconcerting perspective on Woolf's visit, when she writes: "The visit of Miss Strachey's close friend, Virginia Woolf, in 1929 to read us a paper was a rather alarming occasion. As I remember it she was nearly an hour late; and dinner in Clough Hall, never a repast for gourmets, suffered considerably. Mrs. Woolf also disconcerted us by bringing a husband and so upsetting our seating plan" (Ann Phillips 174). 11 This discussion of "a room of one's own" owes much to Lakoff and Johson's discussion of "ontological metaphors" in Metaphors We Live By, particularly of "container metaphors" (25-30) 12 See: Anthony Taylor, "Shakespeare, Studley, and Golding," p. 523.note 1; Jessica Winston, "Seneca in Early Elizabethan England," p. 31.note 8; p. 33.note 14; p. 38.note 30; p. 58.

264

Chapter Thirteen

(Wilson). Indeed, in her introduction to The Elizabethan Translations of Seneca's Tragedies, Simpson acknowledges Greg's "help and advice" (ix).13 Moreover, she aptly utilizes this scholarly agenda for a consideration of wider issues, combining her "strong religious faith" (Gardner, "Obituary") with her scholarly interests by publishing two essays ("John Donne and his Theology"; "John Donne and Re-Union") in Anglican journals,14 while also looking forward to an integrated, contextual (historical, biographical) approach to editing his sermons in two other essays, published in the Modern Language Review ("A Chronological Arrangement"; "Donne's Sermons, and their Relation to his Poetry).

World War I The outbreak of World War I heralded the end of Simpson's first period of scholarship. She volunteered to serve as a nurse between 1914-1918 at British Red Cross and military hospitals in both England and France.15 As David Phillips writes, it "was an act of considerable courage for a pioneering woman university teacher and scholar to interrupt an academic career in Cambridge to work as a voluntary aid detachment (VAD) nurse in the difficult conditions prevailing in France in 1915." For her work Simpson received the 1914/15 Star Medal, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal.16 13

Greg's letters to Evelyn Simpson (1930-1936) are to be found in her Beinicke Papers (OSB MSS 90. Box 1. Folder 20). 14 Church Quarterly Review was published between 1875-1968 by the London Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The Churchman, a journal of Anglican Theology, has been published since 1879 by the London Church Society, associated with the Church of England. 15 Simpson first served (November 1914-November 1915) as a Nursing Member and Assistant Quartermaster at Shelford Red Cross Auxiliary Hospital, Cambridgeshire. She was then sent to a military hospital in France on 9 November 1915, and returned home to England on leave in mid-July 1916. She returned to service on 22 August 1917 at the Officers Military Hospital, Eaton Hall, Chester, serving as a General Service Superintendent V.A.D.s. She remained there until discharged on 1 October 1918. This information was supplied by the British Red Cross Museum and Archives, London, supplemented by the Newnham College Register and Simpson's own account in From Cambridge to Camiers. 16 The 1914/15 Star Medal and the British War Medal were awarded to Spearing for her work in France in 1915 and 1916. The Victory Medal was awarded to her as one of the eligible personnel who served in the establishment of a unit in an

“The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are There”

265

Simpson published an account of her war experiences, entitled From Cambridge to Camiers under the Red Cross. This book can find no better reader than Virginia Woolf, who writes in her TLS review ("A Cambridge V.A.D."): Here we have the case of Miss Spearing, a late Fellow of Newnham, engaged when war broke out upon "research work on certain Elizabethan dramas." Not even this war, one might have thought, would have disturbed an occupation so utterly alien to itself; and yet the proofs of her book sent to the Louvain University Press were among the first things to perish in the flames. She found compensation "and much more" for its loss by becoming a V.A.D at Cambridge, and this little book consists of notes and diaries she wrote there and later when she was nursing at hospitals in various parts of France. She does not attempt to analyse her feelings very closely, as no doubt she had little time to indulge them: but something of the excitement of a student plunged from books into practical work and finding herself quite capable of it is perceptible in her account and exhilarating to the reader….And yet she by no means shares the sentimental illusions about wounded soldiers and the effects of war on the character which she found rife in England on her return. A time in the trenches does not make bad men good; soldiers "are very ordinary people, with an unfortunate weakness for getting drunk, and an inability to say 'No' to a pretty girl."

Particularly interesting is the way in which Woolf directly cites Simpson's various responses to the war. The reviewer first turns to the preface, in which Simpson discloses her move from scholar to V.A.D. nurse, underlining both the fissure between these two identities and how the war simultaneously (and rather paradoxically and grimly) possesses the capacity both to destroy her "research work"17 and provide its very "compensation" (vii). Woolf's use of the phrase "alien to itself" emphasizes the war's incursion into Simpson's pre-war idyllic world of operational theatre. See: National Archives of the United Kingdom, London. Retrieved 18 July 2008. . 17 It was Simpson's edited volume, Studley's Translations of Seneca's Hippolytus and Hercules Oetaeus (that was to have followed the 1913 Studley's Translations of Seneca's Agamemnon and Medea), which was lost in the 1914 burning of Louvain by the Germans in World War I. In 1926 Simpson was considering another attempt at publishing this volume, at the suggestion of the editor Prof. Bang (letter dated 26 July 1926; OSB MSS 90.Box 4.Folder 108). It seems, however, that not enough money was available for this project, and no re-written manuscript was found among her papers (neither in the Evelyn Simpson Papers nor in the possession of her family).

266

Chapter Thirteen

scholarship–that Horti conclusi–portrayed in her book as a "joyful student life, full of books and games and camaraderie" (2). Subsequently Woolf focuses on Simpson's censure of the "prevalence of illusions, mostly sentimental ones" (80)–the shock, one realizes, of her return to England from the battleground in France. With these comments Woolf reaches very much into the heart of the book. Significantly, Woolf is attentive to Simpson's successful coping with the “practical work” of military nursing, which can readily be seen to make her a participant in the advancement of women's status by furthering—in the words of another Newnham College student—the realization "of women's ability to cope with a variety of unladylike activities" (Ann Phillips 148).18 This highlights the complex issue of woman's service in the V.A.D.; one can well consider that such participation ultimately served to extend a volunteer's concern past simply demonstrating what Sharon Ouditt has termed "women's ability to act within a framework of acceptable female role models" (36)—the discipline of a uniform, the "character" and "breeding" of the middle and upper class, Christian "humility" and "unselfishness" (16-24). At one point, for example, Simpson (who Ouditt cites as upholding these values, 36) revels nonetheless in the particular experience of a military hospital in France, writing about "the freedom from the numberless restrictions which sometimes make hospital life in England so irksome to college or business girls" (27). Her recognition of the shared professional standing of these women underlines their changing status, carried from civilian into military life, and back into post-war English society. What is more, Simpson carefully notes in her preface that sections of her book had been previously published; what is most significant is her choice of the Englishwoman (the other was the Newnham College Roll Letter), a London monthly journal that was "devoted to constitutional suffrage and responsive to middle-class sensibilities" (Bristow 5).19 Publication in this forum can indicate many things: a familiarity with, and support of, the suffragette movement; the situating of V.A.D. work within the parameters of this movement; the desire for official sanction of one's individual experience as aligning itself with feminist goals. 18

For a recent survey and discussion of Woolf's relation to the women's movement, see: Sowon Park, "Suffrage and Virginia Woolf." 19 Gemma Bristow explains: "The journal was connected to the London Society for Woman's Suffrage (LSWS), Britain's largest regional suffrage organization….the Englishwoman was oriented towards a middle/upper-class readership…and away from the more violent and anarchistic manifestations of its cause" (6).

“The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are There”

267

What is more, there are aspects of Simpson's narrative about her World War I experience, which raise interesting questions about loss, mourning, reconciliation and the literary transformation of these experiences. First and foremost, there is the loss of her younger brother Edward, killed in the Battle of the Somme on 11 September 1916; she thus remained at home with her family after her July 1916 leave, did not return to France and resumed V.A.D. duty in England only in August 1917 (personal communication from Mary Fleay). It is during this time that she must have prepared both From Cambridge to Camiers (1917) and Edward Spearing's manuscript The Patrimony of the Roman Church (1918) for publication. In her preface to the latter, she self-effacingly explains that the "book as it stands, therefore, consists entirely of my brother's work, but in a somewhat shortened form, and my own share in it has been confined to this compression and to the addition of a certain number of references and notes" (ix). Yet acknowledgement of pertinent biographical information can posit an alternate conception of Simpson's editorial work, not simply as "a work of sisterly piety" (Garnder and Stead 9) but as an appropriation, a reidentifying, of her brother from their father's realm of law to her own of scholarship. A student at Emmanuel College, Cambridge of both history and law, Edward Spearing subsequently was articled to his father's firm of solicitors (1912-1914) and so, as Simpson explains "it was only his spare time that he could devote to the writing of this essay" (The Patrimony viii). Yet it is this very work of scholarship that sustains his presence: in the 1936 endowment of an "Edward Spearing Prize for History" by the Reverend L. Elliott-Binns, "in memory of his friend and contemporary in College, Edward Spearing, who fell in the European War";20 and in its recent inclusion within the internet archive of the Canadian libraries.21 Virginia Woolf would not, of course, have known about this later work, nor have had access to Simpson's unpublished poem that intensifies her prose account of nursing the first casualties of the Battle of the Somme (July 1916). Reading these in tandem provides a fascinating example of a "vision of war seen from the inside" (Khan 7), bestowing on the V.A.D. nurse the equivalent of combatant, or trench, experience that "became a guarantee of the authenticity of war writing" (Buck 87):

20

Emmanuel College Magazine 30.1 (1935-1936): 23. I would like to thank Janet Morris, Assistant Archivist of Emmanuel College, for this information. 21 See: .

268

Chapter Thirteen "The Aftermath of the Big Push" (From Cambridge to Camiers) Oh the pity of it!—the poor wounded broken creatures moaning and calling on God Who made them, screaming at the slightest touch, raving in delirium, or lying there unconscious with glazed eyes and heavy breathing. The wards were like hell through that first week in July. One night I felt that I had never thought that hell itself could be as bad as this. Generally one can concentrate one's attention on a single bad case and give him constant care, but here were fearfully wounded men moaning and calling all around. One night my eye fell on a newspaper headline, "Victory cheaply bought," and it seemed a most ghastly mockery. From the military point of view, of course, the losses may have been comparatively few in number considering the advantage gained—of that, I know nothing. But I do know that no victory should ever be called cheap that is bought at the cost of such mortal anguish as filled our hospitals in that first week (5859).22 Night Duty: II. During a Big Push: That's over once again! Now for some food, And then some sleep. We're all half dazed. For thirteen hours one wild continued rush, Then comes relief. I shan't forget these nights –The tramp, tramp, tramp of weary orderlies Bringing fresh cases in… The endless stream Of smashed and battered things… The bandages Reeking with blood and pus… The piteous cries Of some poor lad whose nerve is gone…The shriek Of half-delirious men who try to chant 'God save the King', then 'Who's your lady friend?' They shout, and all the others wake and turn Their weary heads away, and wish for dawn. I saw a newspaper the other day; "Victory Cheaply Bought!" it said … I wish The fools who write so lightly of such pain Could do my job here for a month or two.

In a footnote to the prose account, Simpson explains that in "my original jottings I gave here a more detailed account of one or two cases, but I see no use in harrowing readers' feelings unnecessarily" (59). Unhampered in Night Duty by the issue of self-censorship for publication

22

Both Sharon Ouditt ("Nuns and Lovers" 31) and Santanu Das (Touch and Intimacy 186) cite Simpson's subsequent remark about there being "a curious community of suffering in which one is glad to have been allowed to take one's part" (59).

“The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are There”

269

of her prose narrative,23 Simpson utilizes the formal patterns and interpretive conventions of lyric poetry to highlight a destructive poetics that intensifies the prose description. Thus the continuous enjambment as well as the anaphoric repetition of the article “the” emphasize her metonymic presentation of nurses, orderlies and the wounded, to simultaneously depersonalize and transform them into the varying fragments of a sensual onslaught—kinesthetic, auditory, visual and olfactory. This depersonalization is further extended in the description of the wounded—“the poor wounded broken creatures” from the prose passage—as “smashed and battered things,” unmitigated here by sympathy and echoing with the horror of mutilation and monstrosity. In the lyric passage Simpson also intensifies the speaker’s particular authority and identity. While in the prose passage this speaker dissents from the military calculation of human loss versus tactical advantage, she does so by (rather disingenuously) asking her reader to accept the opinion of an uninformed but compassionate person; the present-day reader can retrospectively condemn the military for launching one of the most costly and bloody military operations of World War I.24 The poetic speaker dispenses, however with this pose, and asserts her full authority in a stance that in some way evokes the tradition of that "meditative persona…[with a] mind itself faced with external stimuli" (Culler 167); in this particular instance the reader is thereby asked to convert the convention of battleground (nursing) memoirs into a tale of magic and miracles, in which the "wish for dawn" and "fools who…could do my job" can be duly granted. The fissure between the realistic and the fantasy tale is deepened by the parallel citing of different discourses. By inserting the soldiers' delirious ravings and the newspaper's headlined declaration into the text, the poetic speaker not only brings these colliding experiences into relief but also undermines the meditative situation and the futility of the very "wish" it has generated. The impact of these two passages is itself heightened by the present-day reader's knowledge of the impending loss of Simpson's brother; here one can find a poignant refutation of Woolf's statement that Simpson "does not attempt to analyse her feelings very closely." 23 At the beginning of From Cambridge to Camiers, Simpson also explains: "I must also record my thanks to the Hon. Arthur Stanley, Chairman of the Joint Committee of the British Red Cross Society and the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, who has given the Society's permission for the publication of the book" (viii). 24 For a discussion of the topographic consequences and the literary depiction of the Battle of the Somme, see: Paul Fussell, The Great War (69-71, 144-154).

270

Chapter Thirteen

Oxford, Jonson and Donne After the war Evelyn Simpson took a position as a Tutor in English literature at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, "especially welcomed [as one student wrote] by those of us who were not Language specialists" (St. Hugh's College Chronicle 26). In 1922 she became the first woman to be awarded the D.Phil. degree at Oxford (first introduced in 1914).25 This was also a time of expansion and change for St. Hugh's College, more than doubling the pre-war number of students, as well as opening both the B.A. degree to women and University membership to women tutors (Kemp 3537). Yet not everything had progressed, for Evelyn Simpson was required to relinquish her position upon her marriage (in 1921) to Percy Simpson, as not until after 1945 could married women hold positions as Tutors in Oxford Colleges.26 Their close collaboration produced two children (Edward Spearing Simpson and Mary Spearing Simpson Fleay),27 the last half of the Oxford edition of the works of Ben Jonson (as Evelyn Simpson progressed from assistant to editor)28 and the Nonesuch edition of Donne's The Courtier's Library. Evelyn Simpson's scholarly work continued unabated, as she published two editions of her D.Phil. dissertation (The Prose Works of John Donne) and essays in scholarly forums (on both Jonson and Donne), as well as critical editions of Donne's prose and Sermons.29 The co-editing with 25

See: . Retrieved 19 August 2008. 26 I would like to thank Deborah Quare, Librarian of St. Hugh's College, Oxford, for this information. 27 Edward Simpson received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from New College Oxford, having studied the course of Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE). He worked at the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, and was killed in with his fiancée in a skiing accident on Mount Blanc (I would like to thank Caroline Dalton, Archivist of New College, Oxford for this information). Mary Fleay (born 1924) received a B.A. degree with Honours from Newnham College, Cambridge. She lived with her husband Martin Fleay and their four children in Uganda (1959-1960). Upon returning to England, she worked as a teacher (Newnham College Register. Volume 2. 1924-1950:301). 28 While in volumes 3-5 Evelyn Simpson is thanked for her help in collation and checking the proofs (3:vi; 4:v; 5:vi), in volume six Percy Simpson records that "Mrs. Simpson, who has given valuable help in the past, has in this volume become a collaborator. The fact is recorded on the title-page [Edited by C.H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson]" (6:v). 29 Simpson also served, between 1950 and 1955, as a supervisor of advanced students for B. Litt. and D. Phil. degrees at Oxford University (letter to George

“The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are There”

271

George Potter of The Sermons of John Donne firmly develops the editorial concepts laid out in her pre-war essays, by comprising "the first edition which employs the methods and apparatus of modern scholarship. Furthermore, it is the first edition in which the sermons are arranged, as far as possible, in chronological order" (Willard Farnham, Sermons 10:viii). Potter, Professor of English at the University of California, confirms their "even and equal collaboration" by establishing the publication of the first five volumes under "Potter and Simpson" and the second five under "Simpson and Potter" (letter dated 24 April 1951; OSB MSS 90. Box 2. Folder 46). Simpson's work was rewarded by an Associates' Research Fellow (1946-1949) and a position of Associate at Newnham College, Cambridge (1956-1963), the 1955 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize of the British Academy "for work by a woman on English Literature" (letter dated 1 July 1955; OSB MSS 90. Box 4. Folder 100) and the Leverhulme Research Award (1956-1958). The London Times obituary for Evelyn Simpson, written by Helen Gardner, throws light on this period of her life: Their life together, with their son and daughter, was simple and strenuous but profoundly happy. The pleasures of visiting the Simpsons, enjoying Evelyn's homemade jam in the garden and listening to Percy's anecdotes, is something that many of his pupils will always remember with gratitude….Evelyn Simpson joined him from 1937 as junior editor [of Ben Jonson]. The last three volumes of the text and the invaluable two volumes of commentary would never have been published without her unselfish labour in organizing her husband's massive accumulation of material. Meanwhile, she had begun work with George Potter, of Berkeley, on the great edition of Donne's sermons that would always be her memorial. The first volume appeared in 1953. In the following year Professor Potter died and Evelyn Simpson was left to carry on alone…It is a monument of patience, learning, and skill. It is also a monument of courage. Like her husband, Evelyn Simpson had a great capacity for enjoyment. Like him she was a good fighter and thought errors should be combated. Warm-hearted and affectionate, she combined with complete naturalness the roles of wife, mother, and latterly, grandmother, friend, and scholar….

Gardner's laudatory and poignant obituary was certainly influenced by the circumstances in which it was written–the Time's request for an urgent response to Evelyn Simpson's unexpected death.30 Resounding throughout Potter, 24 May 195–OSB MSS 90.Box 4.Folder 93; Newnham College Roll). 30 In a note attached to the obituary, found in the James Osborn Papers (OSB MSS 90. Box 2. Folder 40), Osborn writes: "This obituary notice of Mrs. Simpson was

272

Chapter Thirteen

this passage is, once more, that image of Horti conclusi, Gardens that are walled in, this time as an image of pastoral–commuted into matrimonial and scholarly–happiness. This certainly seems to sustain what Suzanne Gossett has so judiciously written regarding Evelyn Simpson's remark in the final volume of Donne's Sermons: "It was through my early attempts to write something on Donne that I first made the acquaintance of my husband, Percy Simpson, to whom I now dedicate this volume in love and gratitude" (Sermons 10:xiii). It is in this context that Gossett notes Evelyn Simpson's "conflation of literary and erotic pleasure," as well as the acknowledgment that "incentives romantic and professional may commingle" (113).

Engagement Picture 1921

Evelyn Simpson's somewhat opaque remark can be clarified by looking at Percy Simpson's correspondence. This not only reveals that (from 1920) they worked together as, respectively, secretary and chairman of the Oxford branch of the English Association,31 but that as a representative of written by Miss Helen Gardner. The Times was caught without one already ‘in the morgue; so telephoned Miss Gardner in Eynsham. She then wrote these affectionate lines, and telephoned them in to The Times in time for them to meet their deadline. (The above information from Miss Helen Wade White).’ 31 This is evident in two letters from Percy Simpson (dated respectively 21 and 25 May 1920), which are very likely about business matters of the Association (OSB MSS 8. Box 10. Folder 15). Evelyn Simpson relinquished this position upon their marriage (letter to James Osborn, dated 2 August 1963; OSB MSS 7. Box 70. Folder 1457).

“The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are There”

273

Clarendon Press Percy Simpson evaluated Evelyn Simpson's manuscripts on Donne. The earliest letter, dated 23 June 1914 (OSB MSS 8. Box 10. Folder 15), records his editorial remarks about her edited collection of six of Donne's sermons; though accepted for publication, this volume was cancelled by the outbreak of World War I (Newnham College Roll Letter 1914:16) and the concept only came to fruition in the larger, posthumous 1967 collection of John Donne: Selected Prose. Evelyn Spearing then goes off to the V.A.D. and to war, and returns to her academic studies and another evaluation from Percy Simpson, dated 6 January 1921. In this instance he evaluates her manuscript, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne, as an "excellent piece of work, scholarly, interesting, & clear" (OSB MSS 90. Box. 4. Folder 114). Their engagement in March32 and marriage in August of that same year thus sealed a long-standing professional relationship. Looking retrospectively at Evelyn Simpson's personal and professional circumstances thus effectively undermines the reflections of the fictional Harriet Vane upon the two contradictory possibilities for a woman scholar, either as an academic or as a wife and mother.33 For juxtaposing the careers of Helen Gardner and Evelyn Simpson highlights the innovative alternative posed by the latter. Certainly the scholarly projects of Gardner and Simpson were inevitably intertwined: Simpson submitted the manuscript for her edition of Donne's Essays in Divinity to Gardner "for her criticism," and, as Simpson wrote George Potter, Gardner "gave it the extremely thorough mauling which I have sometimes inflicted on you, I fear! However, her suggestions were most valuable" (4 May 1951; OSB MSS 90. Box 4. Folder 93); Simpson praised Gardner's edition of Donne's Divine Poems in a TLS Review ("The Poetry of Donne"); and Gardner included Simpson's essay, "The Literary Value of Donne's Sermons" in a collection of critical essays. In the end, however, one does wonder about the absence of any significant evaluation of Simpson's editorial and critical achievements in Gardner's obituary for her, giving its reader leave to consider the possible tensions between two women scholars of the Renaissance (and most particularly Donne): between Dame Gardner, editor of Donne's poetry and the first woman to hold the chair of Merton

32

In a letter dated 25 March 1922, Evelyn Simpson writes to Percy Simpson that "I sat on the verandah in the sun for some time this afternoon. But it is not a day that can be compared with March 25 last year–Good Friday, & our walk along the Roman Road" (OSB MSS Box 4. Folder 107). 33 For further discussion of gender stereotyping and its exposure in Gaudy Night, see: Ann McClellan, "Alma Mater."

274

Chapter Thirteen

professor of English language and literature (Lea);34 and Evelyn Simpson, editor of Donne's prose, who twice relinquished a formal academic career– once to join the V.A.D. and once to marry–but nevertheless, and most unusually, continued a distinguished scholarly career. This complex relationship with Gardner highlights Simpson's participation in the developing network of women scholars. The friendship she enjoyed with both Gardner and Mabel Potter (George Potter's widow) was borne out in their respective, posthumous publications of her work. Thus Gardner edited Simpson's John Donne: Selected Prose, as well as her essay "Two Notes on Donne, while Potter edited the essay on "The Local Setting of Henry Vaughan's Poetry."35 On her part, Simpson takes care in Elizabethan Translations to thank Minna Steele-Smith, scholar of German and English and Staff Lecturer at Newnham College, Cambridge (1898-1928),36 "who first brought the subject before my notice" (ix), she is a close friend with Dame Joan Evans, a scholar of medieval France at St. Hugh's College, Oxford and the Courtauld Institute (Garlick), London,37 and she was involved in the Oxford Association of University Women.38 34

Helen Gardner's admiration of Evelyn Simpson left a strong impression on Margaret Edson, the author of Wit: A Play. In a letter to Mary Fleay, Edson explains that the character of E.M. Ashford is connected to Evelyn Simpson (personal communication from Mary Fleay and from Margaret Edson). 35 See Helen Gardner's "Preface" to John Donne: Selected Prose. In a letter to James Osborn (26 August 1972) Mabel Potter writes: "I am sending you under separate cover an article of Evelyn Simpson entitled The Local Setting of Henry Vaughan's Poetry…at the time of her death Mrs. Simpson was making some revisions in this and several other unpublished articles for a proposed collection of essays. She had asked me to help her with checking and proof, as I had done for the Sermons. Thus I had several of the articles, and Mary Fleay sent me the rest after her mother's death. Two of them I prepared for publication and sent to Helen Gardner to try to find a publisher, which she did. The others were discarded, except for this Vaughan essay….two years ago I…decided to submit the essay in a condensed form to a Welsh magazine (OSB MSS 7. Box 61. Folder 1268). Only one offprint, of Simpson's 1965 essay "Two Notes on Donne" is to be found in the Dame Helen Gardner Papers, at the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I would like to thank Dennis Flynn for his assistance in this matter. 36 I would like to thank Anne Thomson, College Archivist, Newnham College, for this information. Steele-Smith was known for her translation from the German of Friedrich Kaufmann's Northern Mythology. 37 Simpson extends a wedding invitation to Evans, and joins in honoring her at a dinner at the College. See the letters dated 5 August 1921 (OSB MSS 90. Box 1. Folder 12) and 22 April 1933 (OSB MSS 90. Box 3. Folder 84). 38 In a handwritten note, dated 6 May (evidently during the war years, as it writes

“The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are There”

275

Simpson also used the money provided by the University of California Press to employ women as her research assistants, most particularly Mary Holtby, Oxford B.A., who "took the Honours course here in English, and is already interested in Donne" (letter dated 9 February 1955; OSB MSS 90. Box 4.Folder 99).39 Holtby's contributions to the edition of the Sermons are evident throughout their correspondence, as can be seen, for example, in her detailed notes on the complicated intertextual relationship among Donne's 17th-century Latin exegetical sources in a passage from his sermon on Job 16:18 (Sermons 9: 221-223).40 It is, therefore, not at all surprising that the particular trials of women scholars are recognized and experienced by Simpson. In two letters she makes very real what Woolf has termed "the reprehensible poverty of our sex" (A Room of One's Own 26). The first is addressed to the Principal of Newnham College (26 July 1926), inquiring about the possibility of a grant to restore Simpson's pre-war work on Elizabethan drama, while the second (16 November 1954) is addressed to Mabel Potter, inquiring about the possibility of a partial use of the grant from the University of California Press for "payment for additional domestic help" (OSB MSS 90.Box 4.Folder 98): (to the Principal): I know that the allocation of grants from the Stuart Research Fund rests with the Fellowship Committee, but I thought that I should like to ask your advice whether the Committee would be likely to receive favourably an application for a small grant, e.g., £25. I am anxious to go on doing a certain amount of research work, as I have now had a fairly long training & I love the work for its own sake. The research which I have done since my marriage has, however, been very unrenumerative….I hardly feel justified in spending time on work which leaves me out of pocket. Does the about her daughter's army service): "I went to the annual meeting of the Oxford Association of University Women at Lady Robinson's house in the Banbury Road. We discussed the Parliamentary issue of 'equal pay for equal work' between men and women. It was decided to send a contribution of £2 from the Assoc. towards the expenses of the campaign, but the discussions showed how complex the whole question is, and how it demands family allowances as a consequence of equal pay" (OSB MSS 8. Box 7. Folder 5). 39 When Holtby left Oxford, Simpson subsequently employed Mrs. Roberts and Elizabeth Wade White (letter dated 7 October 1959. OSB MSS 90. Box 4. Folder 105; John Donne: Selected Prose vi). 40 Simpson explains in a letter (dated 8 May 1956) that Holtby's information arrived too late for printing with the sermon. This letter and the archival notes (dated 3-4 May 1956) are to be found in: OSB MSS 90. Box 1. Folder 22; OSB MSS 90. Box 4. Folder 101; OSB MSS 90. Box. 5. Folder 121).

276

Chapter Thirteen Committee agree with the L.C.C. [London County Council] in thinking that married women ought to devote all their energies to their homes or would it consider an application from me, provided that I could make out a good case for a small grant? (OSB MSS 90. Box 4. Folder 108). (to Mabel Potter): I don't believe a committee composed of men can ever be brought to understand that it is impossible to do proper research work of a high quality if one has continuously to interrupt it to cook a joint and 2 vegetables, make gravy & the like, make an apple tart, & when the meal is finished, wash up, etc, etc. answer the door-bell, dust the sitting-room, & all the hundred & one other jobs which you know so well. One can do some research work, such as checking proofs & answering queries about doubtful points, but the main task of sitting down to survey all the sermons for a volume and write the Introduction, and then deal with problems of date and historical background, requires that one should be able to concentrate for hours at a time, & have all one's books & papers around one (OSB MSS 90. Box 4. Folder 99).

Simpson's love of research is clearly evident here, as is her recognition of the need for financial support of this work, and undeniably for a "time of one's own." Simpson finds the (unshared) responsibilities of housework an inconvenience to her scholarly projects; in this context it is interesting to note the comment made by Beryl Smalley, historian at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, in the 1951 introduction to her book, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages: "Perhaps my greatest debt of all is to those at home and in college who have stood between me and the cooking and cleaning that eats up the leisure of most women today" (x). It is also worth noting that Simpson (understandably) allows herself to voice these vividly strong complaints to other women, revealing her conception of a community of women scholars coalesced by the misjudgment demonstrated by male committees. Simpson's private ire, moreover, spills over into her critical response to Donne's prose, adumbrating present-day concerns with gender. Though not a central focus of her own concerns with critical editing, Simpson does record acerbic remarks throughout her scholarly introductions and essays; whether it is her comment that Donne's "prose works show that he despised the intellectual powers of women" (A Study of the Prose Works 1924:62; 1948:71) or her revealing observation that "no sort of seventeenth-century sermons seems today more obsolete than the typical marriage sermons of that time, since the conventional belief in the inferiority of woman affects nearly all such sermons and it is unattractive to those of us who live in twentieth-century England or the

“The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are There”

277

United States" (Sermons 2:44).41

Conclusion Taking the lead from a previous essay in this volume, co-authored by Betty Travitsky and Anne Prescott, studying Evelyn Simpson has proved an exhilarating experience of "sounding silenced voices"; primarily of Evelyn Simpson, recovered from her letters, memoirs and published works, but also of the contemporary scholars and writers who responded to her both professionally and personally. Perhaps this silence is of a different quality than that discussed by Travitsky and Prescott: the archival silence of scholarship rather than of forgotten lyric, prose and dramatic writers; the critical essays needing to be unearthed from internet databases and from library shelves not totally accessible to all scholars; the personal reminiscences of early to mid-20th-century students, colleagues and family whose own voices are gradually being lost. This short discussion of Simpson's life thereby records the biography of a woman scholar from the first half of the twentieth century, whose life so resolutely and passionately intersected with women's struggles for intellectual emancipation, the first World War and the editorial re-conceptualization of the early modern English canon.

Works Cited Primary Sources Donne, John. The Sermons of John Donne. 10 Volumes. Ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. Jonson, Ben. Ben Jonson [Works]. Ed. C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson. 11 volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-1952. The Holy Bible, Conteyning the Old Testament, and the New: Newly 41

For further discussion of the marriage sermons, see: Lindsay Mann, "Misogyny and Libertinism." Simpson's two comments echo and expand upon remarks made in Simpson's early essay on "Donne's Sermons, and their Relation to his Poetry," in which she takes note of Donne's "somewhat cynical attitude towards women" in his poetry (Spearing 40), as well as surmising that "the various marriage sermons could hardly have been very pleasant hearing for any bride who possessed the slightest degree of spirit" (Spearing 47).

278

Chapter Thirteen

Translated out of the Originall tongues: & with the former Translations diligently compared and reuised by his Majesties Speciall Comandement. Appointed to be read in the Churches. London: Robert Barker, 1611. Sayers, Dorothy L. Gaudy Night. New York: Harper, 1995c1936. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Secondary Sources Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972. Bristow, Gemma. "Brief Encounter: Richard Aldington and the Englishwoman." English Literature in Transition 49.1 (2006): 3-13. Buck, Claire. "British Women's Writing of the Great War." In The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. Ed. Vincent Sherry. 85-112. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Culler, Jonathan. "Poetics of the Lyric." In Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. 161-188. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1975. Das, Santanu. Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Flynn, Dennis. John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Gardner, Helen. "Obituary: Mrs. Evelyn Simpson: The Prose of Donne." London Times. 12 September 1963: 18. —. "Simpson, Percy (1865-1962)." Helen Gardner, rev. Rebecca Mills. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Retrieved 24 January 2005. . Garlick, Kenneth. "Evans, Dame Joan (1893-1977)." In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Retrieved 26 January 2005. . Garnder, Alice and M.T. Stead. "Early Mediæval History." Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature 8.1 (1920): 9-14. Goodblatt, Chanita. "Evelyn Mary Spearing Simpson." St. Hugh's College Newsletter 9 (Spring 2002): 6.

“The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are There”

279

Gossett, Suzanne. "Why Should a Woman Edit a Man?" Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies 9 (1966): 111-118. Kemp, Betty. "The Early History of St Hugh's College." In St Hugh's: One Hundred Years of Women's Education in Oxford. Ed. Penny Griffin. 15-47. London: Macmillan Press, 1986. Kenney, Catherine. "Sayers, Dorothy Leigh (1893-1957)." In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Retrieved 21 May 2008. . Khan, Nosheen. Women's Poetry of the First World War. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1988. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lea, K.M. "Gardner, Dame Helen Louise (1908-1986)." In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Retrieved 16 May 2008. . Mann, Lindsay A. "Misogyny and Libertinism: Donne's Marriage Sermons." John Donne Journal 11.1-2 (1992): 111-132. McClellan, Ann. "Alma Mater: Women, the Academy, and Mothering in Dorothy L. Sayer's Gaudy Night." Literature Interpretation Theory 15.4 (2004): 321-346. Nicholson, Norman Cornthwaite. "The Preacher of Paradox." TLS 28 August 1983:548. Oxford English Dictionary. Second Edition. 1989. . Ouditt, Sharon. "Nuns and Lovers: Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurses in the First World War." In Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War. 7-45. London: Routledge, 1994. Park, Sowon S. "Suffrage and Virginia Woolf: 'The Mass behind the Single Voice'." Review of English Studies. New Series. 56.223 (2005): 119-134. "Percy Simpson, Dr." In Obituaries from the Times 1961-1970. Comp. Frank C. Roberts. 730-1. [16 November 1962: 15]. Reading, England: Newspaper Archive Developments, 1975. Phillips, Ann. (ed.). A Newnham Anthology. Cambridge: Newnham College, 1979. Phillips, David. "Simpson, Evelyn Mary (1885-1963)." In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Retrieved 24 January 2005. .

280

Chapter Thirteen

Shillingsburg, Peter L. Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Smalley, Beryl D. The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. Second Edition. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame press, 1964c1951. Sutherland, Gillian. "Emily Davies, the Sidgwicks and the Education of Women in Cambridge." In Cambridge Minds. Ed. Richard Mason. 3447. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. —. "'Nasty Forward Minxes': Cambridge and the Higher Education of Women." In Cambridge Contributions. Ed. Sarah J. Ormrod. 88-102. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Taylor, Anthony Brian. "Shakespeare, Studley, and Golding." Review of English Studies 39.156 (1988): 522-527. Tullberg, Rita McWilliams. Women at Cambridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wilson, F.P. "Greg, Sir Walter Wilson (1875-1959)." Rev. H.R. Woudhuysen. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Retrieved 23 February 2007. . Winston, Jessica. "Seneca in Early Elizabethan England." Renaissance Quarterly 59.1 (2006): 29-58. Woolf, Virginia. "A Cambridge V.A.D." TLS 10 May 1917: 223.

“The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are There”

281

Appendix Bibliography: Evelyn Mary Spearing Simpson Gardner, Helen and Timothy Healy (eds.). John Donne: Selected Prose. Chosen by Evelyn Simpson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Herford, Percy, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson (eds.). Ben Jonson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-1952. Simpson, Evelyn Mary "Ben Jonson's A New-Yeares-Gift." Review of English Studies 14.54 (1938): 175-178. —. "Ben Jonson: Selected Works by H. Levin [Review]." Review of English Studies 15.60 (1939): 477-478. —. "A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne by Geoffrey Keynes [Review]." Review of English Studies 9.33 (1933): 105-111. —. "A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne by Geoffrey Keynes. Third Edition. [Review]." Review of English Studies. New Series. 11.41 (1960): 118-119. —. "The Biographical Value of Donne's Sermons." Review of English Studies. New Series. 2.8 (1951): 339-357. —. "The Date of Donne's 'Hymne to God my God, in My Sicknesse'." Modern Language Review 41.1 (1946): 9-15. —. "A Donne Manuscript in St. Paul's Cathedral Library." Philological Quarterly 21.2 (1942): 237-239. —. Donne's 'Paradoxes and Problems." In A Garland for John Donne 1631-1931. Ed. Theodore Spencer. 23-43. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958c1931. —. "Donne's Spanish Authors." Modern Language Review 43.2 (1948): 182-185. —. "The Folio Text of Ben Jonson's Sejanus." Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie. Band 61 (Neue Folge 49). Heft 3/4 (1937): 398415. —. "John Donne and Sir Thomas Overbury's 'Characters'." Modern Language Review 18.4 (1923): 410-415. —. "Jonson and Dickens: A Study in the Comic Genius of London." Essays and Studies 29 (1943): 82-92. —. "Jonson and Donne: A Problem of Authorship." Review of English Studies 15.59 (1939): 274-282. —. "Jonson's Masques: A Rejoinder." Review of English Studies 18.71 (1942): 291-300. —. "The Local Setting of Henry Vaughan's Poetry." Anglo-Welsh Review

282

Chapter Thirteen

21.47 (1972): 60-70. —. "The Literary Value of Donne's Sermons." In John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Helen Gardner. 137-151. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962. —. "More Manuscripts of Donne's Paradoxes and Problems." Review of English Studies 10.39 (1934): 288-300. —. "More Manuscripts of Donne's Paradoxes and Problems." Review of English Studies 10.40 (1934): 412-416. —. "A Note on Donne's Punctuation." Review of English Studies 4.15 (1928): 295-300. —. "Notes on Donne." Review of English Studies 20.79 (1944): 224-227. —. "The Poetry of Donne. John Donne: The Divine Poems. Ed. Helen Gardner [Review]." Times Literary Supplement. 9 January 1953: 23. —. "Seventeenth Century Prose by F.P. Wilson [Review]." Review of English Studies. New Series. 13.51 (1962): 310-312. —. A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924. —. A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne. Second edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948. —. "The Text of Donne's 'Divine Poems'." Essays and Studies 26 (1940): 88-105. —. "Two Manuscripts of Donne's Paradoxes and Problems." Review of English Studies 3.10 (1927): 129-145. —. "Two Notes on Donne." Review of English Studies. New Series. 16.62 (1965): 140-150. —. (ed.). The Courtier's Library, or Catalogus librorum aulicorum incomparabilium et non vendibilium. With a translation by Percy Simpson. London: Nonesuch Press, 1930. —. (ed.). Donne's Sermon of Valediction at his Going into Germany, Preached at Lincoln's Inn, April 18, 1619. Printed from the original version in the Lothian and Ashmole manuscripts and from XXVI sermons. London: Nonesuch Press, 1932. —. (ed.). Essays in Divinity. By the late Dr Donne. Being several disquisitions, interwoven with meditations and prayers: before he entered into Holy Orders. Now made publick by his son J. D. [John Donne]. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. —. (ed.). John Donne's Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Simpson, Evelyn Mary and George Reuben Potter (eds.). The Sermons of John Donne. 10 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 19531962.

“The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are There”

283

Spearing, Edward. The Patrimony of the Roman Church in the Time of Gregory the Great. Ed. Evelyn M. Spearing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918. Spearing, Evelyn Mary. "Alexander Nevile's Translation of Seneca's 'Oedipus'." Modern Language Review 15.4 (1920): 359-363. —. "A Chronological Arrangement of Donne's Sermons." Modern Language Review 8.4 (1913): 468-483. —. "Concerning Sophocles." Persean Magazine 4.30 (1904): 101-107. —. "Donne's Sermons, and their Relation to his Poetry." Modern Language Review 7.1 (1912): 40-53. —. "The Elizabethan 'Tenne Tragedies of Seneca'." Modern Language Review 4.4 (1908-9): 437-461. —. The Elizabethan Translations of Seneca's Tragedies. Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1912. —. From Cambridge to Camiers under the Red Cross. Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1917. —. "John Donne and his Theology." Church Quarterly Review 78.156 (1914): 362-388. —. "John Donne and Re-Union." The Churchman 28 (March 1914): 202209. —. "More Impressions of V.A.D. Work in France." Newnham College Roll Letter 1916:41-48. —. "Some Cornish Churches." Persean Magazine 4.34 (1905): 292-295. —. "The Tragedies of Seneca Translated into English Verse by Frank Justus Miller [Review]." Modern Language Review 7.2 (1912): 246248. —. "V.A.D. Work in France." Newnham College Roll Letter 1915:34-38. —. "With the V.A.D. in France: Winter." Englishwoman 30.90 (1916): 239-245. —. (ed.). Studley's Translations of Seneca's Agamemnon and Medea. Edited from the Octavos of 1566. Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1913.

CONTRIBUTORS

Jonathan Gibson works at the English Subject Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London. He previously worked as a lecturer at the universities of Exeter and Durham and at Queen Mary, University of London. He has published articles on a wide range of early modern topics and is co-editor with Victoria Burke of Women and Early Modern Manuscript Culture (Ashgate, 2004). He is currently writing a book on the manuscripts of the Elizabethan courtier Arthur Gorges. Chanita Goodblatt is a Senior Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Ben-Gurion University. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Written with the Fingers of Man's Hand: John Donne and Christian Hebraism (Duquesne University Press), and co-editor (with Howard Kreisel) of the collected volume Tradition, Heterodoxy and Religious Culture: Judaism and Christianity in the Early Modern Period (BenGurion University Press). She has published essays on medieval and early modern literature, contemporary English, American and Hebrew poetry, and cognitive poetics in Style, Mosaic, Poetics Today, Prooftexts, Renaissance and Reformation, Language and Literature, and Exemplaria. Her current project is a book on Cognitive Literary Studies and the Renaissance. Suzanne Gossett is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. She is a General Editor of Arden Early Modern Drama, for whom she is completing an edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster. She writes on issues of editing, feminism, and collaboration, and is the editor of many early modern plays, including Shakespeare’s Pericles for Arden (2004), Middleton and Rowley’s A Fair Quarrel (Collected Middleton, 2007), and Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s Eastward Ho! for the Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson (forthcoming.) Erin Henriksen is a lecturer in English Literature at Tel-Aviv University. She is the editor of Fiction of Unknown and Uncertain Female Authorship, in the Ashgate Press series of The Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library. She is also the author of "Dressed as Esther: The Value of Concealment in Ester Sowernam’s Biblical Pseudonym," Women’s Writing 10 (2003) and "The Passion in the Poems: Milton’s Poetics of

286

Contributors

Omission and Supplement", in Milton’s Legacy, eds. C. Durham and K. Pruitt (Susquehanna University Press, 2004). Ann Hurley is Professor of English Literature at Wagner College. She is the author of John Donne’s Poetry and Early Modern Visual Culture (2005) and co-editor (with Kate Greenspan) of ‘So Rich a Tapestry’: The Sister Arts and Cultural Studies (1995). She has published essays on Donne, on seventeenth-century non-dramatic poetry, on the intersections of literature and the visual arts, and on women writers of the early modern period. She is currently working on an edition of two plays by Elizabeth Polwhele. Judith Jennings is the Executive Director of the Kentucky Foundation for Women, a private philanthropy supporting feminist art for positive social change. She holds a Ph.D. in Eighteenth Century British History from the University of Kentucky and is the author of The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade, 1783-1807 (Frank Cass, 1997) and Gender, Religion, and Radicalism in the Long Eighteenth Century (Ashgate, 2006). Before joining the foundation, Jennings served as the founding Director of the University of Louisville Women's Center and as the Associate Director of the Kentucky Humanities Council, a state agency of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Zachary Lesser is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge, 2004), as well as articles on early modern drama and print culture in Shakespeare Quarterly, ELH, ELR, and elsewhere. He is currently writing a book with Alan B. Farmer on popularity in the early modern book trade, tentatively titled Print, Plays, and Popularity in Shakespeare's England. Leah S. Marcus is Edwin Mims Professor of English and Director of the Program in Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Childhood and Cultural Despair (1978), The Politics of Mirth (1986), Puzzling Shakespeare (1988), Unediting the Renaissance (1996), and editions of the writings of Queen Elizabeth I (2000-03), The Merchant of Venice (2006), and The Duchess of Malfi (1009). Jerome McGann is John Stewart Bryan University Professor in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Point is to Change It: Poetry and Criticism in the Continuing Present

Women Editing/Editing Women

287

(University of Alabama Press, 2007), The Scholar's Art: Literature and Scholarship in the Administered World (University of Chicago Press, 2006), Radiant:Textuality: Literary Studies after the World Wide Web (Palgrave/St. Martins, 2001) and Social Values and Poetic Acts (Harvard University Press 1988). He has also edited the works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Laetitia Elizabeth Landon, and The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse. McGann has published essays on editing and teaching texts in New Literary History, Textual Practice, Critical Inquiry, Pedagogy and New Technology. Michal Michelson currently teaches in the English Department at Bar Ilan University. Her recent publications include "'Our Religion and Liberties': Mary Astell's Christian Political Polemics" in Virtue, Liberty, and Toleration: Political Ideas of European Women, 1400-1800, eds. Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green (Springer Press 2007) and Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, co-edited with William Kolbrener with a coauthored introduction (Ashgate 2007). She is at present completing a book manuscript on women's use of reason and the Protestant religion in order to challenge notions on gender and authority in early modern England. Anne Lake Prescott is Helen Goodhart Altschul Professor of English at Barnard College and also teaches at Columbia. A past president of the Spenser Society and recently president of the Sixteenth Century Society (207-2008), for many years she was on the board of the Renaissance Society of America and is currently on the board of the Sidney Society and the John Donne Society. She is the author of French Poets and the English Renaissance (Yale, 1978) and Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (Yale, 1998) and articles on topics including the poems of Marguerite de Navarre, the English refusal of the Gregorian Calendar, Elizabeth I, Thomas More’s jokes, and Ben Jonson’s masques. She is coeditor (with Hugh Maclean) of the Norton Critical Edition of Spenser (1993) and (with Betty Travitsky) of Female and Male Voices in Early Modern England: A Renaissance Anthology (Columbia, 2000). She and Betty Travitsky co-edit several series of texts by and relevant to early modern Englishwomen, published by Ashgate. Recent essays include “‘Formes of Joy and Art’: Donne, David, and the Power of Music” (John Donne Journal, 2006); “Mary Sidney’s Ruins of Rome” (Sidney Journal, 2006); and “Two Annes, Two Davids: The Sonnets of Anne Lok and Anne de Marquets,” in Chanita Goodblatt and Howard Kreisel’s edited collection, Tradition, Heterodoxy and Religious Culture: Judaism and Christianity in the Early Modern Period (Ben-Gurion U of the Negev P,

288

Contributors

2007). Her most recent co-edited book, with James Dutcher, is Renaissance Historicisms: Essays in Honor of Arthur F. Kinney (Delaware, 2008). Her current interests include early modern women, almanacs, and the image of David in the Renaissance. Betty S. Travitsky is a Research Associate of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She was a founding member of the Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance at the CUNY Graduate Center, and is on the Advisory Board of the Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland. She is the editor of The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen in the Renaissance (Columbia University Press, 1989), Subordination and Authorship in Early Modern England: The Case of Elizabeth Cavendish Egerton and Her 'Loose Papers' (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999), co-editor with Anne Prescott of Female and Male Voices in Early Modern England (Columbia University Press 2000), and a general editor of The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library Essential Works (Ashgate Press). She has published essays on early modern women in Renaissance Drama, English Literary Renaissance, and Women's Studies, and is presently working on “Earlywomen,” an online bibliography to be mounted in the near future on MRTS Online: Bibliographies of Early English Writers, the Iter/MRTS website. Wendy Wall, Professor of English at Northwestern University, specializes in early modern literature and culture. Her books include The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Cornell University Press, 1993) and Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which was a finalist for the James Russell Lowell prize awarded by the MLA and a 2002 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award Winner. Co-editor of Renaissance Drama from 1997-2005, Professor Wall has published widely on Shakespeare, drama, lyric poetry, women's writing, food, authorship, theater, and print culture. She is currently at work on a book entitled Renaissance Recipe Books. Gary Waller is Professor of Literature, Cultural Studies and Drama Studies at Purchase College, State University of New York. His books include The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert and the Early Modern Construction of Gender; Edmund Spenser: a Literary Life; English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century; Shakespeare’s Comedies; Shakespeare’s All’s Well, That Ends Well: New Critical Essays, and

Women Editing/Editing Women

289

editions of the works of Lady Mary Wroth and the Countess of Pembroke. He has just completed Loss, Traces, Fades: Walsingham in Late Medieval and Early Modern England 1450-1650. His current project is a book on the interaction of popular religion and literature in pre-Reformation East Anglia. Gillian Wright lectures in English Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is co-editor (with Jill Seal Millman) of Early Modern Women's Manuscript Poetry (Manchester, 2005), and is currently working on a study of seventeenth-century women's poetry in manuscript and print.

INDEX

Altick, Richard 88-89 Arber, Edward 112, 114-116 Archer, Thomas 110, 122, 128-129 As You Like It 28 Astell, Mary 160, 165, 203-224 Aubrey, John 43, 45 Auden, W.H. 70-71 Ballard, George 203 Barclay, Robert 229 Barroll, Leeds 6 Barthes, Roland 83, 114, 117, 141 Beal, Peter 18 Behn, Aphra 177, 179, 193 Bellany, Alastair 168 Belsey, Catherine 137 Bennett, H.S. 145 Bennett, Tony 42, 52 Bentley, Richard 77 Blayney, Peter 113, 116 Bly, Mary 122 Boeckh, August 59 Bonian, Richard 103-106, 111, 112, 122 Boswell, James 227-228, 230, 231, 234- 236, 238, 239, 241-246 Bowers, Fredson 21, 57-58, 62-63, 68, 78-80, 166, 169, 171 Braidotti, Rosi 49-50 Brawne, Fanny 43 Breton, Nicholas 40-41 Briscoe, Samuel 184 Brooks, Douglas 118 Browne, William, of Tavistock 40 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 93 Burghope, Marie 159, 165 Burke, Victoria E. 155 Burnet, Gilbert 214 Burre, Walter 122, 127-128 Byrne, Muriel St. Clare 28

Cary, Elizabeth 17, 22-23, 27, 89 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle 22, 159-160 Chapman, George 106 Chapone, Sarah 210 Chartier, Roger 90, 107, 125 Charles II 191, 196-197 Clarke, Danielle 161-162 Clarke, Elizabeth 155-156, 169-170 Collingwood, R.G. 66, 73 Cook, Ann Jennalie 22 Coolahan, Marie-Louise 155, 159 Cowley, Abraham 209 Crashaw, Richard 83 Croker, John Wilson 245 Cullen, Patrick 6-7, 11, 22 D’Avenant, Charles 219-220 Daedalus, Stephen 84 Daniel, Samuel 18, 43, 48, 50 Darnton, Robert 90, 113 Dash Irene 6 Davidson, Peter 167-168 Davies, John of Hereford 17-18, 45, 147-148 Davis, Lennard 179 de Certeau, Michel 107 de Mornay, Philippe 41, 48 Dee, John 107-108 Defoe, Daniel 214, 219 Dekker, Thomas 131- 133 Dilly, Edward 231, 234, 238 Donaldson, Peter 86 Donne, John 19, 26-27, 43, 45, 87, 92, 133, 257-259, 263, 264, 270-276 Drake, Judith 213 Drake, William 108 Dunn, Esther Cloudman 28

292 Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry 155, 158, 163, 165, 173 Egerton, Elizabeth, Countess of Bridgewater 18 Egerton, John 18-19, 21 Eld, George 103 Eight Famous Elizabethan Plays 28 Elizabeth I 17, 42, 160 Ellis-Fermor, Una 28 The Empress of Morocco 195 Erasmus 77 Erne, Lukas 116 Evans, Robert C. 23 Evelyn, John 214 Ezell, Margaret 157-158, 175, 227, 228, 246 The Faithfull Virgins 193, 195-196, 197 Female and Male Voices in Early Modern England: A Renaissance Anthology 1, 8 Ferguson, Margaret 6, 22 Ferguson, Moira 204 Filmer, Robert 222 Findlay, Alison 197-198 Fletcher, John 106, 118, 129 Foster, Donald 23 Foucault, Michel 81, 90, 117, 141 Fraunce, Abraham 40 The Frolicks 190, 192, 194-198 Fust, John 146 Gabler, Hans 83-84, 91 Gardner, Helen 260, 271, 273-274 Garnier, Robert 41, 48 Gascoigne, George 151 Gibson, Jonathan 155-156, 159, 165, 169-170 Gill, Roma 30-31 Goldie, Mark 220 Golding, Arthur 46 Gossett, Suzanne 272 Grafton, Anthony 107 Greetham, D. C. 27, 76, 90, 169 Greg, W. W. 21, 78-79, 114, 117118, 166, 169, 171, 263-264 Greville, Fulke 18, 48

Index Grierson, Herbert J.C. 79 Gurr, Andrew 22 Gwyn, Nell 196-197, 199 Hageman, Betty 6, 11 Hall, Stuart 122 Hannay, Margaret 6 Harington, Lucy, Countess of Bedford 17, 19 Harington, John 19, 146-147 Harol, Corrine 216 Harry, Charity 232 Harry, Jane 228, 232-237, 239 Hart, Charles 199 Hartman, Joan 6 Harvey, Gabriel 108 Haselkorn, Anne 6 Helgerson, Richard 148-149 Henderson, Katherine 6 Herbert, Henry 189 Herbert, William 44, 133, 165 Herford, C. H. 25 Hermann, Gottfried 59, 66 Hewes, Arthur 190 Hibbert, Thomas 232,-233 Hill, Bridget 204 Hill, George Birkbeck 245 Hill, W. Speed 23 Holtby, Mary 274-275 Holzapfel, Rudolf 36-37 Hughes, Margaret 190, 193 Hume, Robert D. 189, 194, 195 Hutchinson, Lucy 159 Jardine, Lisa 107 Johnson, Gerald 116 Johnson, Robert 21 Johnson, Samuel 77, 228, 231, 233236, 238, 239, 241-244, 248251 Jonson, Ben 18-19, 43, 50, 92, 104106, 118, 148-150 Kastan, David 6, 12, 118-119 Kelly, Joan 4 Kennett, White 221 Killigrew, Thomas 193 King, Margaret 6 Kinnamon, Noel 19

Women Editing/Editing Women Klene, Jean 20-21 Knowles, Mary Morris 227-251 Knutson, Roslyn 116, 123 Kuhn, Thomas 60 Lachmann, Karl 78 Lamb, Mary Ellen 39 Lanyer, Aemilia 177 Latham, Agnes 28 Leech, Clifford 28 Leslie, Charles 219 Levin, Carole 6 Lewalski, Barbara 205 Loewy, Benno 190 Looser, Devoney 205-206 Love, Herbert 18 Loewenstein, Joseph 118, 119, 150 Lyotard, Jean-François 83 Maas, Paul 60-61 MacLean, Gerald 168 MacLean, Sally-Beth 122 Maguire, Laurie 116 The Maids Tragedy 29 Makin, Bathsua 213 Malone, Edmund 243 Manners, Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland 19 Marcus, Leah 118-119, 191, 227228 Marlowe, Christopher 87 Marotti, Arthur J. 20, 140-141, 163, 170-171, 193 Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith 206 Masham, Damaris 211 Masten, Jeffrey 118 May, Steven 23, 170 Mazarin, Hortense Mancini 217 McGann, Jerome 20, 29, 85, 94, 119, 166-167, 169, 171-172 McKenzie, Donald F. 85, 113 McKerrow, R. B. 114, 117 McLeod, Randall 119 McMillin, Scott 122 McRae, Andrew 168 Melville, Herman 82, 85 Meres, Francis 23

293

Milhous, Judith 189 Mill, Harriet Taylor 26 Millman, Jill Seal 155 Milton, John 175-176 Moi, Toril 169 Montrose, Louis 137 Moore, Marianne 71, 83 Morris, Brian 29- 31 Mumford, Lewis 79- 81 Mulryne, J. R. 30-31 Murray, Timothy 150 Nashe, Thomas 144 The New Mother of the English Renaissance 2 New, Elisa 204 New, Melvyn 204 Newman, Karen 137 Nichols, John 239 Nicholson, Norman 257 Norris, John 204, 210- 212 Nussbaum, Felicity 233 O’Malley, Susan 7 O’Neill, Eileen 211-212 Orgel, Stephen 150 Ouditt, Sharon 266 Owen, James 219 The Patrimony of the Roman Church 25, 267 Peitsistratus 76 Pepys, Samuel 196, 197-198 Perry, Ruth 203-204 Philips, Katherine 157-159, 167, 193 Phillips, David 264 Pickard, Claire 208-210 Pilkington, Mary 243-244 Pinkerton, John 5 Pollard, Alfred 78, 114, 116, 117 Polwhele, Elizabeth 189-194, 195197, 199-200 Pope, Alexander 77 Potter, George R. 26-27, 257, 270 Pound, Ezra 81 Prescott, Anne 1-17, 277 Prince Rupert 190, 193 Pulter, Hester 159-160

294 Purkiss, Diane 193 Radner, John 234, 238, 241 Radway, Janice 121 Ralegh, Sir Walter 165, 168 Ransom, John Crowe 80 Rathmell, J. C. A. 37, 45 Renaissance Women Online 6 Reiman, Donald 85 Richardson, Samuel 210 Ringler, William 45 Roberts, James 105 Roberts Josephine 11, 187, 192, 227-228, 246 Roper, Margaret 17, 159 Rose, Jacqueline 47 Rose, Mary Beth 2, 137 Rudick, Michael 168 Sacheverell, Henry 219 Saenger Michael 12 Sancroft, William 208 Saunders, J.W. 144 Sayers, Dorothy 258 Scoloker, Anthony 131-133, 139 Seager, Jane 158, 160 Seward, Anna 229-230, 234, 236, 241-242 Shakespeare William 17-18, 22-23, 29, 36-37, 77, 85- 88, 94, 103106, 115, 117, 118, 193 Sharpe, Kevin 107 Sherman, William 107-110 Shillingsburg, Peter 170-172 Showalter, Elaine 47, 159 Shulevitz, Judith 85 Sibthorpe, Henry 21 Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke 17-19, 23, 27, 36-37, 39-52, 133, 167, 177 Sidney, Philip 42, 44-46, 48, 144, 151 Simpson, Evelyn Spearing (Mrs. Percy Simpson) 25-28, 257-261, 263-277 Simpson, Percy 26-27, 260, 270 Skinner, Quentin 223 Smalley, Beryl 276

Index Smith, Hannah 214, 215 Smith, Hilda L. 204, 217 Southwell, Lady Anne 21, 159, 160, 163-165 Speght, Rachel 20 Spearing, James 259-260 Speght, Rachel 128 Spenser, Edmund 1-2, 10, 42, 144 Sprigg, Nathaniel 232, 234 Springborg, Patricia 204 Spurgeon, Caroline 28 Stallybrass, Peter 137, 150 Stampa, Gaspara 12 Steen, Sara Jayne 11 Stevenson, U.K.N. 262-263 Stillinger, Jack 26, 81 Stimpson, Catherine 7 Stoppard, Tom 83 Suzuki, Mihoko 204 Tanselle, G. Thomas 62-65, 81, 85, 113, 120 Tate, Alan 80 Taylor, E. Derek 204, 212 Taylor, Gary 28, 32, 117 Thompson, Ann 29- 31 Thresher, Joseph 237 Thucydides 68, 72, 73 Travitsky, Betty 3-6, 9, 19, 22, 277 The Trollope Reader 28 Tutuola, Amos 88 Valla, Lorenzo 77 Van Sant, Ann Jesse 218, 221 Vane, Harriet 258-259, 273 Vavasour, Nicholas 122, 124, 128129 Visser, Colin 195 Waingrow, Marshall 246 Walkley, Thomas 122, 128-129 Wall,Wendy 18, 118 Waller, Gary 228 Walley, Henry 103-106, 111, 112, 122 Warren, Austin 55 Warren, Michael 117 Wellek, Rene 55 Werstine, Paul 115

Women Editing/Editing Women West, M. L. 61-62, 64 White, Allon 150-151 Wilkin, Richard 208 Wilson, Edmund 79, 80 Wise, Thomas J. 93, 108 Wiseman, Susan 204 Wolf, F. A. 59, 60, 61, 68 Wolley, Hannah 213 Women Beware Women 30 Woods, Susanne 11, 22 Woolf, Virginia 175, 224, 262-263, 265-269

295

Wordsworth, Dorothy 43 Wray, Ramona 158, 159 Wright, Gillian 155, 165 Wright, Richard 84 Writing Women’s Literary History 227 Wroth, Mary 18, 22, 47, 159, 165 Wyvill, Ursula 165 Yeo, Eileen Janes 229-230 Young, Frances Berkeley 36, 37 Zwicker, Steven 107