Writing at the Origin of Capitalism: Literary Circulation and Social Change in Early Modern England 0198869460, 9780198869467

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Writing at the Origin of Capitalism

Writing at the Origin of Capitalism Literary Circulation and Social Change in Early Modern England JULIANNE WERLIN

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Julianne Werlin 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020952848 ISBN 978–0–19–886946–7 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198869467.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Limited

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Capitalism and Communications

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1. The Rise of English Prose

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2. The Beginnings of Literary Mass Culture

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3. The Problem of a Courtly Literature

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4. The Writing of Daily Life

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5. English Literature Abroad

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Conclusion: The Arc of Change Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgements I must begin by thanking James Rutherford, whose perspective and advice over many years shaped this book deeply. András Kiséry, Jakob Norberg, Nigel Smith, and Len Tennenhouse all provided extremely helpful comments. The core arguments of this study were conceived in conversation with Alan Horn. Other friends and scholars contributed to this work in numerous ways, including David Aers, Paul Alkon, J. K. Barret, Sarah Beckwith, Urvashi Chakravarty, Zirwat Chowdhury, Duane Corpis, Martin Devecka, Jeff Dolven, Derek Dunne, Penelope Geng, Matt Growhoski, Matthew Harrison, Andrew Hui, Heather James, Evan Kindley, Kat Lecky, Ross Lerner, Angelina Lucento, Lynne Magnusson, Nick Popper, David Russell, Will Selinger, Dan Shore, Susan Stewart, Charlotte Sussman, Aarthi Vadde, Emily Vasiliauskas, Elvira Vilches, Hadas Weiss, Judy and Jerry Werlin, Owen Williams, and Jessica Wolfe. Research for this project was supported by several institutions: I thank The University of Southern California and The Institute for Advanced Studies at Central European University, where I held postdoctoral fellowships, The Folger Shakespeare Library, where I held a long-term research fellowship, The Huntington Library, where I held a short-term fellowship, and the English department at Duke University, which provided me with research leave.

Introduction Capitalism and Communications

The Method This book is an experiment in conjoining two approaches to early modern English literature which, despite a seemingly obvious affinity, are rarely pursued together: the material history of texts and Marxist historical analysis. No trend in scholarship on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature in the past three decades has been more important than the rise of research on media, not confined to the history of the book or even manuscript, but encompassing communications as a whole. A wide variety of phenomena, including but by no means limited to methods of papermaking and bookbinding, readers’ habits of annotation, and the development of the postal system, have been shown to be relevant to early modern textual and literary history.¹ There is now an abundance of detailed, empirical research, much of it extremely illuminating, on how texts were made, circulated, and read. Scholarship even extends to the reuse, waste, and decay of books and papers.² As one leading book historian remarks, “attention to the material form has grown so pervasive among literary critics” that it now appears to form an “inevitable” set of questions and interests.³ ¹ A comprehensive citation of work in this field would not be possible, but landmark studies in book history include Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998); and more recently, Anthony Grafton, Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). ² Anna Reynolds, “ ‘Such dispersive scattredness’: Early Modern Encounters with Binding Waste,” Journal of the Northern Renaissance, Vol. 8 (2017), 1–43; Emily Butterworth, “Apothecaries’ Cornets: Books as Waste Paper in the Renaissance,” MLN, Vol. 133, No. 4 (2018), 891–913. ³ Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 175. Writing at the Origin of Capitalism: Literary Circulation and Social Change in Early Modern England. Julianne Werlin, Oxford University Press. © Julianne Werlin 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198869467.003.0001

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The same cannot be said, however, of Marxist analysis. Although the complex legacy of Marxist thought can still be felt in many aspects of literary and historical scholarship, the general tendency over the course of the same three decades is surely one of decline.⁴ Even the growing interest in capitalism and its history sparked by the 2008 financial crisis was not enough to reverse its overall downward trajectory. Perhaps the still-unfolding economic devastation caused by a global pandemic, with its markedly asymmetric effects on the population, will do what market failure on its own could not. As of yet, however, there is no resurgent subfield of Marxist analysis of early modernity. Yet such analysis has a great deal to offer the study of early modern literature in general and book and media history in particular. It can provide a clear and coherent method for thinking about the history of culture in material terms. Marxist historians of England have also produced an abundance of empirical and theoretical research on economic and social history, much of which has not yet been fully integrated into literary history, despite its relevance to core research questions.⁵ The most important advantages of Marxist analysis, however, may lie at precisely those points where it cuts against the grain of longstanding practices in literary and historical scholarship. To begin with, it insists on an uncompromisingly broad perspective on the past. This is in sharp distinction to recent trends in literary history, which has become more fragmented as it has become more nuanced and empirical. As different aspects of textual production have been explored in ever greater detail, there has been a gentle but seemingly irreversible tendency toward plurality and ecumenicalism. Even the objects under analysis tend to split and multiply; the study of culture becomes the study of cultures, of literacy, literacies. A Marxist approach, by contrast, situates the investigation of individual elements of a given era within the socioeconomic structure as a whole. It assumes that the conditions of labor and the struggle between classes shape every aspect of society. Although this approach undoubtedly raises challenges in practice,

⁴ Exceptions include Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2003); and Joseph Loewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), who situates his study of the prehistory of copyright within an analysis of capitalist industry. ⁵ This is a point that Sarah Hogan makes in her study of English utopianism and the transition debate, Other Englands: Utopia, Capital, and Empire in an Age of Transition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), which is itself a striking exception in its sophisticated use of the work of Marxist historians and theorists.

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it has considerable power in illuminating dynamics and interests that of necessity extend across social spheres—and across modern disciplinary boundaries. There are particular benefits to considering the production of books and manuscripts within the history of labor, class conflict, and consumption more broadly. The prices of books and broadsides are routinely calculated— but can the meaning of those figures be understood without comparing them to that of other commodities, or, for that matter, without reflecting on the changing wages and shifting forms of property in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England? Can the effects of the circulation of print from London outward to the rest of England be comprehended without reference to the capital’s role as the principal hub of commerce in an increasingly centralized market? Can the significance of changing literacy rates be grasped without considering the new importance attached to reading in a world of contracts, leases, and bonds? This study suggests that they cannot; rather, the logic of literary production in this period must be interpreted as part of the socioeconomic history of early modern England in an age of capitalist transition. The phrase “capitalist transition” raises a second sense in which Marxist methods run counter to influential tendencies in literary history today. Decades of critique have taught literary scholars that historical teleology must be avoided at all costs. The sweeping narratives that once structured interpretations of early modern England—some, admittedly, either simplistic or triumphalist—are no longer openly embraced, although their influence often lingers in a shadowy form. As one Renaissance scholar notes approvingly in a recent survey of the field, “literary scholars have largely left behind neo-Marxist or Foucauldian master narratives, and instead closely scrutinize the contexts that produced the texts they study, often drawing on up-to-the-minute historical research.”⁶ Marxist theory, by contrast, offers what is perhaps the prototypical “grand narrative” in its account of the rise of capitalism. It shows why the transition to capitalism must be understood as a systematic transformation rather than an example of simple continuity or even the slow accretion of contingent changes. Like the period designation “early modernity,” the idea of capitalist transition proposes that history has a directionality; unlike “early modernity,” it has a causal edge, implying that the engine of historical change can ⁶ Paulina Kewes, “A World Well Lost?” English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 50, No. 1 (2020), 76–82.

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be found in a new set of social and economic relations and the conflicts and competition they produced. Insofar as scholars have begun to doubt this proposition, they have ceased to use the term “capitalism,” preferring adjectives like “industrial,” or “modern,” or, conversely, “traditional” or “premodern”—words that, as E.P. Thompson wrote, “offer themselves with a specious scientism, as if they were value-free.”⁷ An emphasis on the gradual nature, complexity, and contingency of the historical process has seemed to warrant the rejection not only of the methods of Marxist analysis, but of the account of a transition to capitalism itself.⁸ Yet the idea that early modernity saw the emergence of capitalism has immense power for the analysis of early modern literary history, and this is perhaps why, though it has often been critiqued, it has never been entirely discarded. Here, as elsewhere, the implications of this approach for the material history of texts is particularly suggestive. England’s economic transition coincided with the transformation of its textual culture. The single most important aspect of that transformation was the incredible and unprecedented proliferation of texts that occurred in the period. Like other European polities, England saw an exponential leap in the quantity of writing in circulation—a fact that contemporaries noted incessantly. As one writer observed, “the world is full of idle bookes, and friuolous toyes, neuer in any age was the like.”⁹ To some extent, the increased amount of writing in circulation must be attributed to the technological miracle of print, whose adoption and refinement constitute one of the clearest watersheds in the history of literary culture. But the rise of English writing was never merely a question of the printing press: quantities of manuscript also soared. As Mark Bland has shown, in 1600 only a quarter of the paper imported into England was used for print; the rest went to manuscripts.¹⁰ At the same time, new channels of distribution and new methods of organization, from commercial publishers to government archives, arose in tandem with the growth of written matter.

⁷ E.P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?” Social History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1978), 133–65. ⁸ For many economic historians, “economic growth” has replaced “capitalism” as the object of inquiry. As Maarten Prak notes, “this shift took the ideological sting out of a debate that had been dominated . . . mostly by Marxist historians,” “Introduction,” in Maarten Prak, ed., Early Modern Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2001), 1–22. ⁹ Henry Crosse, Vertues Common-vvealth (London, 1603), Q3v. ¹⁰ Mark Bland, “The London Book Trade in 1600,” in David Scott Kastan, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare (Malden: Blackwell, 1999), 450–63.

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In England, this explosion of writing was inseparably connected with the country’s transition to an agrarian capitalist economy. From the deeds, titles, and contracts that regulated people’s relationship to property and labor to the streams of information necessary to merchant enterprise, the birth of a competitive national economy relied on writing. In another sense, too, capitalism shaped the production and dissemination of texts: that is, insofar as books and broadsides were commodity objects like any other, they were subject to some of the same trends in production and consumption, and were distributed through many of the same channels, as goods of other kinds. As the necessary instrument of trade and government, or as potentially profitable commodities, texts circulated along lines directed by English society as a whole. As a result, the most important changes that occurred in the English textual system over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reflected the rise of a competitive, integrated national economy. It is in this sense that early modern English literature reflects an arc of transition toward modernity—that is, toward a world shaped by capitalism. And it is for this reason that research on the material history of texts in early modernity, in particular, can gain clarity and depth from entering into dialogue with Marxist historical and theoretical research on the rise of capitalism. The contact between these two methods, however, should not be onesided. The vast and growing body of research on the material history of texts in early modernity also has much to offer Marxist literary scholarship. In outlining the method he termed cultural materialism, Raymond Williams called for an approach to the study of culture that would be thoroughly integrated with economic history—one in which the “means of communication” are understood as a vital component of “means of production.”¹¹ Media, that is, should be seen as part of the infrastructure of society. In his theoretical framework, the history and economics of communication, from the English language to television, were one of the points where Marxist politics and literary interpretation most obviously coincided. Despite his influential example, however, the vast majority of Marxist literary scholarship does not focus on the material history of texts, but rather on their ideological coordinates. A recent, excellent introduction to Marxist literary theory contains sections on aesthetic terms such as beauty, formal unity, and ¹¹ Raymond Williams, “Means of Communication as Means of Production,” Culture and Materialism (New York: Verso, 1980), 50; Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961).

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realism, as well as ideologically powerful categories such as the nation and race, but does not discuss the publishing industry, the media, or intellectual property.¹² Literature, in such studies, is understood as a vehicle for ideas, not as a commodity in its own right. The interpretation of the intellectual content and literary form of writing is, of course, the core activity of literary study. But early modern scholarship has demonstrated that no literary history can be complete without a subtle and empirically rigorous understanding of how texts are made and consumed at a given moment. The field now possesses an unprecedented amount of research on various elements of textual history, ranging from the pioneering bibliographic scholarship of D.F. McKenzie to Steven May and Arthur Marotti’s work on manuscript circulation to William Sherman’s studies of readership, among many others.¹³ Scholars have shown how the conditions governing the making of books and manuscripts shaped the form and content of major works of literature, as well as molding literary style and sensibility within the culture at large. They have also shown how textual history intersected with social history, including the history of gender and sexuality.¹⁴ The result is a genuinely materialist understanding of literature, in which, at least where the history of writing is concerned, no clean lines can be drawn between material base and intellectual superstructure. There is every reason to think, then, that a genuine conversation between the material history of texts and Marxist literary and historical research could bring fresh perspectives and greater clarity to both. The purpose of this study is to sketch some pathways along which such research could proceed. Its focus is on the emergence of agrarian capitalism and the consequent formation of a national market in England, a pivotal event in the history of writing and an episode in which writing played a crucial role as

¹² Barbara Foley, Marxist Literary Criticism Today (New York: Verso, 2019). ¹³ John Barnard and D.F. McKenzie, eds., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Steven W. May and Arthur F. Marotti, Ink, Stink Bait, Revenge, and Queen Elizabeth: A Yorkshire Yeoman’s Household Book (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Many other comparable volumes could, of course, be cited. ¹⁴ Studies of the material text and gender have shed particular light on the relation between the physical book or manuscript and social history, as for example, Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Helen Smith, Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Patricia Pender, ed., Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

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infrastructure, not just ideology. With the creation of the printed bank note at the end of the seventeenth century, England only confirmed the relation between writing and capitalism that was embedded in its history from the Tudor age onward.

A Changing Economy Because even those who agree that capitalism marked a new epoch disagree about its timing, location, and causes, the term cannot be used without some clarification. In this study, I focus on a coherent set of changes concentrated in the period from the late sixteenth century to the late seventeenth century. Although continuities span every historical era, this slice of time was a fateful one for the history of capitalism. Across Europe, the sixteenth century was an era of expansion, as a growing population finally began to match, and then exceed, the medieval totals reached before the Black Death. More sophisticated markets and a quicker pace of trade linked European ports and capitals, while colonial conquests created global forms of commerce, including the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade. Everywhere there were new commodities—books among them—new trade routes, and new systems of communication and exchange. Although England was geographically, economically, and culturally peripheral to the core European countries, it participated in all of these trends. Yet as a result of its own social configuration and complex history, it responded to them in a distinctive way. It was this response that made it a precocious site of economic development—the place where, Marx wrote, the transition to capitalism took “the classic form.”¹⁵ This is a rather ambiguous formulation, and scholars have used it as evidence on both sides in debates about whether England was a true economic outlier or merely a variant of a larger European pattern. In addition, there is considerable disagreement as to whether England is even the relevant unit of social analysis. It is, on the one hand, too small. Many patterns of culture and trade reached unevenly over the British Isles, to Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as across the English Channel to continental Europe.¹⁶ On the other hand, it is too large: ¹⁵ Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976), 876. ¹⁶ John Kerrigan, among others, has demonstrated that it is not possible to understand English literature or history without taking England’s relations with Scotland, Ireland, and Wales into account, in Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics, 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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within England, there was an immense degree of regional variation. One only has to consider, for instance, London, Yorkshire, and Cornwall to call to mind the differences between localities in this era—or indeed, in our own. Despite such inevitable variation, however, England’s shared legal structure, social and linguistic practices, and comparatively high degree of economic integration still make it possible to sketch general tendencies and, ultimately, a common trajectory of change.¹⁷ Bearing in mind the caveats above, in the sixteenth century it is possible to begin to discern certain key economic shifts within England, which contributed to the rise of a profit-seeking, market-driven agriculture. As elsewhere in Europe, a period of steep inflation, sometimes referred to as the “price revolution,” raised the price of English commodities. “All things are growen dearer,” one contemporary complained, “not in England alone, but universallie in respect to former ages.”¹⁸ For England’s governing classes, whose power and wealth still overwhelmingly derived from landowning, rising prices created a new incentive to wrest greater profits from the land, and most sought to raise rents by one means or another. They converted traditional terms of tenancy, including copyhold, into competitive leases, which could be raised at will.¹⁹ Where possible, they expropriated the common land of peasants by legal or illegal means: through enclosure, Marx’s key example of “primitive accumulation,” they expelled peasants from the waste grounds and shared fields to which they had traditional

¹⁷ Steve Hindle has shown how the period of intensive state formation between the middle of the sixteenth and the middle of the seventeenth centuries contributed to its social and economic history, in The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640 (London: Macmillan, 2000). ¹⁸ “Treatise on the Under Valuation of Money,” c.1600, The Huntington Library, MS EL 2242. This interesting anonymous tract, now found in the Ellesmere papers of the Huntington Library, proposes the creation of a fiat currency uncoupled from the value of precious metal. ¹⁹ Robert Brenner argues for the conversion of traditional forms of tenure into competitive leases as the key factor in the origin of capitalism, in “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review, No. 104 (1977), 25–92; “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Past & Present, Vol. 70, No. 1 (1976), 30–75. For a defense of the category of agrarian capitalism, see Michael Andrew Žmolek, “The Case for Agrarian Capitalism: A Response to Albritton,” The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 27, No. 4 (2000), 138–59. Jane Whittle, however, argues for a different picture of the conversion of customary tenures to leasehold: in her view, based on studies of Norfolk, it was tenants who pushed for the conversion of customary tenures to leasehold at the close of the late medieval period due to customary tenure’s inflexibility and the stigma that still lingered even after the dissolution of serfdom. They thus opened the land to market forces, inadvertently creating a system that priced many out of land, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk, 1440–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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rights.²⁰ By the seventeenth century, rents were the major source of profit for the great landowners, who for the most part were no longer directly engaged in agriculture. “Well before 1700,” C.G.A. Clay writes, almost all of the great landowners “were rentiers pure and simple.”²¹ With the rise of competitive rents, the land itself grew subject to market forces. So did its products, the agricultural goods that were the lifeblood of all preindustrial economies— and so, in due course, did the English people who lived and worked on the land.²² At the end of the period, land ownership was not merely what it had been in the Middle Ages, that is, a source of heritable wealth, political power, and the means of subsistence. It was also something novel: a profitable investment.²³ In this environment, “improvement,” a word originally denoting “a piece of land made more profitable by enclosure, cultivation, the erection of buildings,” became one of the seventeenth century’s most powerful cultural ideals.²⁴ The result was a slow but pervasive alteration of social structure that swept from the top of society to the bottom, from the monarchy to the peasantry. As the sixteenth century progressed, the feudal magnates of the aristocracy remade themselves as landlords. Surrendering much of their jurisdictional and military power, the theoretical rationale of noble status, they became a literate economic elite within a centralized state. The middlemen to whom many landowners leased their property, the perpetual bête noire of sixteenth-century reformers, also came to play a new role in the economy. It is a mark of how thoroughly this process altered the

²⁰ Marx, Capital, 875–80. There has since been much debate about the timing of enclosure and its consequences, beginning with R.H. Tawney’s The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1912) and including the response of Eric Kerridge, who argued, in contrast to Tawney and Marx, that the impact of enclosure was generally positive, in Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century and After (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969). ²¹ C.G.A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 144. ²² As Mark Overton writes, in agriculture by the nineteenth century, “markets and marketing had been revolutionized; private property rights were universal, and farming was dominated by the tripartite class structure of landlord, tenant farmer, and labourer . . . there are strong grounds for claiming [these changes] were underway by the mid-seventeenth century,” Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8. ²³ As Marx observed, “it is no longer land but capital that has now directly subsumed even agricultural labour under itself,” Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Penguin, 1981), 936. ²⁴ Oxford English Dictionary, “improvement,” definition 2a. See also Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (New York: Verso, 2002), 106; Paul Slack, The Invention of Improvement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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foundations of English life that the modern English word for an agricultural proprietor, “farmer,” originated as the term for a middleman: “one who undertakes the collection of taxes, revenues, etc., paying a fixed sum for the proceeds.”²⁵ Here, too, capitalism left its imprint on the language. At the base of the social pyramid, change was no less radical. For those who worked on the land, the introduction of a competitive, commercial agriculture had profound effects. “In many areas peasant life was altered,” Jan de Vries writes, “and in one country, England, it lost many of its essential characteristics.”²⁶ Rather than producing goods for their own households or for their landlords’ estates, many peasants were forced to produce primarily for the market in order to pay rising rents—and so they ceased to be, in the classic sense, peasants.²⁷ Others, having lost access to land of their own, began to work as wage laborers on others’ property. The mobile supply of needy workers who emerged in this period would become a permanent feature of modern life, laying the basis for a later industrial workforce. The transformation of the agrarian economy and of the social order toward the end of the sixteenth century laid the foundations for a new kind of domestic economy. By the early seventeenth century, England’s competitive markets had begun to bind the country together in a single, shared economic system. England had long been an unusually unified polity: as a legacy of the Norman Conquest, the competing jurisdictions and the “parcellized sovereignty” characteristic of most of the Continent had never been as pervasive there.²⁸ Nor, as a result, had the tariffs and tolls that fragmented many European regions, making long-distance bulk trade impracticable. “Compared with France and Germany,” J.A. Chartres notes, “England was a veritable free trade area.”²⁹ Unusually dense ties of government and commerce bound the different regions of England together. By the late seventeenth century, the nation was poised to begin a thoroughgoing colonial and economic expansion—one that was based not merely on merchant enterprise, military power, or the strength of population, but ²⁵ Oxford English Dictionary, “farmer,” definition 1. Definition 3 shows the evolution of the word in process: “one who rents land for the purposes of cultivation.” ²⁶ Jan de Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 47. ²⁷ As Keith Wrightson explains, rising rents “exerted pressure on tenant households to engage more fully with production for the market, focusing on whatever found the readiest sale in a particular locality in order to expand the cash incomes necessary to pay higher rents,” Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 139. ²⁸ Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (New York: Verso, 1974). ²⁹ J.A. Chartres, Internal Trade in England, 1500–1700 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 13.

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rather on the advantages of the integrated domestic economy first forged in early modernity. Ultimately, England’s national economy created a vital framework not only for imperialism but also for the Industrial Revolution, the event that led Marx and others to take England as the exemplary capitalist society. On the basis of a quantitative analysis, Jan Luiten van Zanden has traced a pathway that led from the increasing agricultural productivity of the sixteenth century to the emergence of an industrial economy in the nineteenth. “It would appear that the ‘Industrial Revolution’ of the second half of the eighteenth century was no ‘accident,’ ” he observes, “but the almost predictable continuation of the exceptionally dynamic development of the British economy in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and first half of the eighteenth centuries.”³⁰ I have sketched this history because it is the contention of this study that the circumstances in which writing was produced and circulated were intimately intervolved with capitalist development, including the conditions under which working people began to participate in market relations, making possible the formation of a unified, national market for commodities. In the chapters that follow, I discuss the conjunction between writing and capitalism from several angles. Each is a case study that seeks to shed light on a distinct element of literary history and the production, circulation, and consumption of texts. In Chapter 1, I describe how the standardization of English writing occurred through the creation of national, textual networks by commerce and government: the rise of a single system of communication for political, economic, and ultimately linguistic ends. In Chapter 2, I analyze the emergence of a popular mass market in the English ballad trade with reference to the appearance of commodities markets for cheap goods and the commodification of labor, defining features of capitalism. Chapter 3 describes how the changing position of the court in a market economy affected courtly writers, as new modes of literary evaluation challenged the status of aristocratic coterie literature. The influence of money and monetary relations on the depiction of daily life forms the subject of Chapter 4, in which I consider the links between diaries and accounts. Finally, Chapter 5 uses a reading of John Milton’s career to illuminate the transmission of ³⁰ Jan Luiten van Zanden, “A Survey of the European Economy, 1500–1800,” in Early Modern Capitalism, 69–87. Similarly, in an argument based on trends in real wages, Gregory Clark argues that English economic growth began well before the Industrial Revolution, which “is not clearly an abrupt break around 1800 from a static economy,” but “may just be the acceleration of a process that began about 150 years earlier,” “The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1209–2004,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 113, No. 6 (2005), 1307–40.

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English literature abroad at the moment when England turned outward to become a commercial and imperial power.

The Geography of Circulation The question with which I begin is a fundamental one: How did England come to have a national, vernacular literature in early modernity? How did English prose, in particular, become a common and standardized form, accessible to England’s literate population across the nation? It was with the question of the vernacular that Richard Helgerson began his influential study of literary nationalism, Forms of Nationhood, and many other studies of nationalism in the era—Elizabethan, Shakespearean, Miltonic—have followed his example. For Helgerson, the answer lay in the conjunction of English state formation and humanist ambition: the writing of England was “a generational project” pursued in a variety of genres and forms by intellectual Elizabethans.³¹ It was at once a political enterprise and an imaginative one, which both responded to and helped to create a national community. Helgerson’s study captured the mindset of writers such as Spenser, Coke, and Camden—men who composed massive tomes designed to express some basic element of Englishness. But the writing of England—and particularly, the writing of English—also had a more basic, and more literal, component. To create a national form of English writing, the various disparate regions of the country had to be conjoined through new patterns of textual circulation. It is here that the history of English literature intersects with the history of capitalism. For how and why did England’s regions come to be linked together? What motivated the formation of a national sphere of textual circulation? The answer to these questions cannot refer to the circulation of writing alone. Rather, it is closely bound up with economic and political development. As the ties of authority and interest that had long connected disparate regions drew tighter, goods, people, and information all traveled along shared lines. By the end of the sixteenth century, England was an exceptionally unified polity. Its political geography indicated as much: unlike contemporary counterparts such as the Netherlands, England had in effect only one major city. London was the center of trade, politics, and culture, “the hub ³¹ Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1.

:   

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of a self-expanding capitalist system, in a nation-state exceptional for its degree of political and economic integration.”³² It was also the point at which English dialects met and commingled. As George Puttenham remarked in his Arte of English Poesie, poets should adopt “the vsuall speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within lx. myles, and not much aboue.”³³ The process by which a unified English coalesced forms the subject of Chapter 1. “The Rise of English Prose” discusses the relationship between textual circulation and the standardization of the language. It argues that the consolidation of vernacular English writing was driven by the growth and centralization of the government and markets from the late fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Practical documents, the vast array of writings generated by the demands of business, played a leading role in driving literacy and shaping conventions of writing. Their influence extended from the rudiments of composition to literary style, from spelling and grammar to sentence length and structure. They reached, that is, from language to literary history. Two examples illustrate the point: the rise of the plain style, an old topic of scholarly analysis that has recently been revived by John Guillory, and the sudden emergence of an array of new genres of factually oriented prose at the beginning of the seventeenth century, including the essay, news, and the familiar letter, among others. In different ways, these episodes mark an inflection point in the history of English prose. They show how its consolidation as a literary medium was predicated on methods of production and channels of circulation that bound England’s regions together into a single system of commerce and communication. The effects of markets on the circulation of writing were amplified in the case of the literary market, which was confined by law to London and the universities. For the first two centuries of its development, until the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, England’s print industry revolved around a single cultural axis. As a result, print culture formed a homogenizing force linking regions. By the end of the seventeenth century, if not well before, even people on the island’s periphery were familiar with aspects of London, in part as a result of the dissemination of print. When printed texts left the ³² Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (New York: Verso, 1991). As C.G.A. Clay points out, “It was the country’s greatest port and commercial centre; and its political and social capital,” Economic Expansion and Social Change, 197–8. ³³ George Puttenham, The arte of English poesie (London, 1589), 121.

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nation’s capital, larger patterns of politics and trade dictated how precisely they traveled. In some cases, it is possible to trace how routes of commercial and political transit, including assize circuits, networks of fairs, and peddlers’ itineraries, also served as literary passages. The relationship between trade patterns and the development of a national culture is the premise of Chapter 2. “The Beginnings of Literary Mass Culture” considers the most popular English literary form of the early seventeenth century, the ballad. Like other forms of folk culture, the ballad was long understood as primarily local, made by and for the common people. This approach by folklorists and historians of culture encouraged close and fruitful attention to the lives of working people—that vast majority who nevertheless play so minor a role in literary history. But it obscured the very thing that made the English broadside ballad so remarkable. As work on cheap print by Tessa Watt, Patricia Fumerton, and others has shown, the English broadside ballad was a commercial form that developed in the competitive environment of London publishing. It represented something new in literary history: the origins of a national, commercial popular culture. As such, the ballad trade was the literary analogue to the mass markets for goods within English capitalism. In fact, it remained closely linked to other forms of commerce, since the peddlers who brought ballads into the countryside sold a range of cheap commodities and followed larger trade routes. The emergence of a mass market for cheap literature had implications that reached far outside ballads, however. A literature addressed to working people held different imaginative possibilities and used different mimetic modes; ultimately, the influence it exerted would help to transform the entire literary field. By 1600, then, some of the basic characteristics of early modern English textual circulation had taken shape. Although generally confined to England, the transmission of writing was unusually unified within it. Closely intertwined with the commercial organization of English society, it followed trade routes and administrative channels. It also penetrated society more deeply than ever before, reaching new social strata. This, then, was the characteristic pattern guiding the circulation of early modern English texts: unusually rapid development and an unusually deep saturation—but along insular lines. It is no coincidence that the same description could be applied to the English economy as a whole in the period.

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Writing and Social Change Many of the most influential accounts of early modernity have revolved around questions of the social order and the relationships within it. As a primary site of capitalist development, early modern England was held to exemplify the point in human history at which market relations, and the legal infrastructure that supported them, began to supplant customary forms of association, including the lineal claims to status of the aristocracy. England had always had a comparatively permeable aristocracy, with fewer legal distinctions between noble and non-noble status than were drawn on the Continent. But by early modernity, wealth, not hereditary judicial or military rights, had come to serve openly as the ultimate dividing line between gentle and non-gentle status. As E.P. Thompson writes, by this era Englishmen “valued each other not in the scales of breed and antiquity but in round annual sums.”³⁴ One late seventeenth-century writer could describe a gentleman as anyone who “by his wealth can live and bear the port of a Gentleman”—a formula that collapses gentility into affluence.³⁵ If the emergence of capitalism meant anything for English society, it surely meant the reconfiguration of class relations and social hierarchies.³⁶ For literature, this transition was thought to entail the move from what might be roughly termed a courtly to a bourgeois register—a shift that, among other things, was held to have prompted the emergence of new standards of taste and sensibility; the gradual decline of heroic forms such as romance, and the rise of middle-class, realistic fictions; and the transformation of the reader into an individualistic literary consumer. As the art historian Arnold Hauser put it, “the bourgeoisie gradually took possession of all the instruments of culture—it not only wrote the books, it also read them, it not only painted the pictures, it also bought them.”³⁷ The contention that the period saw the emergence of a new culture of capitalism has been much disputed, and scholars have successfully demonstrated the complexity, contingency, and flux of cultural evolution within this era.

³⁴ E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin, 1978), 44. ³⁵ Richard Blome, Art of Heraldry (London, 1685), 253–4. ³⁶ Andy Wood has made a case for the utility of “class” as a concept in early modernity, that is, centuries before its supposed nineteenth-century formation, in “Fear, Hatred and the Hidden Injuries of Class in Early Modern England,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 39, No. 3 (2006), 803–26, as well as elsewhere in his work. ³⁷ Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Vol. 3, trans. Stanley Godman (London: Routledge, 1951), 9.

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While acknowledging these qualifications, my study nevertheless adheres to the idea that in some important aspects of literary history capitalist development impelled a gradual shift away from courtly or aristocratic modes. My interest, however, is in describing by what means such a shift occurred: how, that is, values and assumptions embedded in economic and political history actually made their way into the field of literature. Considered at the level of style and structure, of methods of composition that were not fully under conscious control, the answer is less obvious than it might seem. Here an analysis of the material history of texts can help. One contention of this study is that the concrete constraints shaping the production of writing served to transmit capitalist imperatives to literary history. I take up this subject in Chapter 3, “The Problem of a Courtly Literature,” which considers the effects of emerging market relations on the politics of the Caroline court and the literary culture attached to it. The rise of literary markets, I argue in this chapter, cannot be understood in isolation from commercial expansion across English society—or from its political consequences. For while English industry developed within a monarchical state, it was only compatible with traditional, prerogative authority up to a point. In the 1630s, frictions grew between an increasingly autonomous market and a patriarchal monarchy that claimed considerable authority over the production and sale of goods. On the eve of the English Revolution, industry, including the book trade, became a central ground of contention. In other words, in a formulation that has been much critiqued as the “social interpretation” of the Revolution, the growth of market relations came into conflict with the authority of the monarch. Literature participated in these conflicts not only on the ideological plane but also through the market, subject to government regulation both as a vehicle for subversive ideas and as a commodity. Poets’ response to their own predicament sheds light on how market relations transformed conceptions of taste, consumption, and authority—ideas with implications for literature and politics alike. The English Revolution and regicide sealed the transition from one social mode to another in blood. In its upheaval, the political and legal principles underpinning an ascendant social order were clearly articulated. New ideas of legal and formal equality—emerging against a background of escalating economic inequality and grinding poverty—were given their classic forms of expression. Contract and interest theory, exemplified by Hobbes and later, Locke, represented society as consisting of autonomous persons: independent actors bound together only by personal choice. With their economic

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resonances, they were the philosophy of a society in which exchange relations were beginning to reconstitute the nature of community. As English markets evolved over the course of the seventeenth century, money came to permeate everyday life. But how exactly were the new financial relations associated with capitalism linked to the appearance of literary modes of representation? How did the growing power of money cross the boundary from ordinary experience to the written page? In Chapter 4, “The Writing of Daily Life,” I set out to answer these questions by examining the personal diary, a form that evolved in part out of accounting practices. Recent work on the diary by Margaret Ezell, Alan Stewart, Adam Smyth, and others has described the methods of composition of diaries, situating them within a web of textual practices. Drawing on accounting and the keeping of financial notebooks and records, diaries expressed the principles and literary characteristics of those forms. Anything with a price, no matter how humdrum, made its way into writing. So, too, did the persons who were linked to the diarist in financial or social relations, categories that are not easy to separate. The result was a record in which persons and objects were depicted as simultaneously individual and typical—as significant yet routine. Diaries produced a narrative model in which ordinary, private life became the primary site of value. In capturing mundane, repetitive incidents as perhaps no other form had done, the diary offered a pristine illustration of Franco Moretti’s maxim that “regularity, not disequilibrium, was the great narrative invention of bourgeois Europe.”³⁸ This chapter, then, suggests how everyday life took a new narrative form and received a new evaluation with the emergence of capitalism. It also suggests another proposition about literary history: namely, that one way in which the impact of changing socioeconomic conditions was transmitted to literature was via practices of recordkeeping and paperwork.

Expansion The first four chapters of this study focus exclusively on England: on how a precociously unified economy and competitive markets reshaped domestic modes of circulation and helped to destabilize a traditional social hierarchy. But England has played so important a role in political and economic history ³⁸ Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (New York: Verso, 2013), 15.

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not because of what it was in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but because of what it came to be. By the second half of the seventeenth century, it was an imperial power, taking a new place on the world stage. A hundred years later, by the second half of the eighteenth century, before the Industrial Revolution was at its height, Britain—following the union— had eclipsed the Dutch as the leading global commercial power. Its new role had an impact on its literary culture. Just as the transmission of writing within England had been shaped by capitalist development, so the transmission of writing abroad followed pathways created by trade and political influence. An example will help to illustrate this point. As Woodruff Smith has shown, in the seventeenth century, Amsterdam was not only the hub of European finance, but in addition, the center of a flow of economic information: “the nature of information as a commodity and as a byproduct of the operations of trade networks led in the seventeenth century to the evolution in Amsterdam of a central information exchange for all of Europe.”³⁹ It was an intellectual, as well as merchant, entrepôt.⁴⁰ But as the British overtook the Dutch as the axis of the world economy in the eighteenth century, the balance shifted. London surpassed Amsterdam as an information center, in part owing to the importance of the London Stock Exchange.⁴¹ By that point, London was also an information center in another sense: it had evolved from a tiny and peripheral node of print in the sixteenth century to one of the largest producers of print in Europe by the eighteenth. The final chapter of this study, “English Literature Abroad,” then, turns outward to consider the fate of English literary history in Europe. Although English literature would not have a major impact on the Continent until the eighteenth century, the seventeenth century marked a turning point: for the first time, it became possible for English writers to be read in foreign vernaculars. In making this case, Chapter 5 builds on a recent trend of research into the international circulation of literature, which has shown how swiftly literary innovations could leap across linguistic lines. But my ³⁹ Woodruff D. Smith, “The Function of Commercial Centers in the Modernization of European Capitalism: Amsterdam as an Information Exchange in the Seventeenth Century,” The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 44, No. 4 (1984), 985–1005. ⁴⁰ G.C. Gibbs, “The Role of the Dutch Republic as the Intellectual Entrepot of Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review, Vol. 86, No. 3 (1971), 323–49. ⁴¹ Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 20–43.

:   

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argument insists on the political character of literary transmission and, in the case of England, on its connection to the history of capitalism. It was on the basis of its uniquely integrated, domestic economy that England became a global power in the late seventeenth century—and that, in turn, it began to inspire interest abroad. Using the career of John Milton as a case study, I show how England’s shifting literary and economic position within the European state system transformed English literature. New ideas of fame, reputation, and canonization emerged in the wake of international patterns of textual circulation. For English literature, the modern literary system, in which a sufficient national reputation helps to ensure an international reputation, emerged in this era. With this concluding chapter, the study completes a trajectory setting out from the consolidation of a national literature under early capitalism and leading to its first, tentative diffusion with the spread of English power across the globe. From the perspective of material history, the political, social, and cultural developments of early modernity appear as part of a single process. All were equally shaped by an emerging capitalism, which influenced the transmission of writing no less than the transmission of goods or the movement of persons. While this is not the only angle from which English literature can be viewed, it does offer distinctive insights into the literary system. Above all, it helps to explain how England developed something that can be called a literary system in the first place: a sphere of literary circulation that interlaced the nation. It is this development that makes early modernity so significant a period in literary history. Each subsequent century of English literature has built on its predecessors. But the period from the late sixteenth to late seventeenth centuries witnessed the consolidation of a new kind of literature, one that was intricately connected to England’s capitalist development and, as a consequence, its national economy and culture.

1 The Rise of English Prose Modern English, and consequently modern English literature, emerged as part of the pan-European process of linguistic change typically referred to as the rise of the vernaculars. The consolidation of national vernaculars was driven by an array of interlocking social factors: among others, the growth of bureaucracies of Church and state with their insatiable demand for documents, a rising pace of commerce prompting literacy to descend further down the social scale than ever before, and new techniques of manufacturing that enabled the production of paper, and later print. Because the history of language is inseparable from the history of society—and vice versa—it is a natural, if rather neglected, subject for Marxist analysis. This is particularly true in the case of England, where vernacularization coincided with changes in the economy and social structure, leading to the emergence of standardized English prose and agrarian capitalism at roughly the same moment at the end of the sixteenth century. It is the story of the relation between the two, and its consequences for literary history, that I seek to tell in this chapter. In what follows, I describe how a national pattern of textual circulation arose as a result of new market relations at the end of the Middle Ages and beginning of the Tudor era, in turn reshaping the character of the English language and the body of literature composed within it. In taking this approach, I depart from much of the work on the politics of the vernacular by literary historians in past decades. Although scholars of Renaissance English literature have been closely attentive to the changing character of the language, the dominant strain of research has focused on the implications of such changes in the hands of the most skillful stylists rather than their underlying causes across English society as a whole. Contemporary perceptions of sixteenth-century English, too, have received considerable attention: thanks to a long tradition of research, including such important studies as R.F. Jones’s The Triumph of the English Language and Richard Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood, it is possible to trace the modulations of opinion on language over the course of the sixteenth and

Writing at the Origin of Capitalism: Literary Circulation and Social Change in Early Modern England. Julianne Werlin, Oxford University Press. © Julianne Werlin 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198869467.003.0002

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seventeenth centuries.¹ In addition, the complex of associations that linked the English language to a host of other commitments, including Protestantism, nationalism, imperialism, and humanism, have received powerful treatments.² Scholars have demonstrated that English could never be a mere medium, stripped of social significance; rather, like modern national languages, it always carried an ideological charge. So far as it goes, such research is highly illuminating. But recent studies in the material history of texts, including the production and circulation of manuscripts, have sketched another path forward. They have revealed a world of quotidian practices of writing, showing how aspiring officeholders used notebooks, how merchants exchanged information by letters, and how everyone from apprentices to noblemen were bound by legal documents.³ Understood collectively, such processes illuminate the full history of vernacularization. In doing so, they suggest a broader, and rather different, picture of the politics of the vernacular than that found in pages of Protestant reformers or literary nationalists. They depict a society in which wider patterns of trade were accompanied by streams of letters and accounts, and in which state formation served as a relentless engine for the production and collection of documents—in short, one in which socioeconomic change shaped literate and linguistic history. Such an approach was, in some respects, already anticipated by Marx. Writing of a later period, he described how “the revolution in the modes of production of industry and agriculture” made a revolution necessary “in the means of communication.”⁴ The

¹ Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to Restoration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). ² Sean Keilen, Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Megan Matchinske, Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Margaret W. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003). ³ For example, James Fitzmaurice, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1623 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012); James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, eds., Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). On government, Paul Slack, “Government and Information in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past & Present, No. 184 (2004), 33–68; Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2009); Angela Andreani, The Elizabethan Secretariat and the Signet Office: The Production of State Papers, 1590–96 (London: Routledge, 2017); Nicholas Popper, “From Abbey to Archive: Managing Texts and Records in Early Modern England,” Archival Science, 10 (2010), 249–66. ⁴ Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 505.

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sixteenth century saw the first of many revolutions in writing impelled by the rise of capitalism. The first purpose of this chapter, then, is to describe the connection between the evolution of English writing and England’s transition to capitalism in terms that illuminate their interdependence—what one scholar refers to as “the mutual interdeterminations of linguistic and politicaleconomic change.”⁵ The consolidation and standardization of English prose writing was a vital component of the emergence of capitalism, not simply an ideological reflection of it. Markets could not function without the transmission of information, while contracts and other legal documents delineated new forms of property. Examples might easily be multiplied: the point is simply that the reorganization of the English economy could not have occurred without widespread, well-developed systems of writing. Precisely because writing was so closely integrated with capitalist development, its own history and trajectory cannot be understood without reference to it. The chapter’s second purpose is to argue that understanding the social basis of linguistic change has consequences for the interpretation of literary history. A standardized English became the medium of literature. Its form and possibilities changed with usage, inevitably shaping the literature written in it. No one doubts, for instance, that scientific and philosophical writing in the vernacular—whether in translation or in original treatises— helped to expand the abstract vocabulary of English, including such now basic terms as “atmosphere” and “hallucination,” or that literary writers drew on this expanded vocabulary, as well as making their own additions to it.⁶ The point holds on a much larger scale for the practical documents, including accounts, letters, and legal paperwork, that formed a key point of access to textual culture for most people. A national, literate prose first began to emerge in the paperwork that formed the crucial ligatures of the economy and state. In these documents, the language took on new grammatical and syntactic patterns, as well as new resonances and significance, and this, too, affected literary writers’ usage.⁷ ⁵ Ian Parker, “The Rise of the Vernaculars in Early Modern Europe: An Essay in the Political Economy of Language,” in Bruce Bain, ed., The Sociogenesis of Language and Human Conduct (New York: Springer, 1983), 323–52. ⁶ Robert Stockwell and Donka Minkova, English Words: History and Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). ⁷ Comparatively few works have studied the consequences of linguistic change in grammar or syntax for literature; perhaps only in Shakespeare scholarship has this line of inquiry been rigorously pursued. Early examples include the linguist Otto Jespersen in his Growth and

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Taking the development of a standard English as part of a larger social history also helps to explain features of literary style and genre. Many scholars have noted that in early modern English, prose gradually eclipsed verse as the essential literary medium. A few, such as Franco Moretti, have argued that the turn to prose was connected to the rise of a bourgeois literary culture.⁸ It is impossible, he writes, “to imagine the medium of prose without immediately thinking of work” (18). But although Moretti’s point makes intuitive sense, the mechanism linking prose to bourgeois society and its ethos of work has been left rather vague. In what follows, I argue that the standardization of English prose through its use in capitalist practice, including mercantile, legal, and bureaucratic documents, had an impact on its form in every other sphere as well. At the same time, the great practical utility of prose—for those who could read—granted it a new prestige in the culture as a whole, including in its literature. As I will suggest in the concluding sections of this chapter, readings of the plain style and of the emergence of new prose genres around 1600 follow from this claim.

The Medieval Origins of Early Modern English In order to grasp the significance of the transformation of the English language that occurred in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, it is necessary to glance at the situation that preceded it. In the middle of the fourteenth century, English was not yet a standard language. Standard languages, in one influential formulation, are those that combine “minimal variation in form” with “maximal variation in function.”⁹ That is to say, they are codified across the geographic area in which they are used, with a single set of norms governing spelling, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. Relatively stable across time as well as space, they do not tend to undergo rapid fluctuations. As a result, standard languages are typically written

Structure of the English Language, 10th edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 202. Important modern work by Shakespeare scholars includes Jonathan Hope, Shakespeare’s Grammar (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2003); Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). ⁸ Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (New York: Verso, 2013). ⁹ Einar Haugen, “Dialect, Language, Nation,” American Anthropologist, Vol. 68, No. 4 (1966), 922–35.

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languages, and often possess a strong institutional basis.¹⁰ In addition to their uniformity and stability, they possess a certain practical versatility. They are not restricted to one aspect of social experience, such as religion, law, or literature, but are felt to have the cultural authority—and the resources of vocabulary and grammar—to be used in all of them. Middle English lacked all of these characteristics. It varied across regions and changed from era to era. In many areas of social life, it was not the primary language, particularly in domains that relied on intensive written traditions, such as government, religious institutions, and the professions. Heterogeneous in form and restricted in application, it was not a standard language; in fact, according to one scholar, it was not a language at all, but rather “a loose conglomerate of unstable varieties.”¹¹ A small but telling example suggests just how much variation was possible—according to one linguist, in the late Middle Ages, a word as common as “through” could have as many as five hundred different spellings.¹² The reasons Middle English took this form were political and historical, grounded in England’s government and class structure, as well as in medieval conditions of literacy. From the time of the Norman Conquest, the nobility spoke French, which was consequently the language of courtly literature and poetry. Latin, meanwhile, dominated clerical life and administration. As a result, the growing literacy of the High Middle Ages created the beginnings of a literate culture in England—but not in English. When England first developed a sophisticated verse tradition, it was in French. And when state formation spread practices of writing, they generally involved Latin documents.¹³ English, by contrast, was the language of the common ¹⁰ “In any language,” Raymond Williams writes, “it is the development of major central institutions—government, law, learning, religion, and literature—which leads to the emergence of a reasonably common language among men drawn from various parts of the region to take part in these central activities,” The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 217. ¹¹ Manfred Gorläch, “Regional and Social Variation,” in Roger Lass, ed., The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 3, 1476–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 459–538. As many scholars have noted, there are no purely linguistic criteria for drawing the line between dialect and language; politics, class, religion, and culture are intrinsic components of a standard language. See James Milroy and Lesley Milroy, Authority in Language: Investigating Standard English, 3rd edition (London: Routledge, 1999). ¹² Terttu Nevalainen, “English,” in Ana Deumert and Wim Vandenbussche, eds., Germanic Standardizations: Past to Present (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2003), 127–56. ¹³ Michael Clanchy argued that the use of writing was primarily driven by the state: as the English government came to recognize the legal claims of documents as superior to oral testimony, those who wanted to secure their possessions were obliged to record an evergrowing number of transactions in writing. “Practical business,” he argued, thus drove the

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people, who spoke a multiplicity of variants or dialects but did not have either a strong literate tradition or institutional authority. To write in English in the High Middle Ages, then, was to work within a language that was fluid, heterogeneous, and deeply marked by its social and class history. The implications of this situation were not lost on the most famous poet of Middle English, Geoffrey Chaucer. In the conclusion to his Troilus and Criseyde, the poet obliquely addressed a plea to future copyists: And for ther is so greet diversitee In Englissh, and in writing of oure tonge, So praye I God that noon miswrite thee.¹⁴

Chaucer, that is, feared that in a language whose rules varied greatly across regions and social groups, copyists working with a different set of conventions might easily “miswrite” his manuscript. Yet in this case, as in others, Hegel’s dictum that the owl of Minerva flies at dusk holds true. Chaucer’s ability to perceive linguistic diversity as a problem signaled that this very diversity was in the process of disappearing. His complaint is, to begin with, written in his native language. While he had composed his earliest lyrics in French, in his mature works he turned to English, a circumstance that testifies to the growth of a literary public for the language. Then there is the fact that in this passage, as in many others throughout his works, Chaucer understands his verse as a written form, meant to be read, not heard. In general, notions of correct or incorrect writing only arise within a highly literate context; so long as writing is understood primarily as a transcript of speech rather than as a form in its own right, it tends to vary with accents and dialects, which it naturally records. In the very act of deploring the fluid and varying character of English, then, this passage points to the beginning of the process by which it became a standard language, and a written vernacular English came to dominate England’s literary culture. new literacy of the twelfth century, Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 333. William Rothwell makes a similar point about the distribution of the literate languages as compared to English: “Latin and French would be found primarily in those places where the business of government was transacted and would be used by men for whom they constituted a professional qualification, not a vernacular,” “Language and Government in Medieval England,” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, Vol. 93, No. 3 (1983), 258–70. ¹⁴ Geoffrey Chaucer, The Norton Chaucer, ed. David Lawton (New York: Norton, 2019), 5.1793–5.

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Chaucer wrote at the beginning of one of the most profound social as well as linguistic transformations in English history. Just as the fate of English in the earlier Middle Ages was conditioned by the country’s political and economic structure, so, too, was the rise of a literate vernacular. In the middle of the fourteenth century, English history was set on a new course after approximately half of England’s population died from the ravages of plague. So rapid a loss of population had profound consequences for the economy and its imperatives. By giving workers a more favorable bargaining position, this demographic change hastened the disappearance of serfdom; by the fifteenth century, the English peasantry had won their long struggle for freedom. With an expanding economy, the pace of trade quickened, and the circle of well-off commoners, including merchants and artisans, widened. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, there were many more persons with the leisure and the means for education outside the restricted enclaves of the clergy and government than in the centuries prior. As new groups of men and women gained resources, they also gained a powerful motive for literacy. In all periods, the desire to manage property serves as one of the essential reasons people learn to read and write—indeed, some scholars have argued that the origin of writing is in account keeping.¹⁵ The late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were no exception, as more people began to keep deeds, contracts, and the plethora of paperwork that goes into recording and managing property. But many of the better-off commoners who found it necessary to use documents knew only English. Without a formal education in Latin or French, they naturally tended to write in their own language. As a result, not only were there more documents, but there were more documents in the native vernacular. The first great caches of vernacular correspondence date from the fifteenth century, such as the Paston and Cely letters. English wills, too, began to proliferate in this period.¹⁶ As Laura Wright has shown, London merchants switched their accounts from Latin to English in the fifteenth century—a habit that, in her view, had a decisive effect on the form of the language.¹⁷

¹⁵ Denise Schmandt-Besserat, How Writing Came About (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1992). ¹⁶ Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, 5th edition (London: Routledge, 1st edition, 1951; 5th edition, 2002), 141. ¹⁷ Laura Wright, “Early Modern London Business English,” in Dieter Kastovsky, ed., Studies in Early Modern English (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), 449–66. For a more general treatment of the impact of merchants’ writing, see Laura Wright, Sources of London English: Medieval Thames Vocabulary (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1996).

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It was not simply that more people were writing English, however. New patterns of textual circulation, influenced by England’s economic and institutional history, converged to elevate one particular variant of English to the level of a standard language, one that, increasingly, spread across the country as a whole. The commercial and political conditions of the late Middle Ages gave England’s capital city a new preeminence—and ultimately conferred the same preeminence on London English. With the growth of London as a center of trade, linking surrounding areas through its markets, streams of documents began to flow between the capital and the peripheries. Merchants in the capital exchanged letters and accounts with factors and trading partners in smaller cities, and vice versa. England’s expanding bureaucracy also played a role in the proliferation of English-language documents originating in, or routed through, London.¹⁸ Government clerks had long worked primarily in Latin, while the law courts used a variant of French known as law French. But in a legal and political environment in which English-speaking commoners were playing an ever greater role, some of the functions of the state necessarily shifted into the vernacular.¹⁹ Because they had a uniform training, such men tended to adopt shared patterns of spelling and grammar, contributing to a standardized orthography.²⁰ Chaucer, as an official, was a habitué of this world, and it is in part for that reason that his writing corresponds to modern patterns of usage better than that of many of his contemporaries. The missives of London clerks and judges ended up in the hands of merchants, noblemen, and petty local officers; they were read in every corner of the country, from the Scottish border to the ports and beyond. Working conjointly, government and trade helped to create the written connections that linked disparate persons and regions into a single linguistic community. London English began to

¹⁸ John Fisher, “Chancery and the Emergence of Standard Written English in the Fifteenth Century,” Speculum, Vol. 52, No. 4 (1977), 870–99; J.D. Burnley, “Curial Prose in England,” Speculum, Vol. 61, No. 3 (1986), 593–614. ¹⁹ Gwilym Dodd, “The Rise of English, the Decline of French: Supplications to the English Crown, c.1420–1450,” Speculum, Vol. 86, No. 1 (2011), 117–50; Andy Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 59–60. The vagaries of international relations may also have played a part. In shifting from French to English during the Hundred Years War, Henry V’s Chancery adopted the language of a nascent patriotism, John H. Fisher, “A Language Policy for Lancastrian England,” PMLA, Vol. 107, No. 5 (1992), 1168–80. ²⁰ Malcolm Richardson argues, “over time English letter-writers tended to imitate the language used by the royal officials at the same time that they imitated the dictamen format, thereby immeasurably aiding in the spread of a standard written language,” “The Dictamen and Its Influence on Fifteenth-Century English Prose,” Rhetorica, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1984), 207–26.

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displace its rivals: with a few important exceptions—such as the thirdperson singular verb form, which became the northern -s instead of the southern -th—the norms of an emerging standard English would be the norms of the south-east midlands, that is, of London and its vicinity. The altered balance of power between labor and landowners, growing numbers of wealthy commoners, the development of London-based patterns of trade, and the coordinating authority of a precociously centralized government—the list is undoubtedly a familiar one, especially within Marxist historiography. Such socioeconomic factors are generally taken to be among the most important preconditions for England’s transition to capitalism. They were also, and for the same reasons, the circumstances that made the emergence of a standard English possible. As England became a capitalist society, the written language moved in step with a changing social order.

Rising Literacy In sixteenth-century England, the development of a literate vernacular culture entered a new phase. In some respects, the development of the vernacular was an extension of late medieval trends. Yet there was novelty as well as continuity in the literary and linguistic culture of Renaissance Europe: here, as elsewhere, changes in quantity produced changes in quality, defining a new epoch in the history of the vernacular. So evident is the expansion of textual culture in the sixteenth century that many scholars have sought to explain it with reference to forces that were new to the period. Did Protestantism, for example, impel soaring literacy rates?²¹ Or was the sixteenth century first and foremost the beginning of the Gutenberg era—a revolution in the history of media and therefore of language? It might seem like mere common sense to answer both questions in the affirmative. It is plain that religious ideologies and institutions helped to shape the politics and dissemination of writing, the ways writing was consumed, and the subjects with which it was preoccupied.²² Nor can it be ²¹ Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Charting the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, a Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries,” The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 69, No. 2 (2009), 409–45. ²² Margaret Spufford makes the case for the priority of economic over religious motives for literacy, suggesting, in particular, that Protestantism and Catholicism cannot be interpreted independently of other variables such as urbanization, wealth, and profession, in “Literacy,

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denied that Protestant religious practice had an influence on linguistic standardization, at least in some regions: the impact of the Luther Bible on German, and via its translation, on Dutch, is well known. Likewise, there is little question that print helped to revolutionize the culture of writing, multiplying the quantity of texts in circulation across Europe by an order of magnitude.²³ In addition, the press played a special role in linguistic standardization, especially where punctuation and spelling were concerned.²⁴ It was not just that each copy in a given print run was, for linguistic purposes, identical. The number of persons involved in choosing between competing conventions was also drastically reduced, from numerous authors and copyists to a handful of printers, since printers typically used their own standards of orthography. In his preface to a translation of the Aeneid from French, Caxton complained, as Chaucer had done, about the variable conventions of English, which like the moon “is neuer stedfaste / but euer wauerynge / wexynge one season / and waneth & dyscreaseth another season.”²⁵ But Caxton, unlike Chaucer, did not need to fear the effects of careless copyists. Yet the precise effects of both Protestantism and print are far more complicated than they might seem. Neither can be understood as an autonomous factor in the rise of the vernaculars. For one thing, it is not easy to separate the impact of religious belief from other social variables: Which elements of linguistic history can be attributed to Calvin and which to urbanization?²⁶ In the case of print, it is difficult to discriminate cause and effect in the changing rates of literacy—that is, the extent to which rising literacy drove the growth of print culture, rather than vice versa. As important as such factors were, then, most scholars now recognize that they cannot be isolated from a broader complex of social, political, and economic Trade, and Religion in the Commercial Centres of Europe,” in Karel Davids and Jan Lucassen, eds., A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 229–83. ²³ See Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). For a critique of Eisenstein proposing a more socially embedded model of print history, see Adrian Johns, “How to Acknowledge a Revolution,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 107, No. 1 (2002), 106–25. ²⁴ Anja Voeste and Susan Baddeley, “Orthographies in Early Modern Europe: A Comparative View,” in Anja Voeste and Susan Baddeley, eds., Orthographies in Early Modern Europe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 1–14. ²⁵ William Caxton, Eneydos (London, 1490). ²⁶ Sarah T. Nalle, “Literacy and Culture in Early Modern Castille,” Past & Present, No. 125 (1989), 65–96. In cases where Protestant regions had higher literacy rates than Catholic counterparts, differences in wealth, skilled trades, or urbanization map onto religious divides, making it impossible to assess the role of religious belief as opposed to wealth or employment.

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forces. Rather, they operated within a world of shifting power structures and mutating conventions, determined by their environment as well as helping to determine it. The result of this recognition, in general, has been a scholarly pluralism that adroitly delineates the facts of change while moving away from a causal account of it. It is here that the approach of Marxist scholarship is needed. Without denying the range of factors involved in the rise of the vernaculars, historical materialism can help to bring a certain order and coherence to them by demonstrating their common basis in social history. It can suggest, that is, how and why patterns of socioeconomic change might have induced a revolution in communications that swept across cultural fields and drove technological change. Writing was, among other things, a tool, a vital instrument for organizing relations of production. With the growth of long-distance economic and political networks, written documents came to enable every exercise of power, the birth of every institution, the completion of every social event—including the publication of Latin primers or vernacular Bibles. In this environment, the possibilities of vernacular literacy grew, along with its necessity. In the case of sixteenth-century England, an emerging capitalism not only provided the preconditions for the growth of the vernacular, but helped to determine its direction of development. Where writing, in the past, had been useful for many, and indispensable for a few, in early modern England it became so deeply embedded in the economy that no one could live and flourish outside a literate system, whether they themselves could read or not. It is here, therefore, that we can first see evidence of what Benedict Anderson, writing of a later period, referred to as the “revolutionary vernacularizing thrust of capitalism.”²⁷ Examples of the importance of English writing in this environment are not difficult to amass. Documents proved disputed claims, especially as the legal culture moved from valuing oral customs to prioritizing written contracts.²⁸ Debts often could not be claimed without written records. It could ²⁷ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), 39. ²⁸ The period around 1580–1640 marked the highest rates of litigation in English history prior to the twentieth century. The sharp late-Elizabethan uptick in litigation was largely driven by actions for debt as a result of newly complex financial instruments and arrangements. As Christopher W. Brooks writes, “it was business which was ultimately responsible for the upturn in the fortunes of King’s Bench and Common Pleas after 1550,” Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: The “Lower Branch” of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 93.

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be difficult to keep, sell, or pass down land to successive generations without deeds or titles. “No landowner with a written copy of his or her terms of tenancy, carefully preserved with other ‘evidences’ in the family chest at home,” Adam Fox notes, “can have been insensible to the benefits of reading.”²⁹ And by the seventeenth century, it ceased to be possible to exercise any real political authority, that is, to hold any important office, without being literate. Sixteenth-century English men and women were thus thrust into a world that was governed by texts, as writing took on a new role in the organization of their lives and interests. It was no surprise that in this environment, many more people, primarily men, learned to read and write. Although the precise level of English literacy in the period remains much debated, there is little question that the sixteenth century was a period of rapid expansion.³⁰ Anyone surveying English society could see this clearly. The most powerful groups of society all began to read and write; in the process, their social role and identity subtly shifted. The aristocracy ceased to be an armigerous group and became, instead, a literate one, relying on positions in government and profit from land rather than the direct exercise of violence. As the poet Samuel Daniel put it, surveying the course of Tudor history, it was an age when “more came to be effected by wit then by the sword.”³¹ Likewise, commerce and the professions became organized through writing, and as a result, literacy became universal among merchants and professionals.³² Even many lower down the social ladder found they needed to be able to read and, in some cases, to write—different skills in the era, which were not taught concurrently. Among workers in the skilled trades, artisans, seamen, and even many yeomen, literacy was on the rise. The business environment was fast becoming impossible to navigate without it. As a result of these new

²⁹ Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 45. ³⁰ Many scholars now prefer to discuss “literacies,” rather than literacy, in order to capture the wide range of ability in reading and writing—separately taught skills—in premodern periods; see, for instance, Eve Rachelle Sanders and Margaret W. Ferguson, “Introduction: Literacies in Early Modern England,” Critical Survey, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2002), 1–8. The advantage of this approach is its potential for greater nuance. The disadvantage, however, is that it makes comparison across time and place impossible. For this reason, William V. Harris has defended using a quantitative approach to the history of literacy, even if such approaches must be highly provisional, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). ³¹ Samuel Daniel, The First Part of the Historie of England (London, 1612), A3v. ³² As Lawrence Stone has observed, the first Earl of Rutland could rise to high office under Henry VIII despite being unable to read, but he was virtually the last of his kind. Stone, “Literacy and Education in England, 1640–1900,” Past & Present, No. 42 (1969), 69–139.

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incentives to read and write, literacy rates appear to have climbed steeply into the last decades of the century, before growth slowed in the early seventeenth century, reaching a baseline of anywhere from thirty to fifty percent male literacy, according to various estimates.³³ In London, where rates of literacy far outstripped the countryside, it was higher still, perhaps sixty percent. Today, in an era of near-universal adult literacy, these figures are apt to seem meager. In their own age, though, they were remarkable. These rates exceeded anything in the classical or medieval European world, and they brought England roughly into parallel with the most literate contemporary European societies, such as the Netherlands. Early modern men and women grasped the value of literacy to the pursuit of their interests. Many sixteenth-century books and documents treat literacy precisely as a practical skill, necessary for the preservation of property. An example can be found in one of the more popular books of the sixteenth century, Thomas Phayer’s Newe Boke of Presidents (1543).³⁴ Today, insofar as Phayer is remembered at all, it is as the first translator of the Aeneid into English from Latin (Caxton’s edition, like North’s Plutarch, was translated from French). But Phayer’s Newe Boke of Presidents was arguably his more important contribution to the vernacular.³⁵ Certainly it was the more popular work of the two, with dozens of editions and revisions appearing before it was eventually superseded in the seventeenth century. Phayer’s formulary contained documents for its readers to copy for their own use—including deeds, leases, annuities, dowries, and indentures—in a bilingual format, with English and Latin on facing pages. In his note to the reader, Phayer suggested that its English-language text would be useful for the “meanly learned” and for those who “wyll applye theyr children to the readynge and understandyn of com[m]on evydences and wrytnges” (a2v). Phayer, that is, suggested that the English-language text would be useful for children’s reading. He assumed that for at least some portion of his audience, forms and legal documents would be part of the childhood training in ³³ David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Cressy’s conclusions are controversial, since he uses signatures as a proxy for literacy. Since reading was taught before writing, this may significantly understate the levels of literacy in early modern England, as both Adam Fox and Eleanor Hubbard have argued, the latter in the case of female literacy. See Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England; Eleanor Hubbard, City Women: Money, Sex, and the Social Order in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). ³⁴ Thomas Phayer, A Newe Boke of Presidents (London: Edward Whytechurche and R. Banks, 1543). ³⁵ Rick Bowers, “Thomas Phaer and the Assertion of Tudor English,” Renaissance and Reformation, Vol. 21, No. 4 (1997), 25–40.

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literacy. He had good reason to do so: merchants put their children to school precisely to learn a particular, useful set of abilities, including literacy and arithmetic.³⁶ Then as now, education in literacy was for many a practical skill. For those who had property to manage, literacy had become essential. But written texts could be equally decisive in shaping the lives of those who had nothing at all. From the Poor Laws to the parish registers, from the bonds of apprentices to judicial proceedings, it was suddenly difficult for anyone to avoid being caught in the net of writing that spanned the country. One anonymous early seventeenth-century formulary gives a sense of the range of documents persons could encounter, including passports, a letter “To stay a felon from execucon,” “A licence of a Tincker,” a form for the “Discharge of A fine taxed in the Starchamber,” and “a Comissione to ayd a Captaine to transport men,” among others.³⁷ It was not just officials who used paperwork: even tinkers now needed licenses, whether they could read them or not. As writing became more common, literacy began to mark out a line of social division. Local studies have pointed to a climate in which literacy was coming to be a polarizing characteristic, dividing wealthier, better-off persons from their poorer neighbors.³⁸ Examining the society of Colchester in the early seventeenth century, Richard Dean Smith writes, “The borough had become stratified in terms of literacy, with an ever-widening gap between office-holders and other inhabitants.”³⁹ Poorer, illiterate persons were aware that the ability to read was becoming a form of social power that they conspicuously lacked. “Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man?” asked Shakespeare’s Jack Cade.⁴⁰ One

³⁶ Keith Thomas, “Numeracy in Early Modern England: The Prothero Lecture,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 37 (1984), 103–32. ³⁷ Folger Shakespeare Library, V.b.184. ³⁸ Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1979). ³⁹ Richard Dean Smith, The Middling Sort and the Politics of Social Reformation: Colchester, 1570–1640 (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 101. Similarly, in a study of the Peak Country, Andy Wood writes, in early modern England, “a greater burden of evidence came to be placed on writing in legal process . . . This change in the evidential priorities of central courts gave the advantage to the gentry and nobility,” The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 152. ⁴⁰ William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2, ed. Ronald Knowles (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1999), 4.2.76–9.

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measure of the importance of literacy in this period surely lies in the fact that it could be understood as a source of class conflict. As English literacy came to permeate the upper range of the class structure, it also served to consolidate a unified language used all over the country. The speech of elite young men from Yorkshire might differ from that of their counterparts in Oxfordshire, but increasingly—especially toward the end of the seventeenth century—their method of writing did not. The innumerable practical documents that circulated throughout England not only served as the basis for an increasingly national system of property relations, then. They also, and for the same reason, lay the foundations for a national language written, if not always perfectly spoken, by England’s property owners. In the process, other dialects were relegated to a subordinate status, and the few remaining languages still spoken in England other than English, such as Cornish, were driven into obscurity.⁴¹ As English capitalism began to spread to other parts of the British Isles, so, too, did the written language. In the case of Scotland, a shared monarch greatly impeded the development of literary Scots-English after 1603, as London became the political and commercial center of the island.⁴² A similar pattern occurred in sixteenth-century Wales, creating a class division between English-speaking aristocracy and Welsh-speaking working people not unlike the division between speakers of French and English that had shaped medieval English culture.⁴³ In Ireland, England initiated its brutal history of linguistic as well

⁴¹ As English speakers and writers grew more numerous in Cornwall, for example, Cornish retreated to the periphery; the language would die out around the end of the eighteenth century. Stuart Dunmore, “Language Decline and the ‘Theory of Cornish Distinctiveness’: The Historiography of Language and Identity in Early Modern Cornwall,” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, Vol. 31 (2011), 91–105. ⁴² In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Scots-English had initially followed a pattern similar to that of Anglo-English, with the rise of a dialect to a written, national standard, a language related to, but distinct from, the written standard of England. But with the accession of James to the English throne, the Scottish court moved to London, and much of the Scottish nobility followed. The pull of the London court and trade gradually led to a decline in written Scots-English in favor of Anglo-English norms. See Amy J. Devitt, Standardizing Written English: Diffusion in the Case of Scotland, 1520–1659 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). ⁴³ In Wales, English took on a new status as the acts of union with Wales in 1536 and 1542 prohibited the use of Welsh in government and law. Increasingly bound to London trade and courtly society, the Welsh aristocracy and gentry became Anglicized. See Alan R. Thomas, “The Welsh Language,” in Donald MacAulay, ed., The Celtic Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 251–345.

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as political and economic imperialism, which would have so profound an effect on the globe.⁴⁴ By the end of the sixteenth century, then, England was becoming a capitalist society—one that was increasingly unified across geographic lines, but highly stratified along the lines of class. The written English language was forged in this process, by repeated acts of use and circulation. In more ways than one, it bore the mark of its origin. The orientation of English prose, the assumptions embedded in vocabulary, grammar, and style, cannot be fully disentangled from its history of use. As the vernacular took on new functions, it became the key language of business, and transacting business, in turn, was one of the primary purposes of writing.⁴⁵ For some, indeed, it could appear to be its only purpose. Hence one early seventeenth-century letter writer, the aspiring young gentleman Roger Slingsby, thought it necessary to apologize to his well-connected uncle for being so “presumptuous” as to write despite “not having any businesse.”⁴⁶ England’s changing economy had become intimately entangled with its system of writing.

Toward a Literate Style Understanding the effects of socioeconomic change on English linguistic development has consequences for the interpretation of early modern prose style, and it is to these that I now turn. Virtually all scholars agree that the sixteenth century was a momentous era for English literary writing, as new groups of writers sought to develop the resources of the vernacular. It was in this period, with its rising rates of literacy, new mores, and commercial literary market, that English prose became a medium at once regular and flexible, precise and capacious. Many scholars, concerned primarily with the literary landmarks of the era rather than the culture of writing as a whole, ⁴⁴ Finally, in Ireland, the brutal Tudor conquest had a linguistic component: it made English, not Gaelic, the language of administration, enforcing the bilingualism among the educated that would become so pronounced a part of Ireland’s literary culture. See Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early-Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). ⁴⁵ The semantic range of business, in this era, was close to that of the Latin negotium. It was not restricted to commercial affairs, but could refer to political maneuvering. Yet it did typically imply the pursuit of advantage. The main branch of the Slingsby family were improving landlords based in Yorkshire but with properties across England; a later member of the family, Henry Slingsby, would become Master of the Mint. ⁴⁶ Folger Shakespeare Library, X.d.428 (186).

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have located the most important aspects of the evolution of English prose in writers’ humanist culture, their Latin or Continental learning, their courtly ambitions, and their daring inventions of vocabulary and style. There is no question that such phenomena played an important role in the history not only of literary English prose, but of the language itself: the six thousand or so words imported into English between 1590 and 1609 offer an eloquent testimony to the impact of deliberate literary invention on the vernacular.⁴⁷ Nevertheless, tracing the history of English prose style through high literary culture alone offers at best a partial and at worst a misleading view of the nature of linguistic change in the era. As I argued above, the geographic and class distribution, the function, and therefore the qualities of English were largely driven by practical necessity, not intellectual predilection. English habits of writing took shape at least as much through routine acts of composition—letters, contracts, deeds, the demands of business—as through more elaborate performances. From this perspective, the evolution of a literary style in early modernity cannot be seen just as a question of deliberate choices of technique and artistry, much less a phenomenon restricted to the most eloquent and inspired of literary works, remarkable as these are. It is also part of the history of linguistic standardization, which occurred at the intersection of grammar, vocabulary, syntax, orthography, punctuation, and even style, features of the language that are not always as easy to distinguish as they might seem. The mere existence of an increasingly standardized written variant, no matter how simple or inelegant, had stylistic implications of the greatest significance, which still pervade every literary work and have even come to influence speech itself. In English today, as in most languages with a written form, there are sustained differences between writing and speech. Writing, of course, must maintain close contact with the spoken language in order to remain intelligible, but rarely is it simply a transcription. In a famous moment in Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, his main character, M. Jordain, discovers that because he is not speaking verse, he is speaking prose.⁴⁸ In a literal sense, Jordain is correct, since the actor playing the role is of course articulating a written part. But his insight does not apply to the world outside the stage: most of us, most of the time, do not in fact speak

⁴⁷ Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 64–5. ⁴⁸ Molière, The Misanthrope and Other Plays, trans. John Wood and David Coward (New York: Penguin, 2000).

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“prose.” As the linguist M.A.K. Halliday notes, written language is not merely “conversation written down.”⁴⁹ Rather, it has its own features and conventions. The organization of the page differs from the organization of spoken language. Writing has different units, such as the sentence, paragraph, section, and chapter. Its grammar, too, differs systematically from speech. As England developed a broader and deeper literate culture in early modernity, writing drifted further from speech along a number of axes, taking on its own, distinctive features. To read over the writing of the sixteenth century, from the powerful but often meandering prose of the early Tudor era to the confidently structured writing of the late Elizabethan period, is to see distinctive norms of writing develop, not through the inspiration of one or another writer, but as the common medium of the educated elite. Perhaps the clearest example of the way that writing came to differ systematically from speech in early modernity lies in the sentence. The sentence is a unit of writing: although we may refer colloquially to spoken “sentences,” many linguists argue that words or phrases, not sentences, are the basic component of speech.⁵⁰ Sentences, by contrast, form the basis of modern prose. Even in writing, however, sentences are not universal. Rather, they represent a prose sufficiently developed to make use of a fundamentally different form of organization than speech—a prose that is no longer a transcription of the oral. As a result, Ian Robinson has argued that the modern form of the sentence only evolved in European languages in early modernity.⁵¹ It is clear that the sentence was still developing in English prose in the sixteenth century, a fact that is apparent in the ambiguity of the word. When writers of this time referred to “sentences,” they still typically meant sententiae, aphoristic formulae, rather than the newer meaning of the term, a grammatical unit delimited by punctuation. As is so often the case, the use of the word slightly trailed the development of the entity it denoted.

⁴⁹ M.A.K. Halliday, Spoken and Written Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 41. ⁵⁰ See, for example, Elinor Ochs et al., Interaction and Grammar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Per Linell, The Written Bias in Linguistics: Its Nature, Origins, and Transformations (New York: Routledge, 2005), 169–74. Although many linguists do refer to spoken “sentences”—they are the basis of Chomskyan linguistics—there is no clear set of rules or protocols about how to delineate sentences in speech, giving the division of speech into sentences an element of arbitrariness. ⁵¹ Ian Robinson, The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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By the end of the sixteenth century, the sentence had become a much more clearly defined grammatical unit than it had been a century earlier. Still, its development was gradual and uneven: it was a process of evolution driven by new habits of composition and the influence of new media, not a sudden transformation. Although by 1600 everyone used punctuation to delimit sentences, the distinction between periods and semicolons was much less clear-cut than it is today. The extraordinarily long sentences of Renaissance prose can in part be attributed to the indefinition of sentence boundaries. In addition, the heavy use of sentence-initial conjunctions, such as “for,” “and,” or “but,” suggests an attempt to distinguish sentences lexically rather than via punctuation—a conception of the sentence as still partially oral rather than wholly literate.⁵² The slow character of this process notwithstanding, this era marks the rise of the sentence as the organizational unit of English prose. Many other features of English prose were closely connected to the development of sentences, and in turn revealed the increasingly literate character of English writing at this moment. As the part of speech responsible for linking units of prose, conjunctions necessarily responded to the redefinition of linguistic units. Oral discourse is highly paratactic, marked by a much higher use of “and” than writing, and a great deal of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century writing, even by relatively well-educated writers, shared this characteristic. Over the course of the sixteenth century, it is possible to see the regular use of a wider range of coordinating conjunctions; in the largest digitized corpus of English letters from the period, it has been shown that the use of “but” rose in proportion to “and” in this era.⁵³ At the same time, subordination became more common, creating the possibility of more complex sentences. Such small shifts had profound consequences for the organization of writing. They created something like a baseline literate style, a set of common grammatical devices and syntactic forms that were part of the appearance of a standard, written English. It is, of course, possible to trace elements of this evolution in the period’s printed books. Much of the literature of the sixteenth century shows the ⁵² By contrast, once the sentence had fully congealed as the normative unit of prose in the eighteenth century, adverbial conjunctions began to be used in medial positions—a feature of writing that is not reflected in speech. Ursula Lenker, Argument and Rhetoric: Adverbial Connectors in the History of English (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2010). ⁵³ Anneli Meurman-Solin, “The Connectives And, For, But, and Only as Claus and Discourse Type Indicators in 16th- and 17th-Century Epistolary Prose,” in Anneli Meurman-Solin, María José López-Couso, and Bettelou Los, eds., Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 164–98.

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joint evolution of English grammar and style in process. Sermons and plays, handbooks of husbandry and technical manuals, controversial pamphlets and jest books all reveal the development of distinctly literate norms in English, including the increasing use of the sentences, paragraphs, structures of subordination, and grammatical forms associated with writing.⁵⁴ But manuscripts, especially manuscripts that show evidence of editing or revision, offer a glimpse into what was, for most, the primary site of composition. The manuscripts of William Lambarde, an administrator and scholar of the history of the English government, for instance, provide some insights into the process of cultivating a vernacular style for one educated Elizabethan.⁵⁵ Lambarde lived a life in writing. He was immersed in a world of documents, poring over and composing political memoranda, bureaucratic correspondence, and legal writings. His documents, which include drafts of assize speeches as well as legal notes, are especially interesting because they are extensively marked with revisions, often involving as many as three rounds of changes. Some of Lambarde’s changes are intellectually suggestive, indicating nuanced revisions of meaning that would be well worth exploring for historians of politics, law, or literature.⁵⁶ Others, however, are primarily stylistic. One of the most pervasive patterns of changes is the replacement of one conjunction with another. In numerous documents, “and” is replaced with “or” or “that” with “which.” “As well . . . as” becomes “not only . . . but also,” “hitherto” becomes “heretofore,” “but” or “yet” are exchanged for one another, or a new conjunction is added where none was previously. For Lambarde, as for his contemporaries, functional parts of speech such as conjunctions were a point at which style and grammar met. As Lambarde’s many revisions show, however, it was not easy to develop a simple, literate style. Writing in the discrete, distinctively structured units characteristic of the modern sentence was a skill that had to be developed as part of the process of English standardization. Examining sixteenth-century ⁵⁴ Elizabeth Tebeaux has suggested persuasively that the paragraph was already well developed in printed technical manuals aimed at an emerging middle class in “Technical Writing and the Development of the English Paragraph, 1473–1700,” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Vol. 41, No. 3 (2011), 219–53. ⁵⁵ William Lambarde, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Folger MS V.a.208; Folger MS X. d.249; Folger MS X.d.119. ⁵⁶ It would be interesting to speculate, for example, about why Lambarde chose to replace “comune me[n]” with “subjects” when talking about the right to a jury trial or why he decided to replace the phrase “the execution of Lawes” with “the administration of Lawes,” Charge for Sessions of the Peace, April 1589, Folger MS X.d.119 (11); A Charge Uttered at the Quarter Sessions of the Peace, Michaelmas 1585, Folger MS X.d.119 (6).

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manuscript sources makes it clear that this was a competence acquired only gradually, through long practice and repeated use. The formation of the simple English prose generally encouraged in practical documents was, in some ways, as much of a feat as the rise of the rhetorically sophisticated and intricate style associated with literary prose. Ben Jonson, in a passage that adapts the advice of Juan Luis Vives, compared the “congruent and harmonious fitting of parts in a sentence” to the squaring of stones in masonry.⁵⁷ Jonson’s remark, which is particularly evocative coming from a former bricklayer, highlights the way that style, syntax, and grammar converged for early modern English writers. It also reveals just what a laborious process shaping a literate standard could be. Writing English prose, in Jonson’s analogy, is, quite literally, work. It is for this reason, perhaps, that in the papers of sixteenth-century professionals and office holders, notes, lists, and revisions are often directed toward the composition of simple, utilitarian prose, rather than the cultivation of eloquence—which is not to deny, of course, that eloquence was a crucial preoccupation for many.⁵⁸ Take, for example, the papers of Robert Beale, clerk of the Privy Council and a protégé of Walsingham. Like so many of his contemporaries, Beale compiled a formulary for his work in office. What may strike modern readers as more surprising, however, is that he wrote the following list of short phrases in his own hand on its title page: being credibly informed Given to understand advertiseth we understand by advertisements from By your letters from etc of etc we understand⁵⁹

⁵⁷ Ben Jonson, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, Vol. 7, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 565. On Jonson’s use of Vives, see Janel Mueller, “Periodos: Squaring the Circle,” in Sylvia Adamson et al., eds., Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 61–80. ⁵⁸ Studies of notebook culture have shown how widespread habits of collecting witty aphorisms, striking phrases, or even fashionable words were in this period, especially among young men aspiring to political office. ⁵⁹ Robert Beale, “Formulary for a Clerk of the Council,” The British Library, Add MS 48150, f. 1a.

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Beale’s scrawled notes record a list of words and phrases that would have been incorporated into the letters he wrote in his government position. It was designed for an epistolary as well as a practical context, featuring phrases designed to note the receipt of information. Such phrases were apparently not already routine for Beale; rather, they had to be gathered and written down in order to help him navigate the demands of his new position. Even a single, telling word, such as “advertiseth,” was worth recording. For Beale, as for most everyday writers, letters, documents, accounts, and business writing were the primary site of vernacular composition. Their writing was not highly rhetorical or literary, but it nevertheless had a profound impact on English prose. It is not easy, in any of these contexts, to draw a clear line of demarcation between the grammar of writing and its style. In the sixteenth century in particular, a period in which prose was rapidly evolving, the two frequently converged. Work on Shakespeare has led the way in describing how a process of linguistic change dovetailed with, shaped, and was in turn shaped by, literary style and the cultivation of eloquence.⁶⁰ But to gain a broader sense of this relationship, one that is grounded in the use of writing across the entirety of English society, it is necessary to look outside the theater, and indeed, outside literary writing, to the conventions developing in the prose of practical documents. In addition to the sheer preponderance of such writings, they reveal how changes in prose style were directly connected to, and indeed channeled in certain directions by, the political and economic structure of an emerging capitalist society. In documents of this kind, no clear line can be drawn between politics and prose, or economics and ideology. As utilitarian instruments, they offer a point of contact between the history of writing and the changing structure of English society.

⁶⁰ Shakespeare holds a special place in philological scholarship on early modern literature, since his plays were often taken by early linguists to represent the speech or vocabulary of the time; hence the relationship between grammar and style in his work has been investigated in at least two disciplines. Early examples include the linguist Otto Jespersen in his Growth and Structure of the English Language, 202. Important contemporary work by Shakespeare scholars includes Hope, Shakespeare’s Grammar; Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue. For a discussion of the political and social significance of conversational style, see András Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 243–80.

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Practical Writing and the Plain Style With the development of a simple, functional prose, a new stylistic movement took hold in England. This was the rise of the plain style, which would come to supplant more rhetorical modes until it was seen as the core form of English prose writing. Less a distinctive literary style in its own right than a new system of literary values, advocates of the plain style praised simplicity, concision, and coherence as against eloquence, copiousness, and ornament. By the end of the seventeenth century, the plain style had come to be seen as a kind of proxy for Englishness, a translation of national mores into the medium of writing. In many respects, this movement represented a recognition of the social and historical conditions underlying the development of the standard vernacular. It suggested that contemporaries perceived the interpenetration of function and style that had always characterized—that had indeed created—the language itself. The origins of the plain style were once an exciting topic of scholarly debate which, at its best, united social and stylistic analysis. Scholars invoked European literary trends, scientific and technical contexts, religious belief, and the decline of courtly culture as explanatory variables in this movement in the history of prose.⁶¹ Debate, however, has largely petered out, perhaps due to the difficulty of defining a style with so few characteristics or— depending on how one looks at it—so many. One exception is a thoughtful recent article by John Guillory, who situates the plain style within the history of media, in keeping with the emphasis of his research. Guillory argues that the demand for a plain style represented “an intuition about the nature of prose itself,” that is, the recognition that writing had begun to function as a medium of communication.⁶² The plain style, he suggests, was a way of articulating the ideal of transparency demanded of media. Guillory’s approach captures the continuities between the growth of literacy, the standardization of the language, and the changing character of prose, aspects of the history of style that are not often enough considered together. So far as it goes, his analysis is convincing. But by bracketing or

⁶¹ Morris Croll, “ ‘Attic Prose’ in the Seventeenth Century,” Studies in Philology, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1921), 79–128. R. F. Jones, “Science and English Prose Style in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century,” PMLA, Vol. 45, No. 4 (1930), 977–1009; Janel Mueller, The Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style, 1380–1580 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984). ⁶² John Guillory, “Mercury’s Words: The End of Rhetoric and the Beginning of Prose,” Representations, Vol. 138, No. 1 (2017), 59–86.

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ignoring the social content of the plain style, he renders the logic driving its success invisible. The plain style reflected the fact that in England a standardized prose emerged together with, and in response to the needs of, a nascent capitalist society. As writing moved away from rhetorical, oral models, it moved toward an ideal of instrumentality, not only because it was now a fixed and standardized medium, but also because of its concrete functions: an avalanche of documents underpinned new models of property ownership, commerce, and state formation. From the late sixteenth century on, English writers began to reflect on the connection between style and practical writing. When writers of business documents, in particular, considered their own practice, they tended to emphasize a utilitarian conception of style in which brevity, simplicity, and informative content were key.⁶³ The author of The marchants avizo, for example, was typical in his hope that his manual of sample letters for merchants would “instruct young nouices, to vse greater breuitie in their writings then commonly they are wont.”⁶⁴ The demand for brevity was, in turn, a demand for a prose governed by strict adherence to a theme and the avoidance of all unnecessary detail or adornment. Thus Angel Day, the author of the influential English Secretorie, explains that the brevity he recommends so enthusiastically is not “that which consisteth in fewnesse of lines” but is rather “breuitie of matter,” writing devoid of “friuolous circumstances.”⁶⁵ Such precepts help to confirm the connection between the emergence of a culture of business—and an emerging bourgeoisie—and a conception of prose as a utilitarian instrument. Literacy and the competent use of the practical written language were prerequisites for office holding, the professions, or engaging in trade on any scale. It was precisely the utilitarian functions of language, those attached to business and bureaucracy, that had become the key to success. As England developed a culture of business in the Tudor era, practical writings began to play a key structural role within the economy, acquiring growing dignity in the process. In the seventeenth century, the link between a practical ethos and the plain style grew firmer, and was gradually elevated into a kind of ideology. ⁶³ The linguist Douglas Biber has proposed a method of analyzing the relationship between the style and function of informational texts in English. He views a new register as coming into existence in the seventeenth century as a response to new categories of information texts. Douglas Biber, Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). ⁶⁴ J. M., The Marchants Avizo (London, 1589). ⁶⁵ Angel Day, The English Secretorie (London, 1586). Day devotes the third chapter of his book to the pursuit of brevity.

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It received its best and most influential spokesman in Francis Bacon, the prophet of scientific discovery, material progress, and a functional approach to knowledge. Despite his own literary elegance, Bacon would emerge as the single most prominent advocate of the idea that style should be simple, routine, and plain, serving the needs of content. Writers, he considered, should avoid “oratorical embellishment, similitudes, the treasure-house of words, and suchlike emptiness,” taking care instead that their materials be “serviceable and good” and arranged so as to “take up as little space as possible in the warehouse,” in Repositorio spatium minimum occupant.⁶⁶ As Ellen Meiksins Wood has pointed out, such a precedent reveals a “literally economical attitude to language,” which was “marked by a hostility to metaphor that conspicuously does not extend to analogies with the arts of production and business.”⁶⁷ Content was a kind of commodity, and style was, or ought to be, its efficient vessel. Bacon’s dictum represents an extension of the demands of practical writing to literary style as a whole. In the late seventeenth century, when England stood poised to become the leading European commercial power, Bacon’s attitude toward language was taken up enthusiastically by much of the elite, while he himself came to be seen as an icon of the plain style. One of the early members of the Royal Society, the bishop, historian, and Whig polemicist Gilbert Burnet, went so far as to claim that Bacon was “the first that writ our Language correctly.”⁶⁸ It is worth pausing over the precise nature of Burnet’s praise. He did not merely praise Bacon as a literary stylist. Rather, he situated him at the origin of point of a form of writing based on a standardized vernacular—not so much the inventor as the discoverer of a “correct” English prose that had been waiting to be revealed all along. The compliment is paradoxical but suggestive. Ultimately, the correct versus the incorrect and, implicitly, the standard versus the nonstandard would prove to be the key demarcation in English, extending not only to prose but to taste and morals.⁶⁹ It was no coincidence that in the seventeenth century, “right” and “wrong” became, ⁶⁶ Francis Bacon, Parasceve, ad historiam naturalem, et experimentalem, The Oxford Francis Bacon, Vol. 11, ed. Graham Rees and Maria Wakely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 456–7. ⁶⁷ Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (New York: Verso, 1991). Wood notes, “The tradition of linguistic austerity is traceable at least to the seventeenth century and its association with the political economy of England is direct and explicit enough to accommodate even the crudest application of the base-superstructure metaphor” (82). ⁶⁸ Gilbert Burnet, in Thomas More, Utopia (London: Richard Chiswell, 1684), A4v. ⁶⁹ Behind calls for “correctness,” Raymond Williams has suggested, lay “the practical pressure of a newly powerful and self-conscious middle class which, like most groups which find

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for the first time, synonyms for “good” and “bad”—a pairing that is distinctive to English.⁷⁰ Chaucer’s and Caxton’s worries about variation had given way, over the centuries, to the confident presumption that a standard English governed every aspect of grammar and style, demanding not only regularity and lucidity but a pragmatic ethos, sensitive to the demands of literary economy—and implicitly, to the material economy—from its writers. England was not, of course, the only country in which a practical, vernacular documentary culture emerged in early modernity. Most European polities saw a swifter pace of commerce, more intensive domestic communications, and state centralization, albeit to varying degrees and on varying timelines. And in each case, the demands of business led to the accumulation of documents and to stylistic advice that favored brevity and clarity over elegance and ornament—a stylistic mode that was, in any case, always part of the repertoire of prose, as a reading of Quintilian or Augustine can attest. The difference between England and a state such as France, however, was just how thoroughly the plain style came to be seen as central to all prose composition. It was not just that England’s increasingly capitalist social structure gave utilitarian or instrumentalist values a greater cultural authority in language as in everything else, although that was certainly the case. It was also that, because of the comparatively late rise of vernacular English writing, capitalism had played a role in the very process of linguistic standardization. The same forms and missives that made England into a single, unified market, with individualistic forms of property and a national legal system to regulate them, also helped to make English into a single, unified national language. No national academy of language gave rules; usage, instead, guided practice. The relationship between the plain style and English culture was, in that sense, as organic and intuitive as early modern Englishmen liked to claim.⁷¹ By the eighteenth century, the connection between the plainness of English style and the national character was practically a patriotic cliché, leading one writer to laud English as a

themselves suddenly possessed of social standing, thought ‘correctness’ a systematic thing which had simply to be acquired,” The Long Revolution, 244. ⁷⁰ As the linguist Anna Wierzbicka points out, this formulation, which is distinctive to English, serves to collapse correctness, morality, and even legal rights into a single value, English: Meaning and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 80. ⁷¹ Hillary M. Larkin, The Making of Englishmen: Debates on National Identity, 1550–1650 (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

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“plain, rational, and monosyllabic tongue,” while disparaging French as a language of “graceful trifling.”⁷²

Capitalism and the Rise of Prose The rise of a standardized English prose had pervasive effects on literature, the full implications of which only became apparent after the bulk of linguistic standardization had been achieved. By the end of the seventeenth century, if not earlier, prose and not verse would emerge as the core of the English literary system. In the same period, the importance of the plain style for literature would become clear with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and, early in the eighteenth century, with the novels of Defoe, including Robinson Crusoe and A Journal of the Plague Year. The emergence of stylistic and linguistic correctness as a prevailing ideal would come with periodical culture, new forms of literary criticism, and a growing consumer market in the eighteenth century. Yet although all of these changes are associated with a later period, their roots can all be traced to the end of the sixteenth century, at a moment when vernacular writing had become central to the organization of society, the administration of the state, and the creation of a unified, national market. Around 1600, English literature saw a sudden efflorescence of short, ostensibly factual forms of prose. The late Elizabethan and early Stuart era was, in general, a period of concentrated literary invention in England; the novelty of the drama and poetry written in these years is well known and much celebrated. But the new forms of prose that emerged at this moment, while less overtly eloquent, proved equally important for cultural history. The diary, the essay, the character book, the printed familiar letter, and the news sheet or coranto all emerged roughly contemporaneously in English to become influential literate forms; with the exception of the character book, which disappeared despite an attempt by no less a figure than George Eliot to revive the form, all had long legacies.⁷³ The diary, whose evolution is the subject of Chapter 4 of this study, took its modern form in England in the late sixteenth century. Bacon’s 1597 Essays were the first in English, and

⁷² Alexander Jardine, qtd. in Michele Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1996), 107. ⁷³ George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1879).

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helped to launch the genre. Joseph Hall published the first English character book in 1608, and in the same year started a trend of publishing books of familiar letters in England with his Epistles.⁷⁴ John Wolfe pioneered the English news serial in 1592, while John Chamberlain began writing his newsletters in 1597; in the 1620s, news sheets would take on a wider currency through the agency of figures such as John Pory and Nathaniel Butter.⁷⁵ The novelty of England’s new prose genres should not be overstated. All of these forms were, at least in part, adaptations and revisions of existing traditions. They drew on both classical and modern precedents, revealing a keen awareness of the forms being pioneered on the Continent.⁷⁶ In this respect, as in others, England lagged behind many Continental literatures, a legacy in part of the late consolidation of its literary language. But the rapid adoption of these forms at the end of the sixteenth century—the moment when English literacy surged under the pressure of emerging capitalist relations—shows that change was in the air. English was developing the formidable, if utilitarian, prose culture that would define it abroad as well as at home. It was, in fact, precisely through its new prose forms that Englishlanguage literature first exerted a palpable influence on the Continent. Bacon and Hall were the first literary writers in the English language to achieve success when translated into foreign vernaculars.⁷⁷ Hall’s characters were a

⁷⁴ Joseph Hall, Characters of Vertues and Vices (London, 1608); Joseph Hall, Epistles (London, 1608). ⁷⁵ Michael Frearson, “London Corantos in the 1620s,” Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History, Vol. 1, No. 1–2 (1993), 3–17. ⁷⁶ The character book, a series of sketches of contemporary types such as the lawyer or the flatterer, was immediately derived from the newly translated work of the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, though it had medieval precedents in both rhetorical exercises and estates satire. Wendell Clausen, “The Beginnings of English Character Writing in the Seventeenth Century,” Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 25 (1946), 33–45. On estates satire, see Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). On the range of influences for the Baconian essay, see Paul Salzman, “Essays,” in Andrew Hadfield, ed., The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1500–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 468–83. English precedents for Bacon’s essays include Haly Heron and William Paulet. See Virgil B. Heltzel, “Haly Heron: Elizabethan Essayist and Euphuist,” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Nov. 1952), 1–21; Sidney Thomas, “ ‘The Lord Marquess’ Idleness’: The First English Book of Essays,” Studies in Philology, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Oct. 1948), 592–9. Bacon would, at least, have known of William Paulet, since he was the brother of Bacon’s early mentor Amias Paulet. On news writing, see Joad Raymond, “News Writing,” in The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1500–1640. ⁷⁷ The literary works of King James were translated into French—however, they were obviously published abroad because he was a ruling monarch, and had little or no perceptible influence on Continental literary traditions.

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hit in France where, later in the century, the genre gave rise to the classic sketches of La Bruyère. Bacon’s work, too, found a foreign readership. In fact, although he borrowed his title from Montaigne, it was due to the volumes of Bacon and his immediate successors—William Cornwallis, Daniel Tuvill, and Robert Johnson—that the word “essay” became the name of a genre rather than, as in Montaigne’s case, the title of the volume.⁷⁸ These literary exports were the first sign of a shift in England’s patterns of literary transmission under the influence of capitalism, a phenomenon I discuss in Chapter 5 of this study. In content, structure, and style, each of these genres also revealed the influence of the history of English prose I have sketched in this chapter. They were oriented toward the real, making a claim—however questionable in practice—to accuracy. Their subject was contemporary society, as encompassed in the narrow horizons of the individual life, in the affairs of nations, or in philosophical generalizations about the world. And each, in one way or another, typically depicted society as a site of negotiation, subtle dealing, and the pursuit of advantage. As Bacon wrote in the dedication to the final edition of his Essays, “of all my other workes,” they “have beene most Currant: For that, as it seemes, they come home, to Mens Businesse, and Bosomes.”⁷⁹ The essayist Daniel Tuvill even wrote a manual on the art of negotiation or business—a direct response to Bacon’s comment, in The Advancement of Learning, that “wisdom touching negotiation or business hath not been hitherto collected into writing, to the great derogation of learning and the professors of learning.”⁸⁰ In formal terms, the new genres of English prose also carried signs of the culture of practical, manuscript literacy within which they were written. All were essentially modular, composed of short segments, which were then aggregated to form pamphlets or books: essays, letters, character sketches, or ⁷⁸ A.M. Boase, “The Early History of the Essai Title in England and France,” in J. C. Ireson, I. D. Mcfarlane, and Garnet Rees, eds., Studies in French Literature Presented to H. W. Lawton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), 67–74. For Montaigne, as Terence Cave writes, “the individual titled pieces of which the volume is made up are called ‘chapters,’ not ‘essays,’ ” Terence Cave, How to Read Montaigne (London: Granta, 2007), 20. After Montaigne, the only French book to bear the title of “essaies” in the plural before the middle of the seventeenth century was both written and published in London: Jonatan de Sainct-Sernin, Essais et obseruations sur les essais du Seigneur de Montaigne par le Sieur Jonatan de Sainst [sic] Sernin (London, 1626). ⁷⁹ Francis Bacon, Essays, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 5. ⁸⁰ D.T. [Daniel Tuvill], The doue and the serpent (London, 1614); John Leon Lievsay, “Tuvill’s Advancement of Bacon’s Learning,” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1945), 11–31.

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the paragraphs that were the unit of news. In essence, the genres presented short forms, characteristic of a culture of documents, collected together to reach a suitable length for sale as a print commodity.⁸¹ Even in the most polished examples of these genres, it is not difficult to discern traces of the practices of composition that made them possible.⁸² In another echo of the broader literate culture, all of these forms rejected older stylistic models of eloquence, avoiding long, rhetorical periods and ostentatious ornament. In contrast to the graceful symmetry of immediate predecessors such as Sidney, or the resonant cadences of contemporary prose masters such as Donne, they were neither courtly nor lyrical in style. It was for this reason that Morris Croll, in his analysis of the plain style, traced it to early essayists and character writers such as Bacon and Hall. For Croll, the “attic” style of these writers, consisting of short, sharp sentences with an emphasis on brevity and wit, ultimately gave rise to new standards of English. It was in such texts, he felt, that the genesis of the plain style could be seen. The connection is suggestive, especially given Bacon’s later canonization as the patron saint of “correct” English writing. But the causality is backwards—the characteristic style of the new prose genres of c.1600 was a response to new norms of writing, not their source. Bacon’s own injunctions in the essays suggest that he, at least, understood the relationship between the maturation of English prose and the culture of practical writing that had done so much to impel it. In “Of Dispatch,” Bacon describes the best way to talk about business. Brevity is key: “time is the measure of business,” Bacon writes, “as money is of wares” (77). He continues: “iterations are commonly loss of time,” and “prefaces and passages, and excusations, and other speeches of reference to the person, are great wastes of time.” The need for efficiency powerfully situates Bacon’s stylistic ideals at the origin of capitalism, an economic system that, as E.P. Thompson has argued, is crucially concerned with what we now call time management.⁸³ Other writers of contemporary prose genres shared Bacon’s attitude. For John Hoskins, a lawyer, judge, and MP, as well as a theorist of style, the first requirement of epistolary style was brevity. In a passage borrowed by Ben

⁸¹ As the example of the anthology suggests, this was a broader part of the print dynamic in this era, in which composition was not yet as thoroughly oriented toward the printed book as it would later become. ⁸² For a compelling take on a different aspect of essayistic composition, see Scott Black, Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). ⁸³ E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present, No. 38 (1967), 56–97.

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Jonson, Hoskins suggested that letters should have “a kinde of thrift or saving of words.”⁸⁴ Here, as elsewhere, an economy of language is proposed in which content, style, and purpose are all linked. Today, most of the examples of these early prose forms are little read except by scholars of early modernity. Despite their peripheral place in the literary canon, however, they do help to reveal something vital about English literary history. They are clues to a turning point in the history of English prose, as writers began to explore the possibilities of a newly consolidated literate style. Considered together, these new prose forms help to make the case for a different history of English literature, in which continuities can be traced from the standardization of English that began in the late fourteenth century to the rise of a plain style and new genres of prose that confirmed its success at the end of the sixteenth century. In this history, a longer relation between capitalism and literature can be seen than the one that is customarily traced through the rise of the novel and the bourgeois reading public, or even the earlier emergence of the commercial theater and the mass London audiences. It is also a different one, turning not on ideology but rather on the practical history of literacy. English writing helped to make possible a national market and unified political territory, and it was through this process that the language took on its modern form. The consolidation of English prose, like the creation of road networks, law courts, and new monetary instruments, was part of the formation of a capitalist infrastructure. From spelling to syntax to style, the history of language and literacy is a political history. It is also part of the history of literature: there is no clear line that divides the basic conditions of literacy from literary forms. Rather, the uses of literacy continue to underpin the history of literature in every era.

⁸⁴ John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1935).

2 The Beginnings of Literary Mass Culture Introduction In any account of the origin of capitalism, the transformation of the lives of the common people necessarily plays a central role. The labor of the masses, their use of land and money, their modes of reproduction, and even their acts of resistance are obviously matters of the greatest importance for understanding broad patterns of social change. To attempt to describe the growth and reconfiguration of the English economy without reference to the ordinary people whose daily work and habits of consumption drove it would be a self-evidently hopeless enterprise. Yet studying the lives and experiences of the common people raises notorious difficulties. In early modernity, as in prior periods, working people left few written remains. Though rising rates of literacy were found even among rural laborers, the majority of them still could not read, much less write or publish books. The traces oral culture has left behind suggest that it was rich and varied; without question, it influenced early modern texts in innumerable ways—but more often than not, it is impossible to reconstruct. As a result, in the scholarship on early modern England as elsewhere, working people are seen rather than heard, glimpsed—typically in distorted form—in the pages of elite writers. Even for early modern historians, this silence raises challenging problems of method and interpretation. As Tim Harris cautions, “we must not confuse what the elite perceived and feared with what ordinary people actually believed and practised.”¹ For literary scholars, whose focus is on grasping not the reality revealed by texts, but the texts themselves, this state of affairs ensures that the common people are at best marginal to any account of the period’s literature. And yet there is one sense in which working people could be said to have had a decisive, indeed transformative, effect on the literary history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Over the course of this period, the ¹ Tim Harris, “Problematising Popular Culture,” in Tim Harris, ed., Popular Culture in England c.1500–1800 (London: Macmillan, 1995), 6. Writing at the Origin of Capitalism: Literary Circulation and Social Change in Early Modern England. Julianne Werlin, Oxford University Press. © Julianne Werlin 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198869467.003.0003

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common people began to form an increasingly important and coherent market for goods. Their purchasing power, however minute individually, cumulatively had the greatest possible impact. This, of course, is one of the defining features of capitalism: a shift from a commercial system based on the trade of luxuries to one based on the mass production and sale of cheap commodities.² In England, the growth of markets affected how goods of all kinds were produced and consumed, including grain and other foodstuffs, cloth and the accouterments of millinery—and literature. In opening new commercial pathways, the English economy created new patterns of literary circulation and new forms of demand. As the people became consumers of commodities on a new scale, they also came to make up a commercial audience for literary art. The rise of a theatergoing public in London is the most obvious and best studied instance of this phenomenon. The theaters grew in size from the 1580s on, relying on large audiences whose numbers likely included many working people.³ Theater historians have shown in impressive detail how the theaters’ imperative for profit shaped every aspect of the dramas that were staged within them, from their plots and characters to their presentation and advertising.⁴ The theater, perhaps the most powerful art form of Renaissance England, thus developed together with and in response to a paying audience consisting in part of the common people. While the theater is by far the most intensively researched example of the growing importance of the people as a cultural market, it was not the only form that worked in this way. There is, in fact, another form that more obviously reveals the shifting character of popular culture in the early

² As Immanuel Wallerstein writes, under the feudal system, “long distance trade was a trade in luxuries, not in bulk goods.” It was only with an emerging capitalism that “long distance trade could convert itself in part into bulk trade which would, in turn, feed the process of expanded production,” The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 20–1. ³ Andrew Gurr has estimated that from the rise of the theaters in the sixteenth century until their close in 1642, there were approximately fifty million visits to the theater. In his view, the audience was drawn from multiple classes. See Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3rd edition, 2004), 69. By contrast, Ann Jennalie Cook has made the argument that the greatest, and most financially important, portion of the theatergoing audience was drawn from the elite, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). ⁴ See, for example, Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Roslyn Lander Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Linda Woodbridge, ed., Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in the New Economic Criticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

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seventeenth century: the black-letter broadside ballad, that is, the ballad printed in gothic type on a single sheet of paper. In one sense, this is not surprising: the ballad has always been understood as a popular form. But it is only recently that it has come to be seen as a commercial product. For the first two centuries or so of ballad scholarship, researchers understood it as part of a native folk tradition. It was thought to be a pristine example of popular oral culture, its printed copies simply late transcriptions of an immemorial practice. Now, however, for the English case at least, that paradigm has been shown to be unsustainable. A series of excellent studies of cheap print have shown, among other things, that the printed broadside ballads of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries emerged from the world of London publishing, not popular tradition; any precedents they may have had in oral culture have been lost.⁵ The ballad was an eminently commercial form.⁶ Broadside ballads were not only thoroughly immersed in the world of publishing, they were also highly lucrative for it, as the literary form published in the greatest numbers in early modernity. As contemporaries observed, they were among the most “vendible” of literary forms.⁷ They were also a form with a special relationship to the common people. Though they were read by individuals of all social ranks, they were targeted first and foremost at the lower orders, with whom they were closely associated in the ⁵ Douglas Gray, Simple Forms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Even “rhymes” of Robin Hood, once thought to be the clearest case of medieval ballads that survived into early modernity, can no longer be considered part of a continuous tradition of popular song. The editors of a selection of early tales of Robin Hood write, “Although the practice of describing the earliest surviving Robin Hood stories as ballads is now too firmly established to be eradicated, readers of this selection of texts would do best to forget it altogether,” R.B. Dobson and J. Taylor, eds., Rymes of Robin Hood (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976), 6. ⁶ Angela McShane, “Ballads and Broadsides,” in Joad Raymond, ed., The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Vol. 1: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 340–63; Angela McShane Jones, “The Gazet in Metre: or, the Rhiming Newsmonger. The English Broadside Ballad as Intelligencer: A New Narrative,” in Joop W. Koopmans, ed., News and Politics in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800) (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 131–50; Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006); Patricia Fumerton, “Introduction: Experiential Scholarship/Learning,” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 2 (2016): 163–71; Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Mark Hailwood, Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014); Jenni Hyde, Singing the News: Ballads in Mid-Tudor England (New York: Routledge, 2018). ⁷ Henry Crosse, Vertues common-wealth: or The high-way to honour (London, 1603), O4r. “Is it not lamentable,” Crosse asks in the same passage, “that a Pamphlet discoursing nought but Paganisme, should be so vendible, and vertuous bookes want sale . . . for there commeth forth no sooner a foolish toye, a leaud and bawdy ballad, but if sung in the market, by the diuels quirristers, they flocke to it as crowes to a dead carkasse buying them vp as Iewels of price.”

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minds of contemporaries. As a form that, like plays, drew on both writing and performance, ballads held an attraction even for the illiterate, which was crucial to reaching the common people.⁸ But, in contrast to the theater, ballads were a written commodity. That is, although the oral dimension of the ballad was obviously crucial to its appeal, its commercial logic relied on selling a sheet of print, not admission to a performance. In addition, because they circulated as writing rather than being fixed performances in defined spaces, they also had a far broader geographic reach than the theater. Printed in London, broadside ballads circulated outward to become a national form. They thus serve as an early and important example of the role of commercial texts in the creation of a national economy. For all of these reasons—their unique connection to the people, their literate character, their national distribution—the history of the broadside ballad offers the clearest example of economic and literary processes that led to the rise of a mass market for literature. As elsewhere in Europe—the bibliothéque bleue in France, the literatura de cordel in Spain—English popular culture received a standardized commercial form in cheap print toward the beginning of the seventeenth century. This phenomenon signaled nothing less than the future of mass culture under capitalism: the slow erosion of the local, communal, and self-produced, and the tentative beginnings of what Adorno and Horkheimer would call the “culture industry.”⁹ The purpose of this chapter, then, is to sketch some of the causes and consequences of this important turning point in literary history. I seek to show, first, how the emergence of a commercial popular culture was part of broader tendencies in the history of market growth, including modes of both production and consumption. Second, I aim to describe some of the ways in which, due to their audience, ballads pioneered new literary conventions, especially in terms of their depiction of labor. Aimed at working people, ballads helped to make labor a literary subject and, in the process, to alter conventions of genre and decorum within English literature. Yet I will conclude by suggesting that ballads raise troubling questions about the rise of a mass commercial culture and its consequences for the working people

⁸ Christopher Marsh, “ ‘The Blazing Torch’: New Light on English Ballads as a Multi-Media Matrix,” The Seventeenth Century, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2015), 95–116. Alexandra Franklin, “Making Sense of Broadside Illustration in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Kevin D. Murphy and Sally O’Driscoll, eds., Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in EighteenthCentury Print (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 169–94. ⁹ Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 94–136.

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who consumed it. For can consumption be considered a form of selfexpression? And whose values and interests are really represented in the products of a commercial literary art?

A Commercial Form Popularity is an ambiguous idea: it implies widespread consumption, but also consumption by the most numerous class—the common people or the lower orders. There is little question that ballads were popular in the first sense; they were, as I noted above, the best-selling literary form in the era. Adam Fox estimates the total copies of ballads in the second half of the sixteenth century at three to four million, and they only increased in the seventeenth century, reaching their peak after 1660.¹⁰ But what evidence is there that they were popular in the second sense, that is, in terms of the class of persons to whom they appealed? Contemporaries, certainly, were convinced that they were. Books of the age were full of derision for “the vncountable rabble of rhyming Ballet makers” and the “rude multitude of rusticall Rymers,” sentiments that reveal both the class and geographic associations that had attached to the ballad trade.¹¹ Ballad writers, in the view of their more elite rivals, were mere “pot poets,” as poor and as desperate for a drink as their uncouth audiences. From a different perspective, ballads’ supporters offer a similar testimony. Members of the gentry who valued ballads, including collectors such as Pepys and Selden, were interested in them for the same reason others criticized them: as a window into the popular culture of the moment. Although it is not easy to reconstruct the complex print environment of early modernity, especially in the broadside trade, recent research on ballads by Angela McShane, Patricia Fumerton, Mark Hailwood, and others has suggested that on the whole, contemporaries had a point. The sale of black-letter ballads formed part of popular culture. It may also have been more effective, and more unpredictable, in reaching across lines of class than some contemporaries imagined.¹²

¹⁰ Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 15. ¹¹ William Webbe, A discourse of English poetrie (London, 1586), D1r; A4r. ¹² It is clear that broadside ballads continued to be purchased and read, though not written and published, by members of the elite and gentry. Tim Harris writes, “Gentry and people from the more prosperous middling ranks of society accounted for a significant proportion of the buyers of such material,” in Popular Culture in England, 7. See, for

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But as the form coalesced in the print culture of the early seventeenth century, it was positioned to appeal to a market consisting of working people. Its form, subject, and mode of circulation cannot be separated from that fact. Broadside ballads had not always been so clear an example of a popular literary form. In the more fluid publishing environment of the sixteenth century, ballads were heterogeneous and loosely defined, with flexible connections to other classes of literature—no hard lines separated ballads from song on the one hand, or poetry on the other. They were written by a variety of persons, and did not yet have the firm class associations they would later develop.¹³ Toward the end of the century, however, the situation began to shift. As Tessa Watt has shown, ballads became subject to increasingly harsh critique on both religious and aesthetic grounds, which only grew more strident in the early Stuart era.¹⁴ The moral and literary critique of ballads cannot be disentangled from perceptions of their class character: a term like “base,” for example, could cover a multitude of sins, from morality to style to poverty. In an era of mounting antagonism to the poor on the part of their social superiors, the censure of ballads was only one manifestation of a wider phenomenon. As a result of growing disapproval toward ballads, many writers and readers of the middling sort and above, Watt argues, ceased to participate in this much maligned form—and so the ballad became marked as popular literature.¹⁵ There is, however, another, complementary angle from which to look at this history. For those who sought to profit from the ballad, its association with the common people was by no means a disadvantage. Quite the example, the seventeenth-century poetical miscellany, Huntington Library MS HM 198, which contains ballads as well as elite lyric poetry. ¹³ They were, and remained, a source of political commentary: Edward Wilson-Lee, “The Bull and the Moon: Broadside Ballads and the Public Sphere at the Time of the Northern Rising (1569–70),” The Review of English Studies, Vol. 63, no. 259 (2011): 225–42. Humanists and would-be intellectuals used ballads to engage in public combats of wit, as in the case of the scathing and apparently interminable exchange between two rivals, Thomas Smyth and William Gray, that took place in the 1540s. Thomas Smyth, “An artificiall Apologie, articulerlye / answerynge to the obstreperous Obgannynges of one W.G.” (London, 1540?), English Broadside Ballad Archive (hereafter EBBA). Cathy Shrank, “Trollers and Dreamers: Defining the Citizen-Subject in Sixteenth-Century Cheap Print,” The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1–2 (2008), 102–18. ¹⁴ Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). ¹⁵ Watt’s thesis is in agreement with Peter Burke’s argument that the early seventeenth century was a moment of cultural polarization between the elite and the common people, caused by elite “withdrawal” from previously shared forms, Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: New York University Press, 1978).

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contrary: publishers both cultivated and sought to capitalize on the ballad’s appeal to working people.¹⁶ In seeking to profit from the form’s unique connection to a popular audience, the ballad publishers, like the ballad’s detractors, followed wider trends. The early Stuart era was a period of increasing market specialization in the production of commodities in general. In print, the growth of market specialization was enabled by increasing organization within the publishing industry, as a relatively small group of booksellers strengthened their hold on the trade. Specializing in ballads was a way in which publishers could carve out a niche, or corner the market on a profitable asset. By the 1620s, the printing and publishing of ballads was controlled by a small group of printers known as the “ballad partners” who had a virtual monopoly on the trade and who helped to standardize methods of production, sale, and formal conventions within it.¹⁷ It was these publishers who commissioned, published, and profited from ballads. Authors, by contrast, received only trivial sums for the sale of ballads—and as a result, they were often no better off than ballads’ popular audiences. It was in this social, economic, and publishing environment that the logic of the popular black-letter ballad developed. The black-letter ballad was not the only type of broadside, or the only type of ballad, to be printed and sold. Other forms persisted, including the white-letter—that is, Roman-type— ballad, geared toward a more elite audience. But the black-letter ballad was immediately recognizable in both form and content. When contemporaries condemned ballad writers, singers, or the ballad audience, it was almost always to ballads of this type that they referred. By the early seventeenth century, black-letter ballads had a fixed format. They were printed in two columns of black-letter type, a font thought to be the least challenging for struggling readers, and as a result, employed in proclamations, ballads, and primers. In addition to its apparent ease, black letter had other advantages. It possessed a strong association with the people, simplicity, and rusticity, which publishers were careful to cultivate. Black letter was, as Angela McShane notes, a brand.¹⁸ Ironically enough, the black-letter ballad died out toward the end of the century precisely because its purchasers ceased to

¹⁶ As Patricia Fumerton writes, “it seems clear that ballad makers and promoters adjusted the form and circulation of ballads to tap into the large, if poor, lower order market,” Fumerton, Unsettled, 133. ¹⁷ Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 75–8. ¹⁸ Angela McShane, “Typography Matters: Reading Ballads and Gelding Curates in Stuart England,” in John Hinks and Catherine Armstrong, eds., Book Trade Connections from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries (London: Oak Knoll Press, 2008), 19–44.

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be able to read the font with ease. But in the early Stuart period, the form thrived. Ballads’ popular appeal, and their marketing, rested on the fact that they were a hybrid commodity, combining pictorial, oral, and verbal elements. Above two columns of text, ballads displayed an image, usually a relatively generic woodcut illustrating some aspect of the ballad’s subject. These images made ballads attractive as material objects, rather than simply as songs or performances, an element of their construction that led to their frequent use as a form of interior décor or wallpaper, especially in ale houses. Another element of their design pointed toward the partially oral character of the genre: they began uniformly to be printed with the name of the tune to which they were set. The most important respect in which ballads were a popular commodity, however, was their price. Compared to most other forms of literature, ballads were cheap. They typically cost a penny in the early seventeenth century, making them accessible to many who could not afford an octavo playbook, to say nothing of a lavish folio. Perhaps not coincidentally, the penny appeared in many ballads, such as Laurence Price’s ode to the power of money, “Oh grammercy penny.”¹⁹ A penny was the cost of a loaf of bread: beyond the reach of the totally indigent—by no means a negligible proportion of the society—but accessible to most laboring people at least some of the time. Ballads’ price appears to have been, in the language of economics, fairly “sticky”—that is, like wages, it did not change rapidly in response to inflation. The ballad’s cost was part of, and also dictated, publishers’ commercial strategy. As in all industries geared toward the production of cheap commodities, the trade had thin profit margins and depended on large sales.²⁰ If ballads were to be a popular commodity in one sense—that is, a commodity sold to the lower orders—they also had to be a popular commodity in the other sense—that is, sold in great quantities—in order for

¹⁹ Laurence Price, “Oh gramercy penny” (London, 1628?). The penny featured in many medieval poems as well—it seems almost certain that ballads such as Price’s were part of a continuous tradition. John A. Yunck describes this genre in the fifteenth century in “Dan Denarius: The Almighty Penny and the Fifteenth Century Poets,” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 20, No. 2 (1961), 207–22. Still, it is worth remarking that a penny had a considerably different value in the fifteenth century than in the seventeenth, giving this genre a slightly different cast, and perhaps implying a different audience. ²⁰ Angela McShane calculates the cost of printing ten half-sheet ballads at 1.68d. If ballads were sold at 1/2d. to 1d., this guaranteed a profit to both the publisher and the retailer, “Ballads and Broadsides.”

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their publishers to profit.²¹ Thus the logic of the market dictated the fusion of the two senses of the word. Other aspects of the black-letter ballad trade followed from its commercial imperatives, including its comparatively broad geographic distribution. The ballad trade sought the largest possible number of consumers, which also could mean the most widely dispersed. Its unique mode of distribution reflected this ambition. While many ballads were purchased within London, like other forms of print, peddlers also took ballads into the countryside. This practice is vividly illustrated by the ballad-seller, peddler, and pickpocket Autolycus in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, and it was widespread at the time: by the end of the seventeenth century, there were at least 2,880 licensed peddlers working in England.²² The distribution of ballads through peddlers marked an important difference between ballads and books geared toward an elite market. More expensive volumes made their way into the periphery via the personal efforts of those who wished to read them, or by means of booksellers in provincial cities. Ballads, however, were able to seek out their own customers across the countryside. As a result, publishers of ballads could anticipate a popular audience that was supralocal—an audience that could, potentially, include any of the working people of England, not just the people of one particular district or county. It was precisely this feature of the ballad with which the dramatist and pamphleteer Henry Chettle took issue in his polemic Kind-Harts Dreame (1592). His character Anthony Now Now’s chief complaint was not the dissemination of ballads in London. Well aware that “these lasciuious songes” began in the nation’s capital, he objected to the fact that “thence they spread as from a spring . . . in every pedlers packe sent to publike meetings in other places.”²³ For Chettle, as for many of his contemporaries, London was the source of a vast flood of ballads spreading over the countryside. The ballad, Chettle grasped, was creating a national market for popular literature. What is striking about each of these aspects of the ballad trade is how closely it reflects the most fundamental dynamics of an emerging capitalism. ²¹ As Eric Nebecker writes, “cheap production enabled broadside ballads to reach a large audience and thus extended the network of strangers to which they could appeal, both socially and geographically,” “The Broadside Ballad and Textual Publics,” SEL, Vol. 51, No. 1 (2011), 1–19. ²² Jeroen Salman, Pedlars and the Popular Press: Itinerant Distribution Networks in England and the Netherlands 1600–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 103. ²³ Henry Chettle, Kind-Harts Dreame. Conteining Fiue Apparitions with their Inuectives against Abuses Raigning (London, 1592), 55.

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As a popular literary market was emerging, ordinary people were coming to depend on the market for a growing share of their consumption. In the early seventeenth century, such markets were widening their geographic reach, linking ever more regions together: in some cases, such as the cattle trade, markets became national or quasi-national in character. As in the print trade, so in commerce as a whole the growth of translocal markets both enabled, and was driven by, the growth of London. By the seventeenth century, the metropolis was the hub of commerce for England and Wales, a major market for agriculture, and the point from which imported goods and many specialized products were disseminated to the rest of the country.²⁴ Even when goods did not actually pass through London, its size as a market helped to set uniform prices for the country as a whole.²⁵ The effect was measurable: one economic historian has calculated that in seventeenthcentury England, the average gap between prices of wheat in different cities was only thirteen percent, as compared to thirty-one percent in Spain, twenty-four percent in France, and twenty percent in the Netherlands, suggesting a precocious degree of market integration.²⁶ It would, of course, be a mistake to think of the markets of early modern England as fully national, much less as frictionless. They were far from the ideal markets of economic theory, or even the more powerful and predictable markets of the eighteenth century. Regional variation was not the exception but the rule; much of the economy, like much of the culture, was still local. Yet it is still possible to speak of a process of market development as society moved toward a new era in its economic history: “the dominant impression of much of England and Wales in the early seventeenth century,” Keith Wrightson notes, “is that of a society which was interconnected by commercial transactions as never before.”²⁷ To understand the patterns of these markets, it is necessary to look beyond the accumulation of expensive or exotic objects and their wealthy purchasers to cheap commodities and the ordinary men and women who bought them.

²⁴ As Sheila Pelizzon notes, “provisioning networks supplying local towns and consumers became reoriented and reconstructed as supply lines running from country to city,” “Grain Flour, 1590–1790,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center), Vol. 23, No. 1 (2000), 87–195, 141. ²⁵ Eric Kerridge, Trade and Banking in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 15–16. ²⁶ Victoria N. Bateman, Markets and Growth in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2015), 41–90. ²⁷ Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 175.

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It was not luxuries but inexpensive goods and working consumers that ultimately transformed the English economy. Literary culture did not stand above this process but developed as part of it: the dissemination of literary texts in early modernity was influenced by economic patterns forged through trade and production as a whole. In the case of ballads, the connection between the channels of commerce and the distribution and form of texts is particularly clear. Ballads were not, after all, the only commodity sold by peddlers. Rather, they were just one of a range of inexpensive objects sold across the countryside, including necessities such as cloth, pins, knives, and pots, and small luxuries such as mirrors or rings.²⁸ The patterns of distribution for these goods often followed larger commercial pathways, following trade fairs, for instance, or sharing routes used by larger factors and middlemen.²⁹ In this way, a direct line can be traced from the processes that shaped the growth of markets across England to the modes by which ballads were spread. But this is not the only connection between the expansion of commerce and the trade in ballads. Peddlers were not only sellers of goods, but also could be buyers. This aspect of their activity is, in fact, occasionally mentioned in ballads. In “The Joviall Pedler,” it becomes, like so many other practices, the occasion for an obscene jest: Maids bring out your Cony-skins, The Pedler doth you pray For them you may have points or pins Be they black or gray.³⁰

It hardly seems likely that the offer that is the basis of the ballad’s double entendre, the exchange of pins for sex, was grounded in a real practice. But the trade described in literal terms, the exchange of rabbit skins for peddlers’ commodities, was likely common enough. Peddlers did exchange the finished commodities they brought into the countryside for raw materials, which, according to the writer Richard Brathwait, included “cony-skins, lamb-skins, and feathers.”³¹ In this way too, then, the dissemination of ²⁸ Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Margaret Spufford, The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and their Wares in the Seventeenth Century (London: The Hambledon Press, 1984). ²⁹ J.A. Chartres, Internal Trade in England, 1500–1700 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 36. ³⁰ “The Joviall Pedler,” no publisher, date, or author. ³¹ Richard Brathwait, Whimzies, or, a new cast of characters (London, 1631), 18. Brathwait is admittedly a better source for reproductions of stereotypes than for factual accounts. But there

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ballads was linked with the commercialization of the English countryside. There is evidence that in some parts of Europe, these practices occurred on a much larger scale. Laurence Fontaine has shown that across the Continent, peddlers often worked as factors for larger merchants, purchasing the raw products of the peasantry and so incorporating them into commercial networks.³² Were some peddlers in England also connected to the merchants and middlemen who purchased raw goods from agricultural producers? At present, too little is known about the movement, habits, and connections of these itinerant agents. As was the case in English commerce as a whole, the ballad trade was far from a perfect national market. In fact, the very presence of peddlers speaks to its transitional character: the economic importance of peddlers was at its peak in this era, but would decline with the rise of local shopkeeping in the eighteenth century. It was a moment when people, and localities, were becoming integrated into broader economic structures, but in which the process was still far from complete. For this reason, it is not surprising that elements of the ballad trade suggest a strong interest in local culture, perhaps implying that particular ballads were marketed in particular areas. A ballad such as “Yorke, Yorke for my monie,” for instance, scarcely seems likely to have had national appeal.³³ Yet the fact that local elements remained, and in some cases even predominated, should not obscure the importance of the change the ballad trade represented. The distribution of ballads, like the creation of national markets, pointed to the beginning of a new era in the history of culture. If, as Benedict Anderson writes, “the book was the first modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity,” broadsides, and especially broadside ballads, were the first mass-produced industrial commodity to reach the lower orders.³⁴

seems little reason to doubt that peddlers in England, as elsewhere, sometimes traded their goods for raw commodities. ³² Laurence Fontaine, History of Pedlars in Europe, trans. Vicki Whittaker (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). ³³ W.E., “Yorke, Yorke for my monie” (London, 1584). Even in this ballad, however, the spread of London culture is apparent: the ballad praises York “of all the Citties that ever I see . . . Except the Cittie of London.” ³⁴ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), 34.

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A Working Audience Ballads, then, represented a new kind of literary entity. They did so precisely because of the class of persons whom they addressed, which in turn dictated their logic of sale and distribution. It also had implications for their content. As a form of writing oriented toward working people, ballads moved outside literature’s conventional frame of reference, taking on a set of concerns and mores that had not been central to literary history so long as it was solely the province of the educated elite. How exactly did ballads respond to the fact of their popular audience? One answer to the question has been proposed by Patricia Fumerton. Fumerton argues that ballads’ address to the lower orders allowed them to depict a different kind of subjectivity from high literary culture: an “unsettled” and variable point of view that featured a multiplicity of perspectives, composed “of the many for the many.”³⁵ Taking the widespread dislocations caused by economic development as her premise, as well as the literary market’s relentless creation of variety, Fumerton depicts a popular consciousness and a popular culture that are fluid, mobile, and heterogeneous. There is much to recommend this thesis, and Fumerton is an adroit literary interpreter. Nevertheless, in what follows I wish to emphasize a different aspect of the connection between the primary audience and literary content of ballads, focusing less on the way in which they represent subjective experience and more on how they depict the conditions of working people in this era. What I am interested in here is how ballads addressed the working people as working people—as laborers. The appearance of an incipiently national group of laborers was, after all, the other side of the creation of national markets of commodities. If more people relied on markets for commodities, they depended on them equally for payment for their labor, whether as wages or through the sale of produce. For working people, markets began to link labor and consumption in a relentless cycle.³⁶ Early modern men and women were well aware of the role labor played in the lives of the many. No social distinction was more important than that constituted by physical labor. It was essential to both the culture of early modern England and its political organization. As Andy Wood writes, “for ³⁵ Fumerton, Unsettled, 146. ³⁶ See Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (New York: Verso, 2002).

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contemporary social theorists, physical labour represented the everyday boundary between commonality and gentility. The commonality were those who dirtied their hands; the gentry were those who did not.”³⁷ Or as Thomas Smith put it in his analysis of the England of his day, gentlemen were those who “can liue idlely, and without manuall labour.”³⁸ I follow Wood’s and Smith’s example in treating the working people, as opposed to the gentry or nobility, as an intellectually coherent if internally highly diverse social category. For the purposes of my analysis, this division reveals more about the ballads’ audience—as well as English society—than more frequently used distinctions between elite and popular or between rich and poor, although there is, of course, considerable overlap between all three sets of oppositions. Martin Parker, the most famous and successful writer of ballads in the seventeenth century, seems to have grasped the relationship between popular commercial culture and the working people with his usual acuteness. In his chapbook Robin Conscience, he declares that after wandering the land, conscience at last found its place “mongst honest folks that have no lands, / But got their living with their hands.”³⁹ As he was well aware, this group, “people that do labour hard,” formed the primary audience for his literary output. Ballads’ opponents were equally aware of this connection. It was in part ballads’ appeal not merely to commoners or the poor but to working people specifically that earned them consistent opprobrium. One of the core objections to ballads, like other forms of secular leisure and culture, was that they were incentives to idleness—perhaps not coincidentally, the very quality that defined gentlemen in Thomas Smith’s formulation. While many moralists of the era saw secular culture and the Church as fatal opponents, they held leisure and labor as another, equally charged antithesis. It was precisely because ballads were aimed at working people and reflected their interests and problems—which could include labor itself—that their suppression could seem like an important aim. In the event, I will argue, ballads did as

³⁷ Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 11. ³⁸ Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (London, 1583), 27. A similar perspective is evident everywhere in the writing of the period: wealth, and specifically freedom from manual labor, rather than birth defines gentility in England by the end of the sixteenth century. For example, Richard Blome writes that anyone who can “live without manual labour or by his wealth can live and bear the port of a Gentleman shall be called Mr and may purchase a Coat of Arms,” Art of Heraldry (London, 1685), 253–4. ³⁹ Martin Parker, Robin Conscience, or, conscionable Robin (London, 1640), 15.

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much to reinforce as to critique the basic fact that labor was the fundamental pursuit of most people most of the time. Labor formed one of the essential subjects of the early Stuart black-letter ballad. Approaching this form with impressions shaped by its reputation, this might come as something of a surprise. One might expect to find it dedicated to the marvelous and miraculous, like the ballads of Shakespeare’s Autolycus, which describe “how a usurer’s wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burthen” or how a woman was transformed into a fish.⁴⁰ Or one might expect to find a form relating the chivalric deeds and melancholy deaths of lords and knights, in the model of such famous ballads as “Chevy Chase” or “Sir Patrick Spens.” Many ballads were, in fact, written in both modes in early modernity.⁴¹ But the marvelous and the heroic were far from the only, or even the dominant, theme of English ballads. A wide range of English ballads featured ordinary, working people, and took their lives and concerns as their literary material. This was not universally true of ballads across Europe: for example, Spanish ballads, known as romanceros, generally did draw on the repertoire of chivalric romance.⁴² But the English broadside ballad, especially when viewed in contrast to such contemporary forms, had a deeply quotidian strain. Although it is not possible to calculate themes by percentage given the low rate of survival of ballads, it is clear that no subject was more central than the relations between the men and women, including love, marriage, infidelity, and the battle of the sexes. Production, consumption—especially of alcohol—and the affairs of the household also played a major role in its literary representations. And labor, the defining ⁴⁰ William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. John Pitcher (London: Methuen, 2010). ⁴¹ The ballad trade of the era included such titles as “The Lamenting Lady,” grief-stricken because she had “as many children at one birth, as there are daies in the yeare,” or “A brave warlike song,” describing the deeds of the nine worthies of the world, Anonymous, “A brave warlike Song. Containing a briefe rehearsall of the deeds of Chivalry, performed by the Nine Worthies of the world, the seaven Champions of Christendome, with many other remarkable Warriours” (London, 1629?), EBBA; Anonymous, “The Lamenting Lady, Who for the wrongs done to her by a poore woman, for having two children at one burthen, was by the hand of God most strangely punished, by sending her as many children at one birth, as there are daies in the yeare” (London, 1620?), EBBA. ⁴² Harriet Goldberg, Motif-Index of Folk Narratives in the Pan-Hispanic Romancero (Tempe: Arizona State University, 2000); Samuel G. Armistead, “Epic and Ballad in the Hispanic Tradition,” in Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, Anxo Abuín Gonzalez, and César Domínguez, eds., A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula (Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s Publishing Company, 2010), 502–9. Goldberg’s motif-index reveals that there are a number of popular themes in Spanish ballads which scarcely register in English ones. Sorcerers, enchanted castles, princes and princesses all do not appear in English ballads, or scarcely appear. For understandable reasons, English ballads are also much less concerned with Islam than Spanish ballads.

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condition of the lives of ordinary people, formed one of its most important subjects. Evidence of this can be seen in the many surviving ballads that describe trades or address themselves to tradesmen. Take, for example, the anonymous ballad “A Merry Catch of All Trades,” published by John Trundle, and so appearing before his death in 1629, likely in the Jacobean period.⁴³ The ballad is a survey of tradesmen’s practices, turning a comic glance on their frauds—“The Baker weighes with false essayes” and “The Iron-monger hardly deales” and their failures—“All Fruterers loose by’th rot.” Other stanzas take the form of singsong descriptions of tradesmen’s activities: The Taylor sowes, the Smith he blowes, The Tinker beates his pan: The Pewterer ranke, cries tinke a tanke tanke, The Apothecary ranta tan tan. The Apoth: etc.

The world of this ballad is thoroughly organized by work. Beggars fall within its ambit, as do whores—the only female trade mentioned—but so, too, do some familiar character types who are not actually tradesmen, such as the cuckold and scold, omnipresent in ballads, reconceived here as a kind of profession. Sexual innuendo, as in many ballads, is pervasive throughout. Yet the overall impression the ballad leaves is of a worldview in which trades and manual labor are the principal way of comprehending the social order. It is a perspective dominated by ordinary people: with the exception of a courtier and a chamberlain, the ballad is peopled by the lower orders. In sharp contrast to medieval estates satire, another form dedicated to surveying the social order, the clergy are absent; so, too, are the nobility and king. In their absence, labor emerges as the central category not only of the ballad, but of social analysis. Within the scope of the ballad, it is not the fate of one limited and lesser group among others—the laboring classes—but the activity of all. The characteristics of “A Merry Catch of All Trades” were widely shared in early Stuart broadside ballads. Exploring this aspect of the form, Mark Hailwood has shown that the ballad can provide important insights into the formation of occupational identities in the period.⁴⁴ As he notes, there was a ⁴³ “A Merry Catch of All Trades” (London, no date). ⁴⁴ Mark Hailwood, “Broadside Ballads and Occupational Identity in Early Modern England,” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 2 (2016), 187–200. See also Mark Hailwood, “ ‘The

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clear market for ballads pitched to particular occupations, which sometimes purported to be written by a member of that trade. Ballads about shoemakers and smiths were especially common; a particularly ingenious ballad from 1635 in praise of blacksmiths catalogued the origin of common expressions—such as “hitting the nail on the head” and “striking while the iron’s hot”—derived from the blacksmith’s trade.⁴⁵ In doing so, it traced a direct pathway from the practices of a trade to linguistic invention, from work to literature. In addition, ballads sometimes had a more concrete connection to particular occupations: they were occasionally commissioned by guilds for performance at their feasts and celebrations.⁴⁶ Such ballads did not merely depict labor, but were integrated into its structures and practices. In cases where ballads were written specifically for the guilds, it is easy to see how they could reinforce longstanding modes of association and labor formed in the Middle Ages. Broadside ballads composed for feasts or celebrations likely complemented the model of corporate professional identity that had long been offered by the guilds. Were broadside ballads, then, simply a continuation in print of older forms of festivity and community? In some respects, they clearly fit into time-honored patterns and practices. Their emphasis on “good fellowship” and their integration into the world of the alehouse suggested their role in punctuating joint labor with shared leisure.⁴⁷ This is likely to be particularly true of ballads designed for a specific audience or a specific occasion. But commercial ballads, which were designed to be sold to a wider, and more unpredictable audience, ultimately took on a different logic. They represented a departure from the model of the local, communal association and the forms of expression that arose alongside them. If, in practice, ballads could be adapted to local needs, in their conception and design, the economics of the print trade meant that most ballads were a public, impersonal, commercial form. As such, many ballads were designed to appeal to laborers broadly, and not merely to members of a particular trade or craft. As in “A Merry Catch of All Trades,” differentiation between trades could paradoxically emphasize the unity between them—a unity provided by labor itself. Honest Tradesman’s Honour’: Occupational and Social Identity in Seventeenth-Century England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 24 (2014), 79–103. ⁴⁵ Anonymous, “A merry new Ballad, both pleasant and sweete, In praise of the Black-smith, which is very meete” (London, 1635). ⁴⁶ Hailwood, “Broadside Ballads,” 198. ⁴⁷ Mark Hailwood, Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England, 121–33.

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In their depiction of work, then, ballads thus reflected both enduring elements of the condition of working people and the new circumstances shaping both labor and the circulation of commodities—including ballads themselves—in the early seventeenth century. As a result, it is no surprise that the pressures of the market often intrude, overtly or more subtly, on the conventions of the genre. It is not just that money is everywhere in ballads, its marvelous power and devastating absence a constant theme. It is that ballads show how the connection between labor, wealth, and markets was becoming ever more apparent. In “The Countrey mans chat,” which depicts the conversation of a group of Hertfordshire yeomen, the market provides a consistent frame of reference. As the ballad reports, Quoth Goodman Read, to the Goodman Pead, how sold you wheat at Hertford? Faith, quoth old Brown, even halfe a crown and so twas sold at Storford. I never knew, quoth old John Trew, the Markets to be slower. Nay, quoth old Snow, tis very like so, the prizes will be lower.⁴⁸

Storford and Hertford were market towns about thirteen miles apart; that wheat was selling at the same price in both towns, and that the men know this, reflects the way in which local markets were merging together under the pressure of new methods of production and sale and the power of the London market. Hertfordshire, located near London, was one of the first counties in England in which agriculture became thoroughly subject to the market.⁴⁹ The conditions of labor, including the world of work depicted in the ballad, were deeply shaped by these processes. Ballads did not restrict themselves to depicting the labor of men. Household production and consumption, to a large extent the sphere of women, also received considerable attention. In recent scholarship on

⁴⁸ Anonymous, “The Countrey mans chat” (London, no date). ⁴⁹ It was also one of the first places where agricultural productivity rose, as a result of its connection to the market, as Mark Overton and Bruce M. S. Campbell show, “Productivity Change in European Agricultural Development,” in Bruce M. S. Campbell and Mark Overton, eds., Land, Labour, and Livestock: Historical Studies in European Agricultural Productivity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 1–50.

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ballads, the role of women has emerged as a major subject of research.⁵⁰ One reason for this is the simple fact that they can help to fill in gaps: ballads consistently depicted the lives of working women, a group for whom there are too few sources in the historical record, and next to none in early modern literature. Many ballads portrayed women in the mode of comic misogyny that was ubiquitous in the early Stuart era, while others reproduced fraught debates about women’s place within the social hierarchy in a more ambivalent fashion, refusing to choose between competing claims. But ballads also depicted women’s concerns in a manner that, to a reader of the literature of this period, registers as remarkably sympathetic. One reason for this may have been the fact that a substantial proportion of ballads’ consumers and purchasers were women. As Sandra Clark argues, “more than any other literary medium of the time, ballads had the potential to appeal to women, and in many areas their subject matter, textual devices, and performative aspect may well have reflected women’s interests quite directly.”⁵¹ Many ballads were, in fact, quite explicit about their attempts to reach women purchasers. Martin Parker addressed a significant number of his ballads to women. In ballads set to tunes such as “I have for all good wives a song,” he offered advice on marriage and domestic happiness to women; in others, he suggested that men should refrain from beating their wives and avoid jealousy.⁵² In Parker’s ballad “Man’s Felicity and Misery: Which is a good wife and a bad,” the attempt to appeal to a female purchaser is more ingenious. In this ballad, two cousins, Edmund and David, describe their contrasting experiences with their wives, one of whom is a loving wife and pristine housekeeper; the other is spiteful and neglectful.⁵³ The perspectives are men’s, yet at the conclusion of the ballad, the “author” invites the wives in the audience “to shew who’s better and who is worse” by their response to the ballad: “The best will freely buy this Song.” Given that Parker ⁵⁰ Sandra Clark, “The Broadside Ballad and the Woman’s Voice,” in Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki, eds., Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 103–20. ⁵¹ Sandra Clark, “The Economics of Marriage in the Broadside Ballad,” Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2002) 119–33. ⁵² Martin Parker, “The married-womans case, or, Good counsell to mayds, to be carefull of hastie marriage by the example of other married-women” (London, 1627); Martin Parker, “Houshold talke or, Good councell for a married man” (London, 1629); Martin Parker, “Hold your hands honest men for here’s a good wife hath a husband that likes her, in every respect, but onely he strikes her, then if you desire to be held men compleat, what ever you doe your wives doe not beat” (London, 1634). ⁵³ Martin Parker, “Mans felicity and misery which is a good wife and a bad: or the best and the worst discoursed in a dialogue betweene Edmund and Dauid” (London, 1632).

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was the most commercially successful ballad writer of his day, his persistent and explicit representation of women as buyers and subjects of ballads clearly reflects something of the contemporary reality. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that ballads occasionally depicted labor from the point of view of working women, focusing on keeping house. The ballad “A Woman’s Work is never done,” for instance, takes the repetitive nature of domestic labor as its theme.⁵⁴ Martin Parker showed a marked interest in this subject: his “The Woman to the Plow; And the Man to the Hen-Roost” repeats a venerable tale of a husband and wife who switch places in response to the husband’s complaints about his wife’s efforts, only to find themselves unable to cope with the other’s work. Parker concludes with the wish that all wives would follow the ballad heroine’s example: “Then may they work and nere be chid.”⁵⁵ Women, like men, are defined by labor in Parker’s account; in addition, he suggests that they should be seen as competent and productive workers. The alternate attack on and defense of women as domestic workers in ballads should not merely be considered as an example of a timeless trope of misogyny and its equally standard refutation. Rather, it points to a moment of instability in the role of working women and domestic labor as markets transformed the relationship between production and consumption. “With the decline of the family as an economic unit of production,” Natasha Korda explains, “the role of the housewife in late-sixteenth-century England was beginning to shift from that of skilled producer to savvy consumer.”⁵⁶ That is, as fewer of life’s necessities were produced at home and more were purchased in the market, the home was reconceived as a site of consumption rather than labor. Even women who engaged in domestic labor saw their work devalued—it did not, after all, bring in money. This transition is visible in one way or another in many ballads. But it can be seen very clearly in the anonymous “A new Ballad, containing a communication between the carefull Wife, and the comfortable Husband touching the common cares and charges of House-hold,” which renders an argument between a husband and wife about household management in scrupulous detail. In this ballad, the husband suggests that his wife is a drain on resources, rather than a benefit to the household: “You looke in my purse, wife, too often I doubt,” he ⁵⁴ “A Woman’s Work is Never Done” (London, 1650s?). ⁵⁵ Martin Parker, “The Woman to the Plow; And the Man to the Hen-Roost” (London, no date). ⁵⁶ Natasha Korda, “Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 2 (1996), 109–31.

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remarks. The wife counters by depicting her work in the home as an analogue to wage labor: “What you spend on mee, I take for my paine, / For doing such duties as you would disdaine.” More than three hundred years later, some of the same forces and debates would impel the wages-forhousework movement. The nineteenth-century editor of “A New Ballad” considered it “dreary,” and modern readers might well be inclined to agree.⁵⁷ It is certainly somewhat dry. Its careful depiction of the costs and effort required to maintain a household has little in the way of direct narrative interest or comic wit. The wife’s characterization of her labor in “dressing your dyet, in washing and wringing” and in “spinning and reeling” gives the ballad’s reader a sense of the monotony of these repetitive tasks, while in the second half of the ballad, the husband’s insistence that he will “live with good credit and pay every man,” “pay that I owe,” and make “clear quittance” evokes a perpetual cycle of getting and spending, given urgency by the looming possibility of debt and ruin. And yet viewed from the perspective of literary history, it is precisely the ballad’s “dreariness” that makes it noteworthy. Like all of the ballads I have been considering in this section, “A New Ballad” is focused on concrete, mundane, and repetitive tasks, which it depicts in sympathetic detail. In doing so, it treats work as a literary subject, rather than as a condition that falls beneath the level of literature or as a temporary state that literary protagonists must overcome.

Literature and Labor I have sketched how in the early Stuart black-letter broadside ballad, working people and their labors became the central concern of a form of written literature. The culture of working people had always included reference to their productive activity. Popular medieval culture, for example, clearly took an interest in work and in trades, as evidenced by the mystery cycles, among other forms. But such motifs were rarely central to literature, which was geared toward a different audience. In a world in which the elite had a nearmonopoly on literacy, literature was, in general, written for and by the upper reaches of society. As a consequence, where work plays a part in literary texts, it is depicted for the benefit of people who did not themselves have to ⁵⁷ J.B. Ebsworth, The Roxburghe Ballads, qtd. in Sandra Clark, “The Economics of Marriage in the Broadside Ballad.”

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labor. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this simple fact, which, in one way or another, shaped every convention of literature. The very system of genres, for example, reflected the perspective of social superiors toward labor. Traditionally, the low and the comic were linked: tragedy was a high form; comedy, a low. Depictions of kings were tragic; peasants, by contrast, were comic, “clowns,” or occasionally “villains”—two words whose senses drifted from referring to the laboring classes to describing literary types.⁵⁸ The system of aesthetic decorum that informs this classification is an old one, dating back to antiquity.⁵⁹ In the Renaissance, the classical system of genres was rediscovered and reimagined, with its class associations firmly reinforced, under the influence of humanist culture and the print market. Although there were certainly exceptions to this rule, any reader of early modern literature can readily recall many literary texts in which work and working people are portrayed as comic figures. The use of laborers as comic relief in Shakespeare’s plays, for example, from the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the gravediggers in Hamlet, is well known. “Comedy,” wrote his successor John Fletcher, “must be a representation of familiar people.”⁶⁰ In the eighteenth century, Fielding could still draw on these venerable aesthetic distinctions in his anxiously classicizing preface to Joseph Andrews. Introducing the aesthetic category of “the comic epic in prose,” Fielding argued that it differs from “the serious romance” “in its characters, by introducing persons of inferiour rank, and consequently of inferiour manners, whereas the grave romance sets the highest before us.” The “comic epic in prose,” which would come to be known as the novel, also differs from aristocratic forms “in its sentiments and diction; by preserving the ludicrous instead of the sublime.”⁶¹ For Fielding, the novel was a species of comedy precisely because of the class of persons it depicted.⁶² It was only gradually, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that this convention began to be eroded in practice. In ballads, it is possible to see this process in action. Ballads did not just depict work and workers. They depicted them to themselves, in a form designed for their own consumption. In doing so, they did not treat working people merely as ⁵⁸ It was through the theater itself that clown received its modern meaning; see OED. ⁵⁹ In the literature of antiquity, Erich Auerbach explains, “everything pertaining to everyday life must not be treated on any level except the comic,” Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 31. ⁶⁰ John Fletcher, The faithfull shepheardesse (London, 1610), A2v. ⁶¹ Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4. ⁶² Judith Frank, “The Comic Novel and the Poor: Fielding’s Preface to Joseph Andrews,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1993–4), 217–34.

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comic relief from the main plot, or as intrinsically ludicrous. It is, of course, true that many ballads did take their subject matter lightly. A considerable proportion of early Stuart black-letter ballads were comic, or in the aesthetic language of the era, “merry.” But this was by no means always the case. A “dreary” ballad such as “A New Ballad,” with its intimate attention to household management and labor, could hardly be accused of treating the problems of working people in a comic vein. In other ballads, comedy was used to make a serious point, whether about women’s labor, the value of a particular trade, or the exploitation of the people. Evidence of the ballad’s unusual perspective can be seen by examining one incident recorded in both the ballad and the theater. In 1605, an anonymous ballad was published celebrating the grant of a corporation to the London porters. Now they that were before of meanest estimation, by suite have salvde that sore, and gainde a Corporation . . . ⁶³

the ballad declares. London porters were not only typically poor, but also were examples of downward social mobility: throughout the sixteenth century, they were generally members of London guilds who had fallen on hard times.⁶⁴ In celebrating the porters’ labor and their corporation—which may not, in fact, have ever materialized—the ballad is designed for the porters themselves. If others found them “of meanest estimation,” the ballad clearly does not. The following year, the same episode was alluded to in the theater, but in rather different terms. In the satirical play The familie of loue, the character Gerardine declares that he is a member “of the spick & span new set vp Company of Porters.”⁶⁵ Gerardine, in disguise, is making himself into a figure of fun, depicted—like all the characters in the play—by a boy actor. His association with the newly formed company of porters is meant to ⁶³ Anonymous, “A newe Ballad, composed in commendation of the Societie, or Companie of the Porters” (London, 1605). ⁶⁴ Joseph P. Ward, Metropolitan Communities: Trade Guilds, Identity and Change in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 58–65. Ward casts doubt on whether the porters actually received their corporation. ⁶⁵ The famelie of loue Acted by the children of his Maiesties Reuells (London, 1608). While this play was traditionally ascribed to Thomas Middleton, more recently, it has been attributed to the minor playwright Lording Barry. It was likely first performed in 1606.

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amuse the audience; “spick & span” reinforces the irony. The treatment of this episode in the theater stands in sharp contrast with the solemn and dignified tone in which porters are treated in the ballad, demonstrating how stark the difference in class perspective between the forms could be. The theater could, of course, also offer sympathetic depictions of workers, for instance in the plays of a writer as interested in artisan culture as Thomas Dekker.⁶⁶ But despite wide areas of overlap, the two forms ultimately had different centers of gravity. By taking work as a central subject, ballads were on the cutting edge of literary history. In the eighteenth century, a new set of aesthetic conventions would emerge in which work, realistic action, and ordinary people were the key subjects of literature. Many literary scholars have traced the wideranging repercussions of this transformation.⁶⁷ In a powerful recent study, for example, Richard Halpern has argued that new attitudes toward labor had a decisive impact on the history of tragedy. By making production— labor—the source of social meaning, he contends, “capitalism induces a crisis of action that undercuts traditional conceptions of tragedy.”⁶⁸ For Halpern, tragic form, which sets the decisive, cataclysmic action over and against the routine and repetitive process of labor, is stripped of its crucial significance when work becomes central to social meaning within a capitalist system. It is not the decline of tragedy, however, but the rise of the novel that for most scholars has epitomized the changing position of genres at the onset of capitalism. In contrast to tragedy, the novel is a form that is markedly attentive, both in subject and structure, to the economic destiny of individuals, the creation and the maintenance of households, and even to repetitive labor. It presupposes, in Hegel’s well-known formulation, “a world already prosaically ordered.”⁶⁹ In many accounts, the novel’s emphasis on the everyday world of work and domesticity has been attributed to its association with a particular class: the middle class or the bourgeois.⁷⁰ Its ⁶⁶ See Michelle M. Dowd and Natasha Korda, eds., Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011). ⁶⁷ In a wide-ranging study of the reevaluation of work in the seventeenth century, Joanna Picciotto has focused on the interpretation of the Garden of Eden and Adam’s labors, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). ⁶⁸ Richard Halpern, The Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). ⁶⁹ G.F.W. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. II, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975), 1092. ⁷⁰ Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), 47. For Watt, the literary conventions of realism were linked to “the change in the centre of gravity of the reading public,” that is, the growth of a new literary market consisting of the middle classes.

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distinctive concerns were held to reflect their interests and their selfperception. I do not wish to challenge this now much-disputed—but still rightly influential—theory in broad outline. But I think it is worth remarking on the role played by a different class in introducing a literature of the everyday. Long before the publication of Robinson Crusoe, an emphasis on work and the routine was commonplace in ballad literature aimed at working people. This group, after all, had been and continued to be defined by labor. Working people’s new forms of consumption, including literary consumption, could not help but open possibilities for the literary representation of labor and laborers, including the depiction of situations and persons that had previously been considered subliterary.

The Problem of Popular Culture As a form of literature that depicted the lives of working people and their labor, I have argued, the ballad introduced new currents into literary history. Yet this analysis leaves a central question unanswered. To what extent did the depiction of working people actually reflect their perspectives, interests, values, or experiences? In older studies, which viewed ballads as a folk form, scholars took it for granted that they represented the authentic voice of the people, at least to the extent that any literary form could. Viewed as a product of the world of cheap print, however, the question is more complicated. As ballads came to be understood as a commercial form, debates opened between scholars who viewed ballad and broadside literature as a vehicle for the imposition of elite values and those who argued that the form really does capture elements of the experience of ordinary people—with many, inevitably, adopting a compromise position.⁷¹ In an attempt to answer this question, Angela McShane has proposed a useful division between commissioned broadsides, whose printing costs were paid for by a given individual and which were typically distributed free of charge, and commercial broadsides, which had to find a consumer market. McShane’s distinction touches on a vital aspect of popular print history, and the techniques she suggests for differentiating the two modes ⁷¹ For Garett Sullivan and Linda Woodbridge, for example, the distinction between elite and popular culture was drawn by elites, for their own purposes: “the Renaissance posited a popular culture against which to define—and usually to exalt—high culture,” “Popular Culture in Print,” in Arthur Kinney, ed., The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 265–86.

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are undoubtedly useful. Without question the distinction she draws must be observed by scholars studying ballads. Yet her analysis leaves another, far more difficult, problem untouched. This is the problem of commercial culture itself. Even if we know that a ballad was sold on the open market, perhaps purchased eagerly and going through many editions, it is not clear what precisely that tells us about its relation to its consumers. Does commercial culture actually represent the lives and perspective of its audience, or does it in fact always impose the values of those who make and profit from it? Can its products carry a radical charge, or was Adorno right to argue that “the concoctions of the culture industry are neither guides for a blissful life, nor a new art of responsibility, but rather exhortations to toe the line, behind which stand the most powerful interests”?⁷² Ballads reveal the many complexities involved in this problem. To begin with, it should be noted that working people were not merely passive consumers of ballads—rather, they used and responded to them creatively.⁷³ In practice, ballads could take on as many meanings as their diverse interpreters wished to give them. They also served many purposes: different ballads, as is the case with most art forms, imply substantially different modes of response. Nevertheless, there is evidence that many persons drew connections between their own predicaments and perspectives and those depicted in ballads. In using ballads as love tokens, for example, the persons exchanging them could mirror the subjects of ballads; more seamlessly still, drinking songs, often designed to be punctuated with draughts of ale, merged life and art. Other elements of the ballad, such as its use of the first person, speak to a similar presupposition. In many cases, the possibility of identification is written into the very structure of the ballad.⁷⁴ A suggestive reference to the desire of ballads’ consumers to see themselves in the form can be found in the anonymous play The London Chaunticleres, published in the 1650s but likely written and performed in the 1630s. In one scene, a ballad seller attempts to sell his wares. “I like the song well enough,” his would-be customer replies, “but I would have a ⁷² Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 105. The quotation comes from the essay “The Culture Industry Reconsidered.” ⁷³ See, for instance, the creative examples in Adam Fox, “Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England,” Past & Present, No. 145 (1994), 47–83. ⁷⁴ Natascha Würzbach has shown that as the ballad developed as a form in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it made greater use of the first person, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650, trans. Gayna Walls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 236–41.

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picture upon it like me.”⁷⁵ One is duly found, and the customer purchases the ballad. According to the play, at least, it is the ballad’s suitability as a form of self-representation for working people that makes it so attractive. The ballad’s customer wants to see himself in the work—in this case, literally. Yet the fact that the black-letter broadside ballad might reflect the values, sentiments, or even self-image of its consumers, does not, of course, imply that it was free of the ideology of their social superiors. It is, perhaps, the question of labor that best reveals the double-edged character of a popular commercial literature. As I noted above, as a result of an emerging capitalism, the seventeenth century experienced a reevaluation of labor, which ultimately permeated literature as a whole. This reevaluation was not, obviously, restricted to the realm of ideas; rather, a changing attitude toward labor corresponded to the real requirements of the economy. An emerging capitalism demanded more labor at home, while a nascent colonial system put labor to new, brutal uses abroad. In this climate, every expedient was attempted to ensure the availability of labor. In England, workhouses were founded to force the indigent, including children, to work. In Scotland, to take a minor but telling example, the growing coal mining industry provides a striking illustration of the lengths to which the propertied would go: Scottish miners were enserfed at the beginning of the seventeenth century to ensure a regular workforce for large estates in this newly vital industry.⁷⁶ Other forms of unfree labor, most importantly slavery, were widely used in the colonies. And not only were more people working, they were also working more. For the whole of the laboring population, the average number of working days per year increased: by the end of the century, most men and women devoted far more of their lives to labor than their medieval, or even sixteenth-century, predecessors had done.⁷⁷ Ballads’ attention to labor must be understood in this context. On the one hand, they offered a medium for the representation of working people, their ⁷⁵ The London Chaunticleres (London, 1659), 8. Although this play was only printed in the late 1650s, it was likely written in the 1630s. ⁷⁶ John Langton, “Proletarianization in the Industrial Revolution: Regionalism and Kinship in the Labour Markets of the British Coal Industry from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2000), 31–49. ⁷⁷ Robert S. Duplessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 263–6. In England, the growing number of days per year that men and women worked was associated with the loss of the ritual year, as the traditional calendar of festivals and rituals was gradually eradicated under the influence of Protestant reform. See Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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lives, and their aspirations. As was only fitting, they gave a complex picture of the role of work, which could include complaint about the hardships of labor, satirical denunciations, and fantasies of escape from its endless toil. “The main mythical ideal for the labouring classes,” Peter Mathias argues, “was that of leisure not labour.”⁷⁸ Nevertheless, in many ballads, labor was presented in very rosy terms indeed. What appeared to be—or really was—a respectful treatment of working people could become an exhortation to work. Recruiting ballads, which glamorized the lives of soldiers or seamen, are the most direct example of the way in which ballads might serve as an instrument for economic ends.⁷⁹ But the point applies far outside such specialized instances to products of the wider ballad market, which were bought and enjoyed by ordinary people. Once again, a ballad of Martin Parker’s can serve as a case in point. In “The honest plaine dealing Porter,” the first-person narrator extolls the virtues of work. His ballad is a tale of downward mobility and ultimate redemption, in which he describes how he lost his money and was at first “ashamed” to work. Yet the porter claims to have wrested dignity from his reduced circumstances. Now, he suggests, “Ile rather rise at foure i’th morne, / And labour hard til nine at night” than avoid labor. In Parker’s treatment, downward mobility becomes an opportunity for asserting that social value lies in labor, not status or even wealth. In adopting the language of honest labor, he echoes a set of prescriptions that were an omnipresent part of the ideology of the period. Here, as in the ballad celebrating the porters’ corporation discussed above, the choice of trade is significant. It is not just that the porter is a particularly low-status trade. Rather, there is hardly a better example of manual labor than the work of the porter, who does not directly produce anything, but carries goods from one place to another. His efforts are not skilled or complex; they are simply work, and so can serve as an effective stand-in for “human labor in the abstract,” in Marx’s phrase. The nature of the profession, which is not a skilled trade like that of the shoemaker or the blacksmith, allows Parker to make a claim about the value, both moral and social, of labor in general. The work of the porter is ⁷⁸ Peter Mathias, “Time for Work, Time for Play: Relations Between Work and Leisure in the Early Modern Period,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol. 81, No. 3 (1994), 305–23. Peter Burke has also argued that this era saw a transformation in the idea of leisure, “The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern England,” Past & Present, No. 146 (1995), 136–50. ⁷⁹ As well as Fumerton, Unsettled, see Laurie Ellinghausen, “ ‘A Wife or Friend at E’ery Port’: The Common Sailor in Ballads of the Early British Empire,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Vol. 50, No. 2 (2020), 431–53.

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repetitive and difficult, but it is also “honest.” Echoing the Protestant language of vocation, the porter insists, “my calling is not base.” I have concluded this chapter with a discussion of Parker’s ballad because it so obviously illustrates the two-sided effects of the rise of a literate, commercial, popular culture. It is easy to see how, for persons whose lot paralleled that of the porter, such a ballad could hold an appeal. In a culture in which working people were constantly accused of idleness and vice, or made the butt of vicious satire, here is a piece of popular literature that proclaims that there is dignity, value, and honor in their lives and pursuits. At the same time, it is equally easy to see how its message could be viewed as pure cant: a moralistic fiction designed to quell the complaints of working people about the onerous, unremunerative labor they performed for the benefit of the propertied. In this ballad, then, the ambivalent relation of a commercial popular culture to working people is clear—perhaps too clear. But even in subtler cases—even, in fact, in those ballads that seem to adopt dangerously subversive perspectives—the same principle applies. The rise of a commercial popular literature inaugurated a shift from a popular culture produced by the people to one produced for them. It gave them a new place in literary history, and a new impact on it, but only in the highly constrained role of consumers. This new form of culture emerged as part of what was perhaps the single most important transformation in early modern socioeconomic history: the increasing prevalence of market-based forms of production and consumption, fueled by the labor and purchasing power of working people. At this key point, then, the impact of working people can be felt on literary and social history alike.

3 The Problem of a Courtly Literature Introduction The rise of capitalism in seventeenth-century England prompted the birth of a new aesthetics—and the death of an old. Like the literature of much of Europe, sixteenth-century English literature was written in proximity to the court; even writers working far outside its charmed circle typically cast an eye in its direction. A courtly ethos shaped the writing of the Elizabethans, producing a literary theory that collapsed style into decorum, and skill into aristocratic elegance.¹ Under the early Stuarts, courtly aesthetics retained a powerful influence on the wider literary culture. But already in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it was evident that a rival set of literary values was gaining ground. In the 1630s, the decade on which I focus in this chapter, courtly literature at once reached its most developed and most precarious form. Poets working in and around the Caroline court, such as Thomas Carew, John Suckling, William Davenant, and Ben Jonson, produced exquisitely refined lyrics infused with monarchical symbolism, much of it adapted from France. Many poets also wrote masques, that quintessential form of the court, which reached its greatest height of accomplishment and display in this decade, its last. Yet despite their dazzling skill, the lyrics of the 1630s betray an abiding anxiety. In poem after poem, the courtly writers of the period revealed that they were all too aware of the formidable challenge posed by the book market and commercial theater to a literature predicated on the importance of rank, interpersonal connection, and patronage. Their poetics was, in part, a retort to the wider environment in which they wrote. The courtly poetry of the Caroline era was thus a poetry of reaction, as the values of a commodified, market-driven literature began to overtake aristocratic forms of style, taste, and decorum.

¹ Daniel Javitch describes how Puttenham adapted elements of Castiglione to create an English poetics suited to courtiers in “Poetry and Court Conduct: Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie in the Light of Castiglione’s Cortegiano,” MLN, Vol. 87, No. 7 (1972), 865–82. Writing at the Origin of Capitalism: Literary Circulation and Social Change in Early Modern England. Julianne Werlin, Oxford University Press. © Julianne Werlin 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198869467.003.0004

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The tenuous position of courtly poetry was only a species of a larger issue, however. Between 1629 and 1640, Charles I ruled without a parliament, asserting his prerogative powers of government and putting forward a patriarchal ideology of kingship, bolstered by Arminian religion. A decade of heightening tensions followed, many of them economic in character, as the Crown sought—and ultimately failed—to rule a society increasingly organized around market relations.² Courtly literature participated in this wider conflict and derived much of its meaning from it. In this chapter, then, I seek to shed light on the character, and ultimately the eclipse, of courtly poetry by situating the conditions of literary production within the history of economic conflict between the court and a nascent capitalist society. Tensions over the book trade, its intellectual influence, and its royal regulation recapitulated controversies between the prerogative control of trade and the growing commodity markets. In taking this approach, I draw throughout on the research of historians of the book trade even as I attempt to recontextualize it. For Marxist literary scholars, linking literary form and socioeconomic change is one of the core tasks of literary history, and there is no shortage of interpretations of the ideology of the writing composed in the period leading to the English Revolution. With some important exceptions, book historians have generally been more reluctant to draw such connections, whether because of the discipline’s emphasis on empiricism or its rise in a period when economic explanations of social change, Marxist or otherwise, had come to be seen as reductive. Perhaps more to the point, Marxist interpretations of the causes of the English Revolution, including the period of Caroline rule, today have few adherents in the academy. With the rise of revisionist historiography, historical materialist explanations of the Revolution received a formidable setback. For Revisionists, such explanations were too simple and too teleological—they were history seen, in Conrad Russell’s memorable phrase, through “the distorting medium of hindsight.”³ Via the work of scholars such as Kevin Sharpe, revisionism shifted scholarly perceptions of the literature of the 1630s, promoting an almost Namierite understanding of the court as a site of individual interests and alliances rather than an ² In this decade, Robert Ashton observes, “constitutional theories became woven into a fabric of business opposition,” “The Civil War and the Class Struggle,” in R.H. Parry, ed., The English Civil War and After, 1642–1658 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), 93–110, 106. ³ Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1990), ix.

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institution subject to consistent social pressures.⁴ More recent scholarship has, in general, turned away from this stark view of the past. It has, among other things, tended to revive the explanatory importance of ideological factors, chiefly through an account of religious division, although some scholars have emphasized the role of political belief.⁵ In the last few years in particular, scholarship focused on the public sphere, manuscript circulation, and radical print has shed new light on the role of communications in the events of the era.⁶ What has not been revived, however, is the long-term economic account associated with Marxist historiography.⁷ Yet tracing the impact of an emerging capitalism on a courtly culture still retains considerable explanatory power, not least for literature. The courtly poets of the 1630s wrote with a keen awareness of the fact that they were living at a moment when the economics of literary production, along with the economic basis of society, was changing. They knew that distinct, and ultimately opposed, conceptions of literary taste, decorum, and value were to be found in the aristocratic milieu of the court and the public forum of the book market. And they saw that there were important commonalities between the problems posed by markets and market regulation in literature

⁴ Examples of the literary implications of this approach can be found in Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987); Thomas Corns, “The Poetry of the Caroline Court,” Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 97 (1998), 51–74; Steven N. Zwicker, “ ‘On First Looking into Revisionism’: The Literature of Civil War, Revolution, and Restoration,” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 78, No. 4 (2015), 789–807. ⁵ Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c.1590–1640 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1990); David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritans and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). ⁶ Peter McCullough, “Print, Publication, and Religious Politics in Caroline England,” The Historical Journal, Vol. 51, No. 2 (2008), 285–313; Noah Millstone, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); David Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). ⁷ In this chapter, I draw in particular on Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714, 2nd edition (London: Routledge Classics, 2002); Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Schocken, 1964); Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640–49 (London: Heinemann, 1976); Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders (New York: Verso, 2003); and James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (New York: Verso, 2000).

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and in the production of other commodities, such as soap or saltpeter.⁸ As Joseph Loewenstein has argued, “the history of printing is a history of early capitalist industry; the book is quintessentially a modern commodity and the author in some ways quite an unexceptional laborer.”⁹ The courtly aesthetics of the 1630s, as I will show, must be understood as an extended response to this fact.

The Monarchy and the Market When Charles took the throne in 1625, many of the characteristics of England’s emerging capitalist economy were just becoming visible. As discussed in previous chapters, in the early seventeenth century, England’s industrial markets increased in size and became more highly integrated.¹⁰ They were the source of more people’s livelihoods—in whole or in part— than they had ever been before and were responsible for a greater share of their consumption. If contemporaries had remained unaware of this fact previously, the 1620s made it apparent. In this decade, a slump in the cloth trade resulted in a downturn whose consequences rippled outward to engulf the country as a whole.¹¹ The scope of the crisis provided ample testimony, albeit in negative form, to the growth of English industry in the preceding decades. Past depressions had, as a rule, been the result of wars, natural disasters, or bad harvests, not of the fluctuations of markets. Now, with the growth of larger markets, England became less vulnerable to harvest failures and the vagaries of nature but more susceptible to downturns caused by variations in trade and prices—it is at this moment, that is, that we can see the beginnings of the modern economic cycle. When 1630 proved to be a year of dearth, Archbishop Laud remarked that the famine “was made by ⁸ On the soap monopoly, see Ronald G. Asch, “The Revival of Monopolies: Court and Patronage during the Personal Rule of Charles I,” in Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke, eds., Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, c.1450–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), and Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule Of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 260–2; on saltpeter under Charles, see David Cressy, Saltpeter: The Mother of Gunpowder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 88–120. ⁹ Joseph Loewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 22. ¹⁰ L.A. Clarkson, The Preindustrial Economy in England, 1500–1750 (London, B.T. Batsford, 1971), 114. ¹¹ B.E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England 1600–1642: A Study in the Instability of a Mercantile Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 52–72.

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man and not by God,” the result, that is, of economic activity, not bad harvests.¹² Laud’s remark angered those who were inclined to suspect him of impiety—but it did capture the reality of the situation.¹³ Laud surveyed the development of the market from a position of political and moral disapproval. If, in his eyes, the actions that had caused the famine were all too human, that was because they were not simply the product of industry but the consequence of vice. The correct response to such a situation lay in regulation. In this case as in others, the pursuit of profit through markets should be circumscribed by customary social hierarchies and guided by notions of the common good and the just price. Where commerce failed to serve the common good, that is, it was the role of the monarch to intervene: the forces of trade ought not to be left to their own devices, but controlled, abetted, and directed by the authority of the Crown. In the abstract, at least, such a position was not especially controversial. It was certainly the traditional view, and it was the one held by Charles, as it had been held by his predecessors. The direction of the economy was, after all, a traditional part of the royal prerogative; even in the eighteenth century, Blackstone could still write that the monarch was “the arbiter of commerce,” although he restricted his remarks to the domestic sphere.¹⁴ Economic paternalism was an ideological pillar of the Stuart rule. In addition, there were other, more practical reasons for the English monarchs to view trade as subject to its authority. The complex system of grants and privileges that was one tool for the organization of commerce was an important source of royal patronage. Frequently given to courtiers and favorites, monopolies and other licenses created chains of obligation and patronage, as well as concrete financial ties, that helped to reinforce the intimacies and hierarchies of courtly life. This aspect of the system had been particularly notable, or perhaps notorious, under James.¹⁵ Under Charles, patronage frequently linked religious, political, and literary endeavors: Brian Duppa, Laudian royal chaplain and future Bishop of Chichester, was the

¹² A.E. Bland et al., eds., English Economic History: Select Documents (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 393. ¹³ Paul Slack, “Dearth and Social Policy,” Social History of Medicine, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1992), 1–17. ¹⁴ William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1770), 273. ¹⁵ Under James, the distribution of patronage had been a major source of popular complaint, epitomized in the critiques of Buckingham. Linda Levy Peck, “ ‘For a King Not to Be Bountiful Were a Fault’: Perspectives on Court Patronage in Early Stuart England,” Journal of British Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1 (1986), 31–61.

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editor of the commemorative volume Ionsonus Virbius (1637) which collected elegies for Ben Jonson, shaping his legacy; his brother James Duppa was a projector and would-be monopolist who had been at the center of a notorious scheme for taxing and regulating the brewing industry the year prior.¹⁶ In doing so, it bound the economy as a whole to the interests of the court; the brewing industry was, of course, vital to English consumption. Patronage was never simply an internal matter; rather, it ensured the court’s centrality to the social and economic life of the country. James Holstun notes that in its “conspicuous display of unproductive and excessive expenditure” the patronage system “reinforces the symbolic power of the absolutist classstate, and so also the legitimacy of its non-market-based extraction of surplus.”¹⁷ The symbolic significance of patronage, in turn, held because it was directly predicated on the economic relation of the court to the country as a whole. Yet a new economic perspective was emerging that would challenge the prerogative control of trade, taking a clear form during the downturn of the 1620s. In these years, it became possible for some members of the propertied classes to see the economy in utilitarian and pragmatic rather than moral and political terms—as the product of impersonal and abstract forces, not ethically charged behaviors.¹⁸ In the 1620s, Joyce Appleby writes, the “wall of paternalism” was breached “with a ramrod of economic realism.”¹⁹ One early proponent of such “economic realism” was the merchant and economist Thomas Mun. In a work of economic analysis prompted by the crisis of the 1620s, he asserted that laws of trade worked by a “necessity beyond all resistance.”²⁰ Trade was autonomous, self-correcting, and implacable. Royal interventions could only set it out of kilter, never improve its operation. Mun thus articulated, with perceptive clarity, a train of reasoning that would have a long afterlife, to say the least. But although his formulation was unusually sophisticated, his thought was in keeping with the trend of current

¹⁶ John R. Krenzke, “ ‘Moneys Unreceived’: Attempts to Tax the Brewing Trade in London and Its Environs Before the Excise Ordinance of 1643,” Brewery History, Vol. 162 (2015), 2–14. ¹⁷ Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, 148. ¹⁸ Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). ¹⁹ Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York: Norton, 2010), 97. ²⁰ Thomas Mun, England’s treasure by forraign trade (London, 1664), 219.

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events. The parliaments of this decade showed they concurred through their legislation, consistently weakening or removing economic restrictions.²¹ Already at the start of the Caroline era, then, signs of an opposition between two rival perspectives could be seen. On the one hand, there was a model of royal prerogative control of the economy that was intermeshed with the structure of courtly life and the monarch’s authority. On the other, there was a new impulse to release markets from traditional sources of constraint in order to allow them to function as efficiently as possible in the interests of the propertied. This dispute had been long in the making, and its aftershocks would be felt for much of the century. But in the 1630s, it gained new urgency on both sides, as Charles heightened prerogative control of the economy. In part, Charles’s increased use of the prerogative to control trade was the result of pressing necessity. After 1629, when he attempted to rule without a parliament, he could no longer rely on subsidies; as a result, the funds raised through the regulation of trade took on vital importance. Purveyance, import duties, Ship Money, and grants of licenses and monopolies all furnished needed sources of income. Monopolies were frequently granted to the highest bidder in exchange for loans or outright payments. By the 1630s, the list of items whose production or distribution was controlled by monopolies or licenses was notoriously long, including common necessities such as soap, pins, salt, and starch, as well as luxuries such as playing cards and tobacco.²² There was even a monopoly on the “office for writing of all licenses & passes,” one that would cover, among other things, the drawing up of monopolies.²³ Highly unpopular, the monopolies, as well as other forms of license, grant, and privilege, grew to symbolize the economic abuses of the court.²⁴ By the time of the Short Parliament, Pym could describe the

²¹ David Pennington, “Beyond the Moral Economy: Economic Change, Ideology, and the 1621 House of Commons,” Parliamentary History, Vol. 25, Part 2 (2005), 214–31. ²² In The Century of Revolution, Hill amasses an impressive litany of consumer goods subject to monopolies, 31–2. Alexander G. Taylor provides a view of the sale of tobacco licenses in relation to Caroline policy during the Personal Rule in “Tobacco Retail Licenses and State Formation in Early Modern England and Wales,” The Economic History Review, Vol. 72, No. 2 (2019), 433–58. See also Michael Andrew Žmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution: Five Centuries of Transition from Agrarian to Industrial Capitalism in England (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013), 112–13. ²³ List of monopoly patents, 1620, Folger Shakespeare Library, Z.e.1, 12–14. For an Elizabethan list, Huntington MS EL 2290 lists fifty-two monopolies. ²⁴ Popular disapproval of Charles’s economic policy is documented in David Cressy, Charles I and the People of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Similarly, Brian Manning has argued that by 1641 “bread-and butter-questions” of economic interest—or bare survival—

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people’s “groanes” over monopolies as coming from “all parts of the Kingdome.”²⁵ More than that, however, royal monopolies came to represent the fundamentally inimical relationship between an autonomous economy, free of monarchical interference, and a patriarchal, prerogative control of trade—in essence, between one mode of production and another.²⁶ This system was not merely part of literature’s wider social context. Rather, because the monarchy’s regulation of commerce was crucial to the creation of literary property, it shaped literary production itself. Literary property—that is, a right of property in the text itself, rather than merely in the book in which it was embedded—was a comparatively new phenomenon. It had first emerged only in Renaissance Europe, where it came into existence in tandem with other forms of intellectual property. The privilege Venice offered to Johann von Speyer in 1469 for a five-year monopoly on all printing may well be its earliest example.²⁷ As the grant to Speyer suggests, the invention of literary property was, and indeed still is, a method of regulating production by the state. It was also response to the economics of print: in this capital-intensive enterprise, publishers had a strong interest in protecting their investments, and they relied on state administration to do so.²⁸

prompted many in the lower classes to join in protests, The English People and the English Revolution, 102. ²⁵ Judith D. Maltby, ed., The Short Parliament (1640) Diary of Sir Thomas Aston (London: Royal Historical Society, 1988), 55. ²⁶ As Joan Thirsk writes, by the early Stuart era, “the government’s policy to standardize production and maintain quality” had become “inimical to industrial growth and the expansion of the home market,” Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 116–17. ²⁷ As Erich Auerbach writes, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, “the notion of literary property was unheard of,” and so “the right to an author’s work resided solely in the manuscript (solo cedit superficies: the building goes with the ground),” Literature Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 242. Literary property emerged as one aspect of intellectual property, which was itself the novel creation of the Renaissance state and Renaissance commerce. The rise of proprietary rights to intellectual objects originated in fifteenth-century Italy before spreading to other parts of Europe in the sixteenth century. In granting a patent to Brunelleschi for a new kind of barge for transporting marble, Florence may have taken the lead; in Venice, technical patents for mills, mines, and industrial techniques quickly followed. Maximilian Frumkin, “Early History of Patents for Invention,” Transactions of the Newcomen Society, Vol. 26, No. 1 (1947), 47–56; Stephan R. Epstein, “Property Rights to Technical Knowledge in Premodern Europe, 1300–1800,” The American Economic Review, Vol. 94, No. 2 (2004), 382–7. See also Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe, Copyright in the Renaissance: Prints and the Privilegio in Sixteenth-Century Venice and Rome (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 21. ²⁸ Zachary Lesser notes the importance of distinguishing between publishers, for whom successful works would be reprinted multiple times, and printers who merely worked on contract for particular jobs, in Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in

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In England, literary property emerged from an extended process of negotiation between the government and trading interests, which attempted to accommodate the overlapping but far from identical interests of each. The crucial element was the 1557 grant of exclusive rights to print to the Stationers’ Company—that is, a government monopoly. From the perspective of the Crown, the restriction of printing rights to a single entity enabled a stricter, although always imperfect, control of expression. For the Stationers, monopoly was the precondition for intellectual property. As a result of their exclusive right to print, the Stationers were able to coordinate amongst themselves to avoid infringing on one another’s property, using company ordinances and the adjudication of their governing body, the Court of Assistants. Monopoly and the grant of royal privileges, therefore, were foundational aspects of the early modern literary market. By the early Stuart era, the book trade was in effect a bricolage of monopolies. Beyond the essential grant of a monopoly of printing to the Stationers’ Company as a whole, individuals could be given exclusive rights by the Crown to a work or class of works. The 1624 Statute of Monopolies attempted to eliminate most classes of monopolies—albeit leaving what proved to be very significant loopholes—but it had specifically excepted books.²⁹ Some of the patents granted in this way were trivial to all except their authors and immediate rivals, such as a patent for a book on the use of certain mathematical instruments to Richard Delamain, which occasioned a personal intervention on the part of Charles.³⁰ But others were very significant indeed. The printing of all law books—a broad and rather ambiguous category—was held to be a royal monopoly, causing battles with the Stationers’ Company in the 1630s over borderline cases.³¹ Bibles were

the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 28. The distinction is also developed by McCullough through an examination of the output of the Laudian printerpublisher Richard Badger, “Print, Publication, and Religious Politics in Caroline England,” 298–9. ²⁹ Monopolies were still granted on the grounds of introducing a new industry to England—a broad and in practice flexible exception. In addition, the 1624 Statute had left a crucial exception in barring the grant of monopolies to individuals, but allowing their grant to companies, William Hyde Price, The English Patents of Monopoly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920). ³⁰ Katherine Hill, “ ‘Juglers or Schollers?’: Negotiating the Role of a Mathematical Practitioner,” The British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 31, No. 3 (1998), 253–74. ³¹ Ian Williams, “Changes to Common Law Printing in the 1630s: Unlawful, Unreliable, Dishonest?” The Journal of Legal History, Vol. 39, No. 3 (2018), 225–52.

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another, and the resulting high prices, as well as the low quality of the editions offered by the king’s printer, were a common complaint.³² In addition, a vast array of raw materials was required to print books, all of which were potentially subject to the Stuart system of economic control, from rags to mills to machinery. In 1640, on the eve of hostilities, the courtier and literary patron Endymion Porter, to whom I will return later in this chapter, was granted a monopoly on the production of white paper.³³ Porter’s grant was effectively a quid pro quo for his financial support of the Scottish campaign. It was an illustration of how a dense network of courtly connections spanned politics and trade, including the book trade, as well as an instance of how English courtly politics had become intermeshed with archipelagic conflict in the years immediately preceding the revolution. In the 1630s, the print trade came to be a site of controversy. As opposition rose to questions of Church government and royal revenue, Charles strove to suppress expressions of discontent, preventing “seditious” books and pamphlets from coming to press where possible, or punishing their authors or publishers after the fact. In doing so, he was behaving as his predecessors and peers had done; all European monarchies attempted to control the press. By the era of the Personal Rule, however, such controversies took on a new significance, as they began to be absorbed into wider divisions over the role and scope of Charles’s administration. Gradually, freedom of expression came to be seen as aligned with market freedoms, and censorship, conversely, with prerogative control. To some extent, this history has been elided by the fact that the most influential early essays focused on either the political or the economic foundations of press censorship, rather than considering the two jointly. In a landmark essay, Christopher Hill argued that seventeenth-century censorship was designed “to prevent the circulation of dangerous ideas among the masses of the population.” For Hill, the system was largely effective, at least for a time: if dissent could not be absolutely stamped out, it could be largely suppressed.³⁴ By contrast, Sheila Lambert and D. F. Mackenzie concentrated on the economic aspects of press control in an

³² David Norton, A Textual History of the King James Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 95. In 1628, Cambridge was permitted to produce its own, significantly higher-quality edition, but prices remained high. ³³ D.C. Coleman, The British Paper Industry, 1495–1860 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958), 52. ³⁴ Christopher Hill, “Censorship and English Literature,” The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 33, 60.

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interpretation that sought to minimize its political implications. Control of the press, Lambert argues, was not driven by the monarchy or its interests at all but rather by the competing claims of the members of the Stationers’ Company. The monarchy necessarily adjudicated matters in its role in the regulation of trade. But press control was, in essence, a commercial question, not a political one.³⁵ Both approaches have had considerable influence within what is now a substantial body of literature.³⁶ Although the lines of debate are not as distinct as they once were, the two positions still can be discerned in rival accounts of the position of the court in relation to impending conflict. But in fact there is no reason that ideological and economic approaches to the question should be at odds at all. It is clear that the interests of the Stationers’ Company, the Crown, individual publishers and printers, and writers sometimes pulled in opposite directions, and ad hoc alliances could form and dissolve. Yet over the course of the 1630s, the monarchy’s claims for press control and its arguments for economic control both grew more fully articulated, and they developed together. “Printing is as inherent a Prerogative to the Crowne as Coining of Money,” Robert Barker, the king’s printer, pronounced in 1642, drawing a suggestive analogy between the monarchy’s foundational role in the economy and its relation toward print.³⁷ Contemporaries perceived press regulation as occurring along both axes—and found it more intolerable, rather than less, because it did so. The radical publisher Michael Sparke, for instance, clearly had ideological objections to the Caroline government. After publishing Prynne’s Histriomastix, he had been made to stand in the pillory with its author and pay a £500 fine. Sparke was also a perceptive observer of the economics ³⁵ Sheila Lambert, “The Printers and the Government, 1604–1640,” in Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds., Aspects of Printing from 1600 (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1987), 1–29; “State Control of the Press in Theory and Practice: The Role of the Stationers’ Company before 1640,” in Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds., Censorship & the Control of Print in England and France 1600–1910 (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1992), 1–32. ³⁶ Examples include Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Blair Worden, “Literature and Political Censorship in Early Modern England,” in A. C. Duke and C.A. Tamse, eds., Too Mighty to Be Free: Censorship and the Press in England and The Netherlands (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1987), 45–62; Deborah Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language and Tudor Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Randy Robertson, Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England: The Subtle Art of Division (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2009). ³⁷ Robert Barker, qtd. in Robertson, Censorship and Conflict, 3–4.

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of press regulation; in his Scintilla, or, A light broken into darke warehouses, he took aim at the Bible monopoly, a position whose political and religious significance contemporaries could hardly fail to appreciate.³⁸ During the revolution, one of the monarch’s most insightful critics would demonstrate the basic unity of the two approaches. In Areopagitica, Milton drew tight connections between monarchical government, monopolies, and publication, linking freedom of publication to the free circulation of ideas in a formulation that has resonated over the centuries.³⁹ From the perspective of the king, the underlying questions were no less clearly linked. During the Personal Rule, as religious and political objections to his policies grew sharper, Charles sought to quell public dissent.⁴⁰ Press control grew tighter, especially of works that were thought to question the monarchy or the Laudian church.⁴¹ In July of 1637, the Star Chamber Decree on printing introduced new press regulations.⁴² This decree, whose primary purpose was to increase the degree of censorship on the book trade, also closely reflected the drift of Caroline economic policy in tightening government control of production. Much of the language of the decree, which included remarks on “the better encouraging of Printers in their honest, and just Endeavours in their Professions,” the conditions of apprentices, and the geographic range of the trade, is closely parallel to other attempts at economic administration.⁴³ In addition, the Star Chamber Decree reflected other elements of Caroline policy. It was part of an accelerating attempt to centralize the regulation of production, placing control ³⁸ Michael Sparke, Scintilla, or, A light broken into darke warehouses (London, 1641). ³⁹ Blair Hoxby argues that Milton’s basic ideas of writing, reading, and indeed intellection reflected his commercial context: his well-known definition of reason as a form of choice is “the reason of a consumer society,” Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 40. ⁴⁰ Controversial questions such as the collection of Ship Money exemplified the way that different concerns could be woven together in practice on both sides. As David Como remarks, “it is difficult indeed to separate out the ‘religious’ objections of nonconformists from the rising drumbeat of ‘political’ opposition to the regime, as embodied in resistance to Ship Money,” Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War, 48. See also Paul Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560–1662 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970). More recently, Anthony Milton’s study of Peter Heylyn shows how, in practice, issues such as tithes could become intertwined with questions of religious belief, on the one hand, and politics, on the other, in Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). ⁴¹ S. Mutchow Towers has demonstrated on empirical grounds that press controls over religious printing increased under Laud’s supervision, in Control of Religious Printing in Early Stuart England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003), 209–64. ⁴² Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Caroline England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 194–207. ⁴³ England and Wales, A decree of Starre-Chamber, concerning printing (London, 1637), D3r.

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directly in the hands of the Crown and Church. In a few key respects, it replaced a piecemeal and collaborative power structure in which printers and the monarchy shared responsibilities, with one in which authority was centered in the government. Up to that point, the Stationers’ Company, like the other London companies, had had considerable independent authority in adjudicating and enforcing violations of law or patent in print. But, as Cyndia Clegg writes, “the most significant feature of the 1637 Star Chamber decree is that it places all oversight of the trade in the hands of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London and all enforcement in the hands of the courts of High Commission and Star Chamber.”⁴⁴ In fact, the very association of the decree with Star Chamber helped to connect it to the controversial question of monopolies. By the end of the decade, Star Chamber had become notorious, among other things, for its involvement in enforcing patents, licenses, and monopolies. As John Pym would complain in the Long Parliament, because of its “advancing and countenancing monopolies . . . the Star Chamber is now become a court of revenue.”⁴⁵ As the examples of Sparke and Milton suggest, it was not difficult for contemporaries to connect discontent over Star Chamber’s activities in raising revenue with its role in the control of the press. At a moment when Englishmen and women were protesting monopolies in salt and soap, the use of the same instruments and institutions in the regulation of literature naturally drew notice. Conversely, the problems posed by the regulation of literature could also serve to highlight the issues of Caroline commercial policy. As Joseph Loewenstein writes, “having led many English trades in integrating the principle of monopoly-production into its industrial structure, the book trade again led in focusing industrial tensions on that very principle.”⁴⁶ As writing became a commodity, then, it was regulated like other commodities. But far from implying a neutral or nonideological stance toward writing, this fact only emphasized the political character of the growing divisions between the Crown and the market.

⁴⁴ Clegg, Press Censorship, 199. ⁴⁵ John Pym, speech on April 17, 1641, in J.P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 187. ⁴⁶ Loewenstein, The Author’s Due, 123.

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The Courtiers and the Market Caroline poetry crystalized in this riven political climate. The literary identity of its courtly writers was formed in response to tensions between the court and market and the corresponding battles over the regulation of print. In what is only an apparent irony, the apogee of courtly literature in England was, among other things, a reaction to the growth of capitalism. The style of the courtly poets of this era developed in part as a result of the challenge of the market. Metacritical, minutely concerned with questions of taste and judgment, elegant and amusing in style, personal and occasional in theme, the poetry of the court looked outward to the challenges of an incipient bourgeois politics and culture and inward to a literary model constructed around courtly sociability and hierarchy. It was this that gave it its unity, despite considerable differences in outlook and style on the part of individual poets.⁴⁷ The idea that the book market offered a contrast, and perhaps even a rival, to the elite milieu of courtly literary circulation was not a new one; it had originated with print. By the 1630s, however, the relative status of print, and the print public, had shifted. Even hostile writers shared a growing recognition that the book market, and so the commercial public, now played an essential role in the circulation, preservation, and even canonization of literature within their society.⁴⁸ Michael Drayton, writing in the 1620s, already refused to consider writers whose work circulated by “transcription,” that is, manuscript, as significant English authors, confining his discussion

⁴⁷ Many recent studies emphasize the differences between the courtly writers of the 1630s, arguing that viewing them as a single group of “Cavalier” poets is anachronistic. See, for example, Syrith Pugh, Herrick, Fanshawe, and the Politics of Popularity: Classical Literature and Seventeenth-Century Royalism (London: Routledge, 2010); Philip Major, ed., Sir John Denham (1614/15–1669) Reassessed: The State’s Poet (London: Routledge, 2016). Nicholas McDowell, attempting to recuperate the common identity of the group, has suggested that their commonality lies in their use of Continental forms and allusions. McDowell is surely right to note the Continental affinities of the courtly literature of the period, especially its debt to French poetics. The court was by its nature an international institution, and France exemplified the high courtly culture to which Charles aspired—including, for opponents, its absolutism. Nicholas McDowell, “Towards a Redefinition of Cavalier Poetics,” The Seventeenth Century, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2017), 413–31. Nigel Smith also offers insights into the international perspective of this group of writers in “Cross-Channel Cavaliers,” The Seventeenth Century, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2017), 433–53. ⁴⁸ David Baker, On Demand: Writing for the Market in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

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of contemporary writers to those who had been “oft printed.”⁴⁹ By the period of the Personal Rule, it was clearer than ever that print was the major site for the reproduction of the literary canon, especially following the posthumous publication of the works of Herbert and Donne in 1633. It was also evident that the print market offered its own standards of value. In the book trade, literature was a commodity, whose frequently disputed ownership only reinforced its commercial character. As with other mass-produced commodities, the volume of sales was a powerful measure of success of books. The print trade thus offered a model of evaluation in which popularity—in general a term of opprobrium in the period—could be seen as a mark of quality, and in which judgment could be exercised by anyone who could afford to pay. “Buy, reade, and iudge,” the title page of one book printed in the Caroline era urged its readers.⁵⁰ Even today, it is rarely easy for poets to accept the judgment of the market. For courtly poets, however, it was not just literary merit but aristocratic identity that was at stake. At a moment when, on the one hand, a new ideology of markets had begun to emerge, and on the other, Charles was attempting to exert new modes of control, the political implications of mass judgment were obvious and shocking. One option was, of course, to steer clear of the book trade entirely. The list of writers who preferred manuscript to print in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods is a long one.⁵¹ Many poets, in particular, sought to avoid what has been referred to as the “stigma of print,” a phrase coined by J.W. Saunders in a classic essay, though it is important to note that the issue was not so much one of medium as of market.⁵² Although the “stigma of print” had clearly lost some of its virulence by the 1630s—if James I was not reluctant to publish his poetry, why should his courtiers be?—some of the writers most closely associated with the court still preferred coterie circulation. Thomas Carew, a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, remained a manuscript poet until the posthumous publication of his verse. John Suckling, who became the emblem of the Cavalier poet—and perhaps even the model of the Cavalier—for his contemporaries, was willing to publish ⁴⁹ Michael Drayton, The battaile of Agincourt (London, 1627), 292. ⁵⁰ George Peele, Merrie conceited iests of George Peel (London, 1627). ⁵¹ Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Arthur Marotti, “Patronage, Poetry, and Print,” in Cedric C. Brown, ed., Patronage, Politics, and Literary Traditions in England, 1558–1658 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 21–46. ⁵² J.W. Saunders, “The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry,” Essays in Criticism, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1951), 139–64.

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drama, but his lyric was not printed until shortly after his early death at the age of thirty-two.⁵³ Others, such as Robert Herrick, printed their writing only once warfare had swept away the court, the main site for the circulation of aristocratic lyric.⁵⁴ But courtly writing was not opposed to print per se. Rather, for many courtly writers, print held an irresistible appeal, centered in the fantasy that it could be turned to their own ends—made an instrument of a courtly poetics, rather than a rival to it. The Crown, after all, constantly sought to exercise authority over work through the print licensing system or, in the case of the theater, through the severe supervision of Henry Herbert, Charles’s master of revels.⁵⁵ Its object was not to eliminate the press, but to make use of it, ensuring that it was turned to favorable ends, or at the very least, not made an instrument of critique of either kings or bishops. Some courtly writers, especially those who were not themselves members of the gentry, likewise wished not so much to evade the market as to benefit from it. Ben Jonson, notoriously, was an exceedingly harsh critic of the commercial public when they disapproved of his work, but the very terms of his critique suggested that he longed for mass approval, or for “the extorted praise / Of vulgar breath,” as Thomas Carew contemptuously put it.⁵⁶ In fact, elaborate attempts to manipulate the reception of print would become a hallmark of Royalist writing. Up to a point, they were even a success. After the outbreak of war, Cavalier writers would prove adept at using print to shape a literary response. “Royalist writing,” Jerome de Groot

⁵³ As Robert Wilcher, among others, has shown, the stereotype of the cavalier can actually be traced to caricatures of John Suckling, which provided an early template for later depictions. The Discontented Cavalier: The Work of Sir John Suckling in Its Social, Religious, Political and Literary Contexts (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 332–6. More recently, Paul Joseph Zajac has shown how the image of poetic authorship was essential to this depiction, in “Suckling's Fragmenta Aurea and the Construction of Cavalier Authorship,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Vol. 55, No. 1 (2015), 125–49. ⁵⁴ Rather ironically, as Thomas Corns among others has pointed out, the Cavalier identity and mentality crystalized in part retrospectively, through the medium of print, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). ⁵⁵ N.W. Bawcutt, ed., The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, 1623–1673 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). ⁵⁶ Thomas Carew, The Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1949). On the failure of The New Inn and its consequences for Jonson’s poetics, see Richard Burt, Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 115–49; Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 107–10; Richmond Barbour, “Jonson and the Motives of Print,” Criticism, Vol. 40, No. 4 (1998), 499–528; Alison V. Scott, “Jonson’s Masque Markets and Problems of Literary Ownership,” SEL, Vol. 42, No. 2 (2007), 451–71.

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observes of the polemical literature of the 1640s, “attempted as far as was possible to control the reception of texts by configuring and constructing the experience of reading.”⁵⁷ Eikon Basilike was the most famous, but far from the only, example.⁵⁸ Many of the strategies used in the course of the revolution can be traced to their development in the 1630s. The Caroline period, for example, was the great era of the paratext. As Michael Neill has shown, prefatory materials in printed drama increased sharply in this era.⁵⁹ In poetry, likewise, paratextual material proliferated. Many of the volumes of verse that appeared in this decade, especially those connected with the court, had elaborate dedications and prefatory poems, as well as a host of other devices encasing poems in an intricate structure of explanation and praise. It is a testament to how important a role such material had begun to play that the Star Chamber decree for the first time formally extended the system of licensing beyond the body of the text to prefatory material including dedications.⁶⁰ Much of the real substance of writing, regulators were aware, now occurred in paratexts. In using paratexts, courtly writers imported elements of coterie circulation into print. They placed poems within networks of sociability and patronage, linking them to concrete occasions or physical locations even as they reached a wider, decontextualized commercial public. In doing so, they sought to reproduce courtly or aristocratic modes of evaluation on the printed page. The judgment of a patron, or even of the monarch himself, could be indicated through paratextual material of various kinds, signaling that the work in question had already been favorably received. The print market ought, ideally, simply to convey this judgment to a wider readership rather than seeking their opinion—a hope that was, of course, doomed to be disappointed. An example will help to illustrate how writers attempted to reproduce courtly codes for the print market, as well as to suggest its limits. William Davenant was a poet and playwright of middling origin who had become the protégé of Ben Jonson, cultivating patronage in court circles with pronounced success. In his book of poems, Madagascar (1638), Davenant ⁵⁷ Jerome de Groot, Royalist Identities (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 55. ⁵⁸ Eikon Basilike, Richard Helgerson writes, “is a book that does everything it can to conceal its bookishness, a book that strives in every way to possible to place itself in the category of image and performance,” “Milton Reads the King’s Book: Print, Performance, and the Making of a Bourgeois Idol,” Criticism, Vol. 29, No. 1 (1987), 1–25. ⁵⁹ Michael Neill, “ ‘Wits Most Accomplished Senate’: The Audience of the Caroline Private Theaters,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1978), 341–60. ⁶⁰ Towers, Control of Religious Printing, 215.

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attempted to present his work as a product of a courtly milieu and to shape its interpretation accordingly.⁶¹ Madagascar begins with a dedication to the courtiers Endymion Porter and Henry Jermyn, “his two Mecaenasses,” in Aubrey’s words, and proceeds to prefatory verses by Porter, Carew, Suckling, and the courtier-poet William Habington.⁶² Many of its lyrics are occasional, with their occasions—and their noble recipients—clearly noted, as in “To the Lady Bridget Kingsmill; sent with Mellons after a report of my Death.” The mid-length poem (446 lines) that gives the volume its title is addressed to Prince Rupert. Imagining his plan to colonize the titular island as a heroic romance, it derives much of its meaning from a detailed knowledge of the geopolitical strategies of the Caroline court, suggesting that author and audience alike are members of the inner circle.⁶³ No one, however, is addressed more often than Davenant’s patron Porter; the volume is, among other things, an extended testament to their relationship. What Davenant attempted to do in Madagascar, then, was to draw on print’s convenience and its cachet, while enmeshing the volume—and by proxy, the reader—in a web of personal connections and intimate occasions. He sought to transform the volume into a kind of surrogate for the court and its forms of authority and prestige. In this respect, Davenant’s close relationship to Endymion Porter was especially significant. Given that Porter possessed important economic privileges, including shares of monopolies in paper and, even more crucially, soap and salt, Davenant’s persistent address to him placed the volume within a system of patronage that had deep ties to the organization of the Stuart economy.⁶⁴ Ultimately, Davenant’s adroit manipulation of the system of venality would reach much further than any reader of the volume could anticipate. In the Restoration, he would become one of two theatrical managers with an effective monopoly not only on the contemporary theater but on the back catalogue of Renaissance drama, granted by Charles II.⁶⁵ Yet even writers who were as assiduous in seeking patronage or as successful in acquiring it as Davenant could do little to ensure a favorable ⁶¹ William Davenant, Madagascar with other poems (London, 1638). ⁶² John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Kate Bennett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). ⁶³ Marlin E. Blaine, “Epic, Romance, and History in Davenant’s ‘Madagascar,’ ” Studies in Philology, Vol. 95, No. 8 (1998), 293–319. ⁶⁴ Porter, along with Lord Maltravers, was a member of the Salt Company of Great Yarmouth, Asch, “The Revival of Monopolies,” 368. For more on this, see Gervas Huxley, Endymion Porter: Life of a Courtier, 1587–1649 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959). ⁶⁵ Deborah C. Payne, “Patronage and the Dramatic Marketplace under Charles I and II,” The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 21 (1991), 137–52.

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public reception for their work. Madagascar records not only Davenant’s cultivation of patronage, but also his prior commercial failure. Following in the footsteps of Jonson, Davenant used verse to criticize the London public for their unfavorable reception of his play The Witts. Once again he turned to Porter. In a poem addressed to his patron, Davenant uses the conceit of a journey “to Court” to express his difficulties, gesturing to his own allegiances in the process. But the journey is beset by a storm—an intentionally thin allegory for the public hostility to his play. Only Porter’s protection, and his superior judgment, can counteract public disapproval: “And I (exalted now) ne’re minde / Their breath, who storm’d, t’increase the Winde . . . .” Davenant writes, invoking the familiar trope of the public’s “breath,” along with its class associations. Thanks to Porter, “They boast in vaine; the Poets Hill / Is all mine owne.”⁶⁶ Davenant’s poem insists that the poet’s hill, Parnassus, could be won by the approbation of the political elite, even if the public dissented—indeed, perhaps especially if the public dissented. He sought, that is, to claim poetic canonicity as a function of the court alone. Yet here, as elsewhere, the anxieties that are only too obvious in the poem reveal that Davenant implicitly realized the contradiction involved in turning to courtly forms of judgment within published literary writing. Even Endymion Porter could offer no protection from the verdicts of the public once a book had been submitted to the literary market; nor, ultimately, could the system of patronage as a whole, despite the attempts of courtly writers. Terry Eagleton argues that what he refers to as the capitalist literary mode of production “produces its own social relations between the particular agents independently of their preexistent social functions.”⁶⁷ The commercial reproduction of literature, that is, pulled readers and writers into new roles, whether they were nobles or peasants: within the field of literary production, writers became workers and readers became consumers. In creating its own set of relations, the commercial literary system thus challenged the very idea of the courtly writer, whose work was integrated into and predicated upon his personal place within an aristocratic milieu. In the early modern book market, one’s own social status, or that of one’s patron and admirers, was not irrelevant to one’s reception, but neither was it determinative.

⁶⁶ Davenant, Madagascar with other poems, 102. ⁶⁷ Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (New York: Verso, 1976), 53.

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It is precisely this idea that John Suckling put forth in his 1637 satirical ballad “The Wits.”⁶⁸ No doubt scathed by his unsuccessful forays into the book market and theater earlier that year, Suckling seeks to show how literary relations have been transformed into commercial relations.⁶⁹ The ballad depicts Apollo’s attempt to find a new poet laureate. Written in Suckling’s most characteristic mode, a scathing anti-epideictic verse, it draws on intimate knowledge of literary circles in order to mock them.⁷⁰ Various contemporaries offer themselves as candidates, but are dismissed one after another with sharp comments. At the poem’s conclusion, Apollo decides to crown a somewhat unorthodox laureate: a wealthy London alderman—that is, a merchant or tradesman rather than a poet, much less a courtier—on the grounds that “’twas the best sign / Of good store of wit to have good store of coin.”⁷¹ Suckling depicts, on the one hand, a contest judged unilaterally by an absolutist Apollo: a top-down model of literary judgment that fit neatly within the courtly poets’ hierarchical conception of value. But, on the other hand, it shows the moment of Apollo’s effective supersession, as the god readily concedes that his own poetic authority has been displaced by money, the arbiter of success within book and theatrical markets, as within all other markets. As Suckling’s contemporary, the poet

⁶⁸ For evidence on dating, see Philip H. Gray, “Suckling’s ‘A Sessions of the Poets’ as Ballad: Boccalini’s ‘Influence’ Examined,” Studies in Philology, Vol. 36, No. 1 (1939), 60–9. Suckling’s form had an afterlife in the Restoration, when mock sessions briefly became a popular genre. See Michael Gavin, The Invention of English Criticism, 1650–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 56–8. ⁶⁹ In 1637, Suckling paid to have his play Aglaura performed, providing sumptuous costumes and scenery. At a moment of increasing rivalry between the commercial and private theaters, Suckling’s self-financed play naturally provoked scorn among professional playwrights, including Richard Brome. The following year, he paid to have it printed in a large and expensive volume, whose wide margins suggested, in the words of Peter Berek, “a folio grandiosity linked to Court performance and Royalist allegiances,” “Defoliating Playbooks and the Reading Public,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Vol. 56, No. 2 (2016), 395–416. See also Richard Brome, “Upon Aglaura Printed in Folio,” in George Wright, ed., Parnassus Biceps (London, 1656), 57. For a more general analysis of the relation between the commercial and private theaters, see Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Butler’s account of the emergence of an oppositional culture in the public theaters has been challenged by revisionist historians, including Malcolm Smuts and Kevin Sharpe, who argue for a complex but ultimately reciprocal relationship between the court and the public literary culture of this period. ⁷⁰ James Loxley has described some of the complexities of praise in the Caroline and Restoration courts, in “Poetry, Portraiture, and Praise: Suckling and van Dyck, Lovelace and Lely,” The Seventeenth Century, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2017), 351–69. ⁷¹ John Suckling, The Works of Sir John Suckling, ed. Thomas Clayton (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1972), 76.

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Thomas Randolph remarked, “wit is neuer good till it be bought.”⁷² The same bitter motto could easily adorn Suckling’s verse, as he contemplates the consequences of the transformation of literary production from a courtly to a capitalist mode. It would be easy but incorrect to see the Caroline courtly poets’ preference for literary evaluations based on aristocratic judgment rather than the verdict of the market solely as the defense of an older mode in relation to a newer one. To an extent, their aesthetics was indeed backward-looking. But it was also the consequence of distinctively new conditions—the product, that is, of the increasingly evident autonomy and authority of the market during the years of the Personal Rule. In his classic study of the “civilizing process,” Norbert Elias argued that the interplay between courtly and bourgeois, far from being anomalous, is highly typical: “a high degree of interdependence and tension between nobles and bourgeois is a basic constituent of the courtly character of the leading groups of the nobility.”⁷³ In Elias’s account, in which France plays the leading role, frictions between groups spurred an attempt at social differentiation at the highest levels. Courtly society, in his argument, was forged through rivalry, as the nobility developed exquisitely refined manners designed to set them apart from their wealthy contemporaries in the metropolis. In England, it is possible to discern a similar process of differentiation occurring across the 1630s. This can be seen, up to a point, in the writing of Davenant, who affirms the role of the patronage system precisely in relation to public disapproval. But it is much more evident in the poetry of the most skillful courtly lyricist of the age, Thomas Carew. Like Davenant, Carew, whose lyrics often had a critical strain, discussed the failure of The Witts in verse. The poem, one of the few he published in his lifetime, appeared as a preface to the printed version of Davenant’s play—ironically, promoting an anti-popular poetics was one of the few aims capable of luring him into print. Carew’s poem begins, IT hath been said of old, that Playes are Feasts, Poets the Cookes, and the Spectators Guests, The Actors Waiters: From this Similie,

⁷² Thomas Randolph, Aristippus, or, The Ioviall philosopher presented in a priuate shew: to which is added, The conceited peddler (London, 1630), 33. ⁷³ Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Malden, MA: Blackwell, revised edition, 1994), 423.

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Some have deriv’d an unsafe libertie To use their Judgements as their Tastes, which chuse Without controule, this Dish, and that refuse: But Wit allowes not this large Priviledge, Either you must confesse, or feele it’s edge . . . ⁷⁴

In distinguishing “judgment” from “taste,” Carew marks the former as the proper evaluative criterion for literature and the latter as the entitled attitude of paying audiences or readers. Literature, as perceived by such audiences, is an article of consumption—a consumer good in the most brutal sense. In response to a market-driven model of literary value, Carew offers a courtly counterargument. His tone is lightly ironic, but the playfulness of his language does not conceal the ruthlessness of its implications. Take, for example, his reference to the exercise of taste as “unsafe libertie.” In describing the public exercise of individual taste “without controule” as “unsafe,” Carew implies that the free use of taste is not merely incorrect or disagreeable, but actually dangerous. The term “liberty” links this threat to the political environment: liberty was already becoming a contested word in the 1630s, while the liberties of the English would be a rallying cry in the revolutionary years. But Carew’s use of “libertie” is also part of a long-term transformation in the history of ideas. In the seventeenth century, as Charles Wilson notes, in legal parlance the word “liberty” was beginning its drift in meaning from “a special privilege to do something forbidden to others” to “the power to do as one thought fit unless restrained by law.”⁷⁵ The newer meaning of liberty, as a fundamental right rather than a privilege, would underpin the idea of an English economy based on the absolute ownership of property and the free participation in markets: liberty as free choice was part of the legal framework of a capitalist society. In Carew’s poem, by contrast, “liberty” bears its traditional meaning, implying an exception, not the rule. Carew thus depicts a situation in which claims to liberty function as an illegitimate attempt to seize special rights or exemptions—a depiction whose relevance to the economic contentions of the 1630s could hardly be clearer. “Priviledge,” similarly, echoes the political disputes of the era. In the 1630s, it could hardly fail to call to mind the use of royal privileges, including ⁷⁴ William Davenant, The Witts (London: Richard Meighen, 1636), A2v. ⁷⁵ Charles Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship, 1603–1763 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), xi.

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those that formed the basis of the much-disputed monopolies. And then there is the vaguely menacing rhyme of “Priviledge” with “edge.” Wit, a term that had become a keyword of courtly poetics, apparently comes with powers of enforcement. In a world in which royal judgment on questions of publication certainly came with “an edge”—as Prynne could testify—the metaphor possessed dark implications. Carew’s aesthetic vision, then, implies both royal domination and rising dissent. Its genesis lies in the frictions between the Crown and an emerging market society that, via the commercialization of literary production, on the one hand, and stringent attempts at royal regulation, on the other, had come to have obvious implications for questions of literary value, judgment, and taste. There is probably no poet who so well exemplified the courtly literary mode in early Stuart England as Carew. No one wrote more accomplished courtly lyrics, marrying a careless wit with a skilled Francophile poetics. As Sewer-in-Ordinary to the king, whose duties included helping to plan royal dinners and feasts, Carew was in a literal sense an arbiter of tastes, and it is clear that his contemporaries saw him in this light. Yet even in the case of this elegant, aristocratic poet, English courtly aesthetics was unmistakably reactive. It is not only that it had its point of origin, as Elias argues in the case of France, in greater aristocratic self-definition in the face of a rising bourgeoisie. Rather, English courtly poems frequently reproduced the ideals to which they were opposed, shaping themselves around them even in attempting refutation. The irony of tone so often present in even the most mannered Caroline poems, especially by the end of the 1630s, suggests that this was an aesthetic on the defensive. In this respect, the courtly literature of England differed from that of France. Unlike France, by the middle decades of the seventeenth century, England was already an agrarian capitalist society structured around centralized markets.⁷⁶ The challenge to courtly culture was thus more forceful, prompting courtly literature to take on a reactive character. As James Holston observes, the absolutist culture of the 1630s encapsulated its own frustration: it was not the naïve expression of absolutist power, but rather “a structural symptom of and supplement to a state unable to transform society according to its absolutist desires.”⁷⁷ The frictions between the court and a

⁷⁶ David Parker provides a useful comparison of the French and English states with reference to aristocratic culture and capitalist development, in Class and State in Ancien Régime France: The Road to Modernity? (London: Routledge, 1996). ⁷⁷ Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, 89.

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capitalist society also had different consequences: not the resounding triumph of the monarchy, leading to the court’s political, economic, and cultural domination as in Louis XIV’s Versailles, but rather the monarchy’s short-term elimination and the court’s long-term loss of cultural and political hegemony. Suckling was right, after all, to depict the victory of the merchants in the contest for wit.

The Courtly Legacy In 1642, the tensions that had developed between the court and the public in the 1630s broke out into open conflict. The court’s economic policy was not, of course, the sole provocation for hostilities. Like all large-scale historical events, the revolution pulled together disparate considerations and factions; it engaged political and theological considerations and spanned an archipelago, with Scotland and Ireland crucially shaping events. Yet insofar as the clashes of the 1640s constituted a revolutionary event—and not only a civil war—it was because it took the form of an attack on the court, the institution of the monarchy, and, among radicals, the aristocracy itself. The warfare of the 1640s delivered a forceful resolution to the questions posed in the 1620s and 1630s about the role of the court in an emerging capitalist society. Even after the Restoration, the royal prerogative never again played the economic role it had had during the Personal Rule; regular taxation, voted by parliament, supported the monarchy. In the literary system, too, the court and its patronage began to play a different role. As England became a capitalist country, its social organization guaranteed the dominance of the market in shaping ideas of quality and value. By the eighteenth century, canons of taste and literary judgment in England were closely connected to fashion, to trends in commodity markets, and to the aspirations of middle-class consumers. For literature, the rise of authorial copyright brought writers’ interests more closely into alignment with readers’. Like the market itself, literary taste was devolved: in contrast to France, England never developed a literary academy, an authoritative body capable of issuing ostensibly definitive judgments of literary quality. For Samuel Johnson, France could sustain a literary academy because of its absolute monarchy, in which there was “a general reverence paid to all that has the sanction of power, and the countenance of greatness.” In his native country, by contrast, he felt that the political mores meant that “the edicts of an English academy would, probably, be read by many, only that they might

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be sure to disobey them.”⁷⁸ Instead, handbooks and manuals, the London season, and, above all, the periodical press, provided guides for taste. Yet the eighteenth century also saw, as Terry Eagleton writes, “a marked ideological rapprochement between new and traditional social elites,” in which aristocratic and bourgeois values converged in a “community of sensibility.”⁷⁹ Perry Anderson, among others, has argued that one of the striking characteristics of English society is that its aristocracy early emerged as a capitalist landlord class, preserving political and economic power with a remarkable degree of continuity over the centuries, even as English society altered.⁸⁰ If there was little place for the Continental-style authority that Charles had attempted to exercise in the 1630s, the institution of the monarchy, together with the aristocracy, nevertheless held real power. Similarly, although the market became an accepted part of literary history, its ascendancy was a long and uneven process, occurring in negotiation with other forms of cultural authority, including aristocratic and courtly mores. The return of the court in the Restoration brought another age of patronage, albeit one that coexisted with the literary markets, rather than serving as their rival.⁸¹ As a result, it is possible to see important continuities, as well as sharp differences, between the courtly poets writing before the revolution and their successors. The questions and approaches that dominated the lyric of the 1630s lived on in the emerging aesthetic discourse of England, albeit in less agonistic forms.

⁷⁸ Samuel Johnson, “Life of Roscommon,” The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Vol. 2, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2006), 19. ⁷⁹ Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 32. ⁸⁰ Perry Anderson, “The Figures of Descent,” New Left Review, Vol. 161 (1987), 20–77. ⁸¹ Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

4 The Writing of Daily Life Introduction The convergence of capitalism and English prose—the subject of the first chapter of this study—appears with particular clarity in one genre: the English diary. This literary form, which first emerged in the late sixteenth century and became widely disseminated in the seventeenth, was a close genealogical relation of the account book, and the two remained linked in both theory and practice throughout the era. Samuel Pepys, still the exemplary diarist in English, was a devotee of accounting: “a regular accountant,” he reassured himself at one tricky juncture, “never ought to fear anything.”¹ Pepys composed his journal in a series of steps that began with a jotted list of expenses; these rough reckonings then formed the basis of the diary entries, which he first wrote on loose sheets of paper, and only later copied into specially ordered notebooks.² Because of their overlap with accounts, diaries are an especially revealing site for examining how new monetary relations came to influence not only the style of English prose, as I argued previously, but its content, the subject of what follows. Financial imperatives, I will argue, helped to select what was set down on paper. As wage laborers or employers, renters or rentiers, sellers of produce or consumers, English men and women had compelling reasons to itemize and record quotidian objects and experiences in writing. A new prose of the everyday, concerned with the routine and material, was thus a direct consequence of England’s increasingly monetized economy and the literate practices on which it was predicated. ¹ Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William G. Matthews (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1970), 7/9/67, 8.327. ² In transferring material between books, Pepys was following a normal practice for keeping accounts: in accounting terms, a journal existed to explain expenses listed in summary form in ledgers. Thanks to two intervals in 1668, it is possible to see exactly what Pepys’s initial notes looked like. Because he never got around to writing full entries for April 10–19 and for June 5–17, he inserted his notes in their place in his diary. On the right-hand margin of the notes, figures track daily expenditures, while, on the left, the items purchased or persons paid or loaned money form lists. Writing at the Origin of Capitalism: Literary Circulation and Social Change in Early Modern England. Julianne Werlin, Oxford University Press. © Julianne Werlin 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198869467.003.0005

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This chapter, then, revisits longstanding scholarly controversies about the relationship between the birth of a bourgeois society in England and the rise of mundane, “realist” forms of writing. It does so, moreover, by examining the diary—along with the novel, one of the classic sources for arguments about the origins of a new literary sensibility. Diaries, in one interpretation, were the genre of a nascent bourgeois individualism, the favored mode of a subject who was self-interested in a double sense—at once deeply reflective and rapaciously acquisitive.³ In a sense, this is familiar if contested territory.⁴ But important recent research on the diary within the history of the book and manuscript has made it possible to approach these debates from a new angle, drawing on a broader and considerably more nuanced field of empirical evidence. Focusing on the material aspects of life writings, scholars including Margaret Ezell, Adam Smyth, Alan Stewart, and Jason ScottWarren have placed diaries and kindred forms within a richly described textual history.⁵ No longer relying on cleaned-up printed editions, they have returned to manuscript, describing texts that are considerably messier than the ones to which readers are accustomed, but that, in their idiosyncrasies, reveal patterns of composition and use far more clearly. They have shown how practices of life writing spread, described the persons who composed them, and analyzed their reasons for writing. They have also revealed how diaries were entangled with a range of other forms, crucially including account books and financial paperwork. They thus suggest the possibility

³ Michael Mascuch has given one of the most sophisticated interpretations of the connection between the diary and individualism. Mascuch grounds the emergence of the diary in economic change, but argues that early modern diarists’ acquisitive strategies were intended to forestall financial disaster rather than to move up the social ladder: “Rather than seeking individual escape, the typical middling actor followed a course intended to repulse the prospect of his family’s ignominious descent.” “Social Mobility and Middling Self-Identity: The Ethos of British Autobiographers, 1600–1750,” Social History, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1995): 45–61; Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997). See also C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). ⁴ The controversy is almost as old as the interpretation: Paul Delaney, in his study of the British autobiography, criticizes the connection between the diary and the rise of the modern individual, taking aim at “the semi mystical theory” of “renaissance individualism,” in British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). ⁵ Margaret Ezell, “Domestic Papers: Manuscript Culture and Early Modern Women’s Life Writing,” in Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle, eds., Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2007), 33–48; Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Alan Stewart, The Oxford History of Life Writing, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Jason ScottWarren, Shakespeare’s First Reader: The Paper Trails of Richard Stonley (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

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of adding precision and detail to research that more often than not was conducted at a high level of abstraction. Oddly enough, however, even as the connection between financial forms of writing and the diary has come into clearer focus, the historical framework that once gave their intersection importance has largely fallen away. None of the impressive recent studies of the diary seeks to situate it within an emerging capitalism, much less to trace the origins of a bourgeois mode of literary writing in broader terms. Nor, despite a significant emphasis on forms of paperwork, do they examine the new socioeconomic forces that made increasing financial documentation necessary. It is clear that people kept accounts and, thanks to recent research, how they kept them, but much less clear why they kept them. As a result, there is need for a reexamination of the diary that assesses it in light of the greater clarity about its use, development, and method of composition produced by recent scholarship, while situating it within the history of capitalism. This is what I seek to do in what follows, placing particular emphasis on the evolving character of early modern English money, including written financial instruments, and the way money both organized and responded to social structure. Diaries are testaments to what Charles Taylor called “the affirmation of ordinary life,” that is, the new attention to the spheres of production and reproduction that marked the emergence of a bourgeois culture in England.⁶ In addition, this chapter has a second purpose. It proposes a method of filling an important explanatory gap in the research on the history of capitalism. For Marxist scholarship, it is axiomatic that the transition to capitalism restructured mentalities and modes of literary representation. Yet the precise points of contact between socioeconomic organization and culture are generally left implicit. “The congruence of changes in these two levels,” one study notes, “is often taken as evidence of their linkage,” yet, in the end, the exact nature of the link can rarely be specified.⁷ The values and forms embedded in literature are assumed, not unreasonably, to proceed from a new social reality, but the method by which they made the leap from social life to the page remains, in many cases, an open question. In this chapter, I continue and extend the argument proposed in the first chapter of this volume, namely, that considering the relationship between vernacular

⁶ Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 211. ⁷ Nicholas Abercrombie et al., Sovereign Individuals of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986).

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practices of prose composition and the culture of financial paperwork in seventeenth-century England can provide some answers. In showing how money, accounting, and literature interacted, this approach sheds light on how exactly the demands of capitalism came to shape literary history.

From Italy Northward Even in its earliest beginnings, the evolution of the diary was connected with the history of money. Although the diary is, strictly speaking, a sixteenthcentury form, many of the techniques that diarists would use first appeared in the late medieval Mediterranean, at a turning point in the economic history of Europe. By the end of the Middle Ages, the city states of the Italian peninsula were pioneering new forms of commerce, some borrowed from the Arab world, others created through the demands of use. Florence, in particular, established itself as the trade and banking capital of Europe, the central node in a network of commercial relations that spanned the continent and extended outward into Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Because the trade of Europe was conducted not merely in coin, but on paper, new commercial forms necessarily implied new forms of writing. Merchants began to use sophisticated financial instruments and to maintain detailed records. To keep track of their finances, they adopted double-entry book keeping, making it possible to distinguish income from capital.⁸ Legal paperwork multiplied, to be used—if necessary—in commercial courts. Currency itself was altered as merchant bankers accepted deposits and issued loans for their fellow citizens and the merchants and princes of Europe, using bills of exchange as both a means of transferring funds and issuing credit.⁹ These paper instruments—“ghost money,” as Braudel evocatively described them—“gradually invaded the economic life of Europe.”¹⁰ The new financial forms of the period had a swift and sure impact on the literate practices of Renaissance Italy. From Burckhardt on, scholars have argued that an individualistic culture of written self-expression emerged in

⁸ Jacob Soll, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations (New York: Basic Books, 2014). ⁹ On the development of Florentine banking, see Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 203–29. ¹⁰ F.P. Braudel, “Prices in Europe from 1450 to 1750,” in E.E. Rich and C.H. Wilson, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Vol. IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 378–486.

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the period as a result of its new civic and commercial life, exemplified in the biographies and autobiographies that proliferated in the era.¹¹ The merchant economy of the region, the argument goes, produced not only the innovations of Florentine banking but an individualistic ethos epitomized in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists or the colorful memoir of the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini.¹² There is no doubt some truth in this claim. But there were also more direct ways in which financial culture shaped life writing. In this era, a growing number of persons began to keep daily accounts. In a world in which personal ties and business practices could not easily be distinguished, in which “the logic of accounting and credit infused the social and political relations of the time,” forms of writing initially derived from finance captured many elements of daily life.¹³ Informal accounts, notebooks, and registers of every description multiplied alongside business documents. Already by the late fourteenth century, families among the Italian merchant elite had begun to keep account books recording the expenses and income of their households. Such books often took a somewhat miscellaneous form: alongside daily financial transactions, they could include notable incidents in the history of a family, such as its births, deaths, and marriages.¹⁴ In addition to family histories, the life of a human being or even the life of a city could find its way into intricate registers, as in the Venetian senator Marin Sanudo’s monumentally detailed chronicle of Venetian life known as the Diarii (1496 to 1533). Sanudo’s chronicle, meticulously describing events in his city as they occurred, is a testament to the political acumen, the financial adeptness, and the skilled writing of the Venetian patriciate.¹⁵ Other forms of life writing were more fragmentary, the product of journeys, the work of offices, or transient commitments. They included few elegant

¹¹ Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.C.G. Middlemore (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1878), 101. For a more skeptical take on whether Italian biography pointed toward modern, individualistic norms, see Peter Burke, “Individuality and Biography in the Renaissance,” The European Legacy, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1997), 1372–82. ¹² Gustav René Hocke dates the earliest Italian diurnally organized life writings to the beginning of the fourteenth century, including the “Diario di Anonimo Fiorentino,” in Das europäische Tagebuch (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1963), 50–1. ¹³ John F. Padgett and Paul D. McLean, “Economic Credit in Renaissance Florence,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 83, No. 1 (2011), 1–47. ¹⁴ Richard A. Goldthwaite, “Florentine Household Accounts, Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries,” Renaissance Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2017), 219–35. ¹⁵ Marin Sanudo, Venice, Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo, ed. Patricia H. Labalme and Laura Sanguineti White, trans. Linda L. Carroll (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

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prose passages, and their narratives ranged from rudimentary to nonexistent. Instead, they recorded an eclectic blend of financial and personal details, emphasizing precision and grounded firmly in immediate experience. Designed to keep pace with events rather than to offer a retrospective vision of the arc of a life, they were often arranged diurnally. It was out of such practices that the diary, ultimately, would evolve. In the sixteenth century, forms of finance and banking developed in the Mediterranean traveled northward. By this point the Italian grip on the commercial life of Europe had loosened; the Fuggers replaced the Medicis as the European bankers of choice, and Augsburg, Antwerp, and Amsterdam stood poised to supersede Florence and Genoa as the center of its financial networks. As the commercial institutions pioneered in Renaissance Italy spread across Europe, so, too, did the forms of writing that had arisen alongside them. In the north, as in Italy, a financially literate culture of writing extended far past the paperwork of commercial transactions. Notebook keeping became an important aspect of educated European culture, as men and—more rarely—women began to employ a range of diurnal forms to record their life, work, and finances.¹⁶ The evolving form of personal notebooks can be seen in one of the more famous journals of the age, Albrecht Dürer’s account of his trip to the Netherlands in 1520–1. Dürer was a habitual writer and note-taker, who had picked up not only artistic techniques but also sophisticated methods of writing from his extended contacts with Italy and Italian artists. When, at the age of fifty, he traveled to the Netherlands in order to secure a pension from Charles V, he kept a notebook of the trip. Largely a record of expenses, it also included his observations and encounters, providing an important record of his contact with the art and culture of the region.¹⁷ Dürer’s notebook is of interest due not only to the artist’s importance to the history

¹⁶ For a bibliography of German diurnal writing, see Magdalena Buchholz, Die Anfänge der Deutschen Tagebuchschreibung (Münster: Lit Verlag, 1942). Sigismund von Herberstein, a diplomat employed by the Habsburgs, drew on the extensive chronological records of his embassies in order to draft his autobiography, Sigismund von Herberstein (1486–1566) “Mein Sigmunden Freyherrn zu Herberstain, Neyperg und Guttenhag, Raittung, und Antzaigen meines Lebens und Wesens,” in Sammlung kleiner noch ungedruckter Stücke, ed. Martin Georg Kovachich (Buda, 1805). Another, parallel form owed much to the records kept on professional journeys: the use of travel notebooks became increasingly popular, particularly for young men seeking to gain politically useful experience. Elizabeth Williamson, “ ‘Fishing after News’ and the Ars Apodemica: The Intelligencing Role of the Educational Traveller in the Late Sixteenth Century,” in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham, eds., News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 542–62. ¹⁷ Albrecht Dürer, Albrecht Dürers schriftlicher Nachlass (Berlin: Ernst Heidrich, 1920).

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of culture, but also to how the document reflects the migration of literate forms from the practical to the personal, and from Italy northward. Like many such documents, Dürer’s notebook had its basis in accounts. This element of its composition surfaced in a variety of ways, such as the use of the term “item,” the organization of the work, and the selection of details. Dürer typically noted the route and costs of his travel, sometimes adding the day: “Afterwards, on St. Pantaleon’s Day [July 27], we went from Cöln to a village called Postorff, where we passed the night and spent 3 Weisspfenning. And early on Sunday we went to Rüding, where we had breakfast and spent 2 Weisspfenning and 3 ₰ [pfennig].”¹⁸ Throughout his travel narrative, Dürer’s use of accounting techniques grounds his writing in the mundane, practical, and personal. It is what gives his narrative its distinctive rhythm, impelling him to record otherwise trivial details, such as treating an acquaintance to wine or giving a tip to a messenger. It also brings what we might be inclined to think of as important incidents, such as his meeting with Erasmus, onto the same plane as the most routine occurrences: “Item, I gave Erasmus a copper engraving of the Passion.”¹⁹ This aspect of the narrative is a feature of accounts; more than that, it is a feature of a society governed by commercial relations. Money levels events and persons, making them literally commensurable. Formally, this means that the account can bring the most diverse persons and incidents into a shared framework without stylistic or rhetorical differentiation. All of these aspects of Dürer’s journal were the direct result of the fateful encounter of accounting and life writing; and all would become habitual features of the personal diary and its kindred forms of writing. As commercial forms continued to penetrate new regions, practices of personal accounting followed, transforming in the process.

The English Case In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the financial practices that had already reshaped life on much of continental Europe made their way to England. In many respects, English economic culture was borrowed, albeit belatedly, from Italian, German, and Dutch predecessors. But there were

¹⁸ Dürer, schriftlicher Nachlass, 33, my translation. I have retained Dürer’s spelling of proper names. ¹⁹ Dürer, schriftlicher Nachlass, 50, my translation.

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also real differences between the financial and monetary system of England and the forms that developed on the Continent, a fact that would prove fateful for the development of English capitalism and the culture that arose alongside it. In an important contrast to continental Europe, the English banking system was founded on the basis of the domestic commerce rather than international trade. Its key instrument was the inland bill of exchange rather than international bills of exchange.²⁰ Its financial system was predicated, that is, on the emergence of the national market associated with the transition to capitalism whose birth has, in one way or another, been the subject of each of the chapters in this book. As in Italy and continental Europe, in England, the spread of monetary relations occurred, in large part, on paper. There was no real alternative. The European economy was not driven primarily by cash, that is, by coinage. Perennial shortages of precious metals made the use of coins for many purposes impractical or impossible, a problem that lay at the heart of mercantilist theory. The difficulty was particularly acute for the poor and middling sort: wages were paid irregularly, and small coinage was in especially short supply.²¹ At the local level in England, as Craig Muldrew, Carl Wennerlind, and other economic historians have demonstrated, the economy ran largely on credit.²² The result was a vast, albeit tenuous, extension of financial relationships via forms of credit. “Every household in the country,” Muldrew writes, “from those of paupers to the royal household, was to some degree enmeshed within the increasingly complicated webs of credit and obligation with which transactions were communicated.”²³ According to the estimates of Eric Kerridge, in English inventories between 1538 and 1660, the average ratio of coinage to debt by bond, bill, or accounts was 1:9. At its lowest point, in the period from 1590 to 1620, it was 1:12.²⁴ ²⁰ Eric Kerridge, Trade and Banking in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 5–6, 76. As Ellen Meiksins Wood writes, “this type of banking grew out of the ‘metropolitan market’ system and its network of distribution through factors operating on commissions and credits. That system was in turn rooted in the reorganization of English agriculture, especially in the south and east,” in The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (New York: Verso, 1991). ²¹ The special problems posed by small coinage in a system of commodity money are described in Thomas J. Sargent and François R. Velde, The Big Problem of Small Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). ²² Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). ²³ Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 95. ²⁴ Kerridge, Trade and Banking in Early Modern England, 98–9.

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Kerridge’s figures are somewhat provisional, but they do illustrate forcefully how the impact of money on English life was felt through credit rather than in coin. The debts that loom so large in Kerridge’s analysis were recorded in inventories, that is, formal, written records. As a result, the ratio he describes no doubt seriously understates the extent to which English men and women used credit. Many persons, unable to read and write, relied on more informal means of tabulating debts, such as oral promises or simple marks. Even literate men, as the merchant and economic writer Josiah Child noted with regret toward the end of the seventeenth century, were “accustomed to buy and sell Goods by verbal Contracts only.”²⁵ Nevertheless, as merchants like Child well understood, complex transactions were not possible without writing, and it could be difficult to claim debts without the written evidence favored by the courts. Translocal trade, in particular, required documentary forms. As England’s domestic market grew, more of its transactions began to take place through writing. At the same time, money, whether in the form of credit, coin, or financial instruments, was coming to play a new role in the daily lives of England’s people. At the bottom of the social hierarchy, the use of wage labor was rising, as was its intellectual salience.²⁶ It was in this period, as Alexandra Shepard has shown, that working men and women began to understand their own financial worth in terms of their labor power, rather than as the sum of their possessions, making the very self susceptible to monetary expression. By the second half of the seventeenth century, “a living was understood more firmly in terms of what people did with their time rather than what they had on which to depend”—an indication if ever there were one that English men and women were on their way to becoming the propertyless workforce whose emergence is a key preoccupation of Marxist history.²⁷ Just as importantly, with the rise of a market-based agriculture, a growing number of men and women produced goods for sale rather than domestic use, while purchasing an increasing proportion of their daily necessities. Participation in the market, as Ellen Meiksins ²⁵ Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade (London, 1693), 106. ²⁶ In this respect, as in so many others, England resembled its most important early modern economic rival, the Netherlands, where the rate of wage labor in some regions was perhaps the highest in Europe. Bas van Bavel, “The Transition in the Low Countries: Wage Labour as an Indicator of the Rise of Capitalism in the Countryside, 1300–1700,” Past & Present, No. 195 (2007), 286–303. ²⁷ Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015), 310.

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Wood has argued, was a matter of compulsion, not choice: for tenants confronted with rising rents, survival meant selling enough to pay their landlords. Nor was it only the poor who were enmeshed in monetary relations and subject to their forceful imperatives. Wealthy farmers, for instance, relied on the sale of their produce to pay the costs of rent and labor. In these conditions, financial records and methods of account-keeping proliferated, at least among the literate or semi-literate population. Merchants typically kept the most sophisticated accounts, but even some farmers in this era, such as Robert Loder of Berkshire, began to embrace capitalist modes of accounting—methods that aimed to track profit and loss on capital, not merely income and expenditure.²⁸ Moreover, in a country in which, by the end of the early modern era, the ebb and flow of money was a matter of survival for nearly everyone, financial practices were widely disseminated. And as in Europe, many features of writing associated with the management of money shaped other literary forms. Lives shaped by money were also, necessarily, lives recorded in documents. The English diary developed, in part, out of this set of circumstances. Needless to say, the demands of a commercial culture were not the only factor in the diary’s development—professional, domestic, educational, and spiritual pursuits all played a part in various examples of the genre. Students kept educational diaries; lawyers kept legal diaries; office holders kept political diaries; and the nobility carefully noted the details of birth, death, and marriage for the benefit of posterity.²⁹ Yet despite such wide-ranging influences, the diary deserves its reputation as one of the literary forms best accommodated to a monetary culture and an incipient bourgeois individualism. Its structural links to accounting practices were at least as obvious in the period as they are today. “It is a very profitable course to have such a Journal or Diary by us,” John Beadle wrote in the first published manual for diarists, “and you know, Who wil shew us any good? Who wil bring us any profit? is the great question of the world, and prevails very far.”³⁰ The “profitable” character of the diary made it well adapted to the values and mores of an increasingly monetized society.

²⁸ R.A. Breyer, “The Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer: Towards a Marxist Accounting History of the Origins of the English Agricultural Revolution,” Critical Perspectives on Accounting Vol. 17, No. 4 (2006), 367–97. ²⁹ On lawyers as diarists, see Wilfrid Prest, “Legal Autobiography in Early Modern England,” in Ronald Bedford et al., eds., Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), 280–94. ³⁰ John Beadle, The journal or diary of a thankful Christian (London, 1656), 174–5.

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In addition, the timing of the diary’s rise, which occurred in tandem with an emerging agrarian capitalism, is suggestive to say the least. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the use of the word “diary” to 1581. Although the relatively informal character of the genre makes precise dating impossible— with loose enough definitions, it could be traced to antiquity—the adoption of the word seems, more or less, to track the birth and dissemination of the modern form.³¹ From the late sixteenth century onward, it is possible to find personal narratives of ordinary life organized and at least ostensibly written day by day, thus fulfilling all the generic requirements of the diary. By the seventeenth century, the diary had begun to achieve an unusually widespread dissemination, along with a standardized organization, in England and the wider British Isles—as well as in the Netherlands, another site of capitalist development.³² As English men and women began to live in a capitalist society, they became diarists in ever-growing numbers. According to one tally, there are approximately forty surviving English diaries from the sixteenth century, clustered in its final years, while in the seventeenth, there are over 332.³³ The usual problems of survival, especially for diaries of the middling sort or working people, ensure that extant diaries are a tiny fraction of what was written at the time.³⁴ Based on what remains, and on many allusions to the form in other pieces of writing, it is possible to infer that this mode of writing became extremely prevalent in seventeenthcentury England. If a slightly broader range of documents are classed within the category of the diary, such as the almanacs whose conventions and enormous popularity Adam Smyth has convincingly documented, the

³¹ “It is only in the 1570s,” Alan Stewart writes, “that we find the earliest surviving continually kept English diaries that appear to track a person’s life rather than chronicle his job,” The Oxford History of Life Writing, Vol. 1. ³² As Jeroen Blaak shows, in the Dutch republic, there are a few early diarists of the seventeenth century who demonstrate the use of conventions similar to that of Pepys, especially the schoolmaster David Beck, who wrote a diary for the year 1624, Literacy in Everyday Life, trans. Beverley Jackson (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Examples of seventeenth-century Scottish diaries include the diary of Andrew Hay of Craignethan written between 1659 and 1660, The Diary of Andrew Hay, ed. A.G. Reid (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1901). ³³ Elaine McKay, “English Diarists: Gender, Geography, and Occupation, 1500–1700,” History, Vol. 90, No. 298 (2005), 191–212. ³⁴ Perhaps the best-known humble diarist is the Puritan wood-turner Nehemiah Wallington; see David Booy, The Selected Writings of Nehemiah Wallington: The Thoughts and Considerations of a London Puritan and Wood-Turner, 1618–1654 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). See also Margaret Spufford, “First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest Seventeenth-Century Spiritual Autobiographers,” Social History, Vol. 4, No. 3 (1979), 407–35; Brodie Waddell, “Writing History from Below: Chronicling and Record-Keeping in Early Modern England,” History Workshop Journal, No. 85 (2018), 239–64.

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probable total grows higher yet.³⁵ By contrast, diaries were not used in seventeenth-century France. “There is a significant difference between France and England” in practices of diary keeping, Philip Lejeune observes. “France lagged behind by over a century: practices that were common in English from the mid-seventeenth century on did not catch on in France until the second half of the eighteenth century.”³⁶ It was not, of course, that France lacked forms devoted to the self or introspection. It was, rather, that other modes of self-examination were used instead, such as the religious genres of the meditation and the confession. In England, by contrast, the diary became an important outlet for spirituality. Between 1587 and 1590, the Puritan minister Richard Rogers kept what is now considered the first spiritual diary in English.³⁷ As Alan Stewart has demonstrated in a virtuosic piece of scholarly detection, Rogers was the central figure in a circle of godly men at Cambridge who introduced the genre to their friends, pupils, and relatives, not merely through recommending its use but through allowing others to peruse their own diaries.³⁸ It is possible to trace the spread of the practice person-by-person as it moved out of Cambridge and across the country, carried by ministers and chaplains. Although spiritual diaries certainly had their own set of conventions and motivations, the influence of capitalist social and monetary relations can often be perceived even here.³⁹ It is a much-discussed fact that in many spiritual diaries, elements of financial recordkeeping still shape the form and content of the text. The congruence Max Weber identified between Protestant spirituality and a sense of “a man’s duty to his possessions” is certainly visible in some examples of the form.⁴⁰ Nor was the connection between recording God’s benefits and earthly benefits lost on contemporaries. For the spiritual diarist Isaac Ambrose, whose published sample of the genre was meant to serve as a model for imitation, diaries were “a Register (of Gods dealings towards him, and of his dealings towards God),” but they were also “an account of their lives,” a word whose financial resonances were ³⁵ John Evelyn, for example, composed his well-known diary from notes originally written in almanacs, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E.S. de Beer (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1955). ³⁶ Philip Lejeune, On Diary (Manoa: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 62. ³⁷ Richard Rogers and Samuel Ward, Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, ed. M.M. Knappen (Chicago: American Society of Church History, 1933). ³⁸ Stewart, The Oxford History of Life Writing, Vol. 2. ³⁹ They made what Robert Fothergill calls “the practice of self-examination in moral terms” a normal feature of the genre, even in many diaries that lack an overtly spiritual focus, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 17. ⁴⁰ Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 1992), 114–15.

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easily activated.⁴¹ Diarists did not hesitate to refer to the financial metaphors evoked by the diary format, alluding frequently to the idea of a spiritual debit and credit. A portion of the journal of Elizabeth Mordaunt, for example, divides reflections into two columns, entitled “to returne thanks for” and “To aske perden for”—a form of ethical double entry.⁴² The link between diaries and financial recordkeeping, however, was not merely a figurative one. Rather, the metaphorical connection between the spiritual diary and the account was so pervasive precisely because the account book and the life narrative could be genuinely overlapping forms. In social diaries, which are my central object of analysis in what follows, accounting could play a direct role in composition. A number of early diaries were not just personal reflections but practical tools. They included reckonings that complemented the narrative of events but did not actually form part of its substance. Diarists used their journals to record memoranda, noting items of interest and practical advantage. Figures and lists, noted in the margins or simply set on a blank page, were a staple of the form. A notebook of William Drake’s suggests how miscellaneous the form and content of diaries could be. In addition to narrative elements, his diary was an extension of a life lived in documents. Among other odds and ends, it contained a list of the jurisdictions of various courts, a list of benefices in the gift of various persons, and records of personal expenses.⁴³ Similarly, in a journal running from 1656 to 1662, Edward Dering, 2nd Baronet—the son of the politician and antiquarian of the same name—copied out contracts and accounts of his judgments at assizes, as well as his daily social engagements.⁴⁴ He also included a list of “The names of the Lords of Rumney Marsh” with votes at a local council, “as much as I could collect” (5r). Finally, the diary of the Yorkshire army captain, Adam Eyre, which he entitled A Dyurnall, or Catalogue of all my Accions and Expences from the 1st of January 1646, included a list of the names of people for whom he is to take debentures to London as part of a quest to claim army arrears: that is, ⁴¹ Isaac Ambrose, Media: The Middle Things (London, 1649). ⁴² Effie Botonaki, “Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen’s Spiritual Diaries: SelfExamination, Covenanting, and Account Keeping,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), 3–21, 11. ⁴³ Sir William Drake, Journal, The Huntington Library, HM 55603, 9v and 14v. Kevin Sharpe writes, “In the Huntington manuscript we see Drake as a man of affairs, pursuing and advancing his own ambitions, moving on the public stage with lawyers, MPs, London aldermen and courtiers, and committing to paper his thoughts about the course of events and the developing crisis in church and state,” Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 74. ⁴⁴ Sir Edward Dering, 2nd Baronet, Ephemeris, The Huntington Library, HM 41536.

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Eyre’s diary was an instrument for advancing his financial fortunes and those of others.⁴⁵ Diarists’ propensity for including sums, lists, and figures in their journals has become more obvious as scholars have returned to manuscript sources, since many published editions edited out such material or relegated it to an appendix. Perhaps more commonly still, notebooks that straddle the line between journals and accounts have not been published at all: an understandable literary preference for narratively rich and stylistically homogeneous diaries has led scholars to overlook the more miscellaneous and mathematical examples of the form. But the lists and accounts in diaries reveal aspects of typical practice, suggesting how useful such books could be to men and women working within a nascent capitalist society. Diaries that include accounts in their margins obviously cannot be removed from their socioeconomic context. The documentary culture within which they existed was predicated on real monetary relations, and the opportunities and obligations they entailed. In many cases, diarists made loans to poorer neighbors, employed servants, and were owed rent by tenants, transactions that make their way into the text. In the course of a varied notebook, for example, the Yorkshire gentleman and improving landlord Henry Slingsby found occasion to record the proceeds from his mills, the rents on his estates, his disappointment in his servants—his cooks in particular were “w[i]th out all measure disorder’d”—and his experiments in new, more profitable agricultural techniques.⁴⁶ Other early modern diarists, such as Thomas Palmer of Rye, were government officials involved in leveling fines, ensuring that the poor continued to labor, judging law suits, or any of the vast number of activities classed under the flexible rubric of maintaining order.⁴⁷ Many diaries, then, are records not only of the relation of a single individual to a wider capitalist society but also of ways that the individual’s use of money affected innumerable other men and women at ⁴⁵ Adam Eyre, A Dyurnall, or Catalogue of all my Accions and Expences from the 1st of January 1646, in The Publications of the Surtees Society, Vol. LXV (London: Spottiswoode & Co., 1875), 96. In the 1650s, as Andrew Hopper has shown, Eyre would become an employee of the debentures office, using his position in order to attain considerable wealth, in “Social mobility during the English Revolution: The Case of Adam Eyre,” Social History, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2013) 26–45. See also Ann Hughes, “ ‘The Accounts of the Kingdom’: Memory, Community and the English Civil War,” Past & Present, Vol. 230, Supplement 11 (2016), 311–32. ⁴⁶ The Diary of Sir Henry Slingsby, ed. Daniel Parsons (London: Longman et al., 1836), 24. ⁴⁷ Palmer’s diary records his work as a Bailiff during the “free fair” at Yarmouth in 1645, which included adjudicating trade disputes and fining two fishermen, “poor men,” for “tipling in the sermon time,” Sussex Archaeological Collections, XIX (Sussex: George P. Bacon, 1867), 202–6.

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the periphery of the narrative. Such diaries show how working people were drawn into financial transactions in an endless circuit of debt and payment. In doing so, they reflect the uneven effects of the monetary economy at a moment of widening inequality. Given that diaries could be a tool of financial recordkeeping, they must be seen in a very real sense as part of the network of documents that arose along with and helped to organize an increasingly monetized society. Diaries were not, of course, a direct component of the monetary system, as instruments of credit and, in some cases, more formal accounts could be. Yet it is not possible to draw a sharp line between the financial instruments, bonds, bills, and accounts that were an indispensable part of the growth of a monetary economy, and the informal notebooks, scrawled figures, letters, and miscellaneous paperwork that, in different ways, enabled and supported the rise of a complexly interlinked market economy. The forms simply do not have hard boundaries. In a sense, then, diaries can be said to have participated in the rise of a capitalist society in England.

Literary Consequences Considered as a genre of writing, the seventeenth-century social diary seems to exemplify the values typically associated with the emergence of a capitalist literary culture in a number of important respects. In diaries, the lives of ordinary individuals became the subject of writing. Theoretically any man or woman could be the protagonist of his or her own diary, although in practice the requirement of literacy meant that diary writing was generally limited by class and, to an extent, sex. In their style, early modern diaries were as a rule decidedly simple and monotone. They did not make use of elaborate or variegated styles or exhibit a sense of literary decorum, a stylistic convention that, as I argued in the second chapter of this study, the literary culture of capitalism would ultimate erode. Diaries, further, compelled a focus on the everyday. Fundamentally anti-Aristotelian in form, they did not show the beginning, middle, and end of a single action, but the continuous unfolding of ordinary life.⁴⁸ It was this focus on daily life, arranged day-by-day rather

⁴⁸ “In the late seventeenth and eighteenth century,” Stuart Sherman observes, “clock-dials, minute hands, diaries, newspapers, and novels were new precisely in that they called attention away from endpoints and invested it in middles,” Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 21.

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than according to the demands of plot or genre, that make diaries so obviously unliterary—and yet that, paradoxically, gave them so important an influence on the development of a capitalist literary culture. Yet as Woolf, Joyce, and other Modernist writers so forcefully observed, there is daily life and daily life. A thousand trivial incidents, many of them scarcely registered, occur in the life of every individual every day, accompanied by innumerable thoughts and sensations. No inherent necessity demands that one small and stereotypical set of them should be selected from among the rest to form a “realistic” account of life; it is a convention of writing, they argued, rather than an implacable reality that produces realist prose. To say that the diary records the mundane incidents of daily life, then, raises as many questions as it answers. It is here, in understanding how the diary came to represent a particular kind of quotidian existence, that the genre’s connection to a capitalist economy is most important. Incidents, objects, interactions, and persons often made their way into the prose of diaries when they represented a monetary relation. In general, money prompts inscription. When objects become commodities, when they have a price attached to them, they tend to make their way into documents. Many of the objects that sustain daily life, no matter how great their practical importance, will remain unrecorded unless there is a reason to enter them into some form of account. Persons, too, often enter records when there is money at issue: for much of recorded history, the most comprehensive surveys of names were gathered in tax records, such as the Domesday Book. The more complexly individuals are linked in chains of debt and credit, the more important it becomes to record names and identities. Items and individuals linked to money, no matter how routine or ordinary they are in one sense, are always meaningful. Their value is not a matter of guesswork: it is given in precise, numerical terms.⁴⁹ Monetary relations, then, played an important role in selecting the incidents, objects, and persons that featured in many diaries. This was neither because diaries were simply transcriptions of unmediated reality, nor, conversely, because they adhered to a set of literate conventions that operated at a decided distance from social reality. Rather, diaries’ depiction of daily life was a result of the complex way that money and writing came to be ⁴⁹ Describing the influence of accounting on early modern European culture, Mary Poovey has argued that accounts promote an “apparently indissoluble link between formal precision and accuracy,” A History of the Modern Fact (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 30. Poovey has argued that accounting, in its emphasis on accuracy and precision, helped to produce the modern notion of the fact.

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entangled within English society at the onset of agrarian capitalism, for the reasons I described above. At the beginning of the Jacobean era, when the diary had just emerged as a literary form, Ben Jonson had already grasped its key elements. In the fourth act of his comedy Volpone, a passage is read aloud from Sir Politic Would-Be’s “diary / Wherein I note my actions of the day.”⁵⁰ Item, I went and bought two tooth-picks, whereof one I burst immediately, in a discourse With a Dutch merchant, ‘bout ragion’ del stato. From him I went and paid a moccenigo For piecing my silk stockings; by the way I cheapened sprats, and at St Marks I urined. (4.1.138–44)

Jonson’s satire, in his usual manner, skillfully anatomizes his contemporaries’ practices. The account is conspicuously mundane. It is, Jonson implies, subliterary, a use of writing to note minutiae that need not be recorded. “No action of my life but thus I quote it,” the diarist boasts. The selection of trivial objects and events, however, is far from random. On the contrary, money and marketing are what prompt the inclusion of incidents. This relationship, as Jonson perceives, is implicit in the genre. Like the real diaries of Jonson’s contemporaries, Sir Politic Would-Be’s journal is closely linked to practices of accounting. Using the accounting term “item,” he records his purchase of toothpicks, his expenditure of a moccenigo (a small Venetian coin) for the repair of his silk stockings, and his bargaining over a purchase of fish. What Jonson’s parody also reveals is that accounting—and its kindred form, the diary—do not merely lead to a new focus on the banal accumulation of particulars. These features also characterize a society in which commercial relations organize consumption. Toothpicks, sprats, and repaired stockings would probably not be accounted for if they were not commodities bought on the market, that is, if they were simply produced or repaired at home. For Jonson as for his contemporaries, Venice was an

⁵⁰ Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. Brian Parker and David Bevington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), 4.1.132–3.

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exemplary instance of such a society, as well as a proxy for a London dominated by new relations of exchange. Yet it is an English character to whom Jonson, accurately enough, ascribes the practice of diary-keeping. The real diaries of Jonson’s contemporaries show many of the stylistic patterns found in his satire of the form. Diaries, especially those that shade into account books, often record commodities the author has purchased. In an entry on his son Richard’s marriage ceremony, James Jackson, a yeoman farmer in Cumbria, notes “Dick’s cloak 8 yeards and a halfe att ijs. ijd. p. yearde, 6 yeards of base [i.e., baize] lineing att js. iiijd. p. yearde, 8s. one sette of Mowheire [i.e., mohair] buttons, 2s 2d halfe an ounce of Silke, 1s neck button. 6d. black threed, 2d.” as well as the bride’s gown, which included “x yeards of Rosetta [i.e., russet] att iis iijd. a yearde” and “halfe a pound of whaile-bone, is,” among other features. The description of the event itself is laconic in comparison, comprising only a single sentence: “July iiijth, 1671: was my sonne Richard and ffrances Chambr married att Abbey Church and Mr. Bolton preacht twice next Lords day following.”⁵¹ It is not difficult to see, in passages such as this one, how accounting tends to particularize and, in its own language, to itemize physical objects. Not only silk and russet, which one might find described in early modern drama or romance, but also thread and neck buttons make their way into Jackson’s writing, included for the sake of their monetary value. Like James Jackson, many other diarists recorded a detailed material world in which commodities and their prices were routinely listed as part of their accounting practice. Sir Humphrey Mildmay of Danbury, Essex, was a wealthy member of the landed aristocracy. He was also an avid accountant, and it is possible to discover, in his hybrid diary and account book, the prices in the middle of the seventeenth century of peas and strawberries, theater tickets, a dozen small candles, and what must have been a fairly luxurious “velvett” bed (£80), among other things.⁵² Quotidian goods, such as foodstuffs and candles, and more expensive items, such as velvet beds, receive a share of attention. The more committed a diarist is to accounting, the more even ordinary domestic objects tend to make their way into writing. In diaries such as these, it is possible to see the crucial raw material for a richly ⁵¹ James Jackson’s Diary, 1650–1683, ed. Francis Grainger, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, New Series, Vol. XXI (1921), 115. ⁵² Excerpts from Humphrey Mildmay’s diary are given in Herbert A. St. John Mildmay, A Brief Memoir of the Mildmay Family (London: John Lane, 1913), 77–95. Another part of the diary is reproduced in Gerald Eades Bentley, “The Diary of a Caroline Theatergoer,” Modern Philology, Vol. 35, No. 1 (1937), 61–72.

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descriptive narrative realism capable of sketching the contemporary world and its things in convincing detail. Fuller diaries begin to suggest how these materials could be assembled into a new form of prose storytelling. In Pepys’s diary, the superlative example from the period, the treatment of items is far more varied. They are always, to some extent, integrated into a narrative. In some cases, they are still only one step removed from the accounting methods in which Pepys would initially have recorded them, as when he notes “a pair of tweezers, cost me 14s.,” or “a fine table for my dining-room, cost me 50s.,” or “a little sword, with gilt handle, cost 23s.,” as well as endless details of food, drink, and apparel.⁵³ But in other cases, objects and services are woven far more subtly into the rhythms of narrative, forming part of Pepys’s depiction of his behavior, habits, and relationships. The range of Pepys’s methods of description can be seen in part of an entry from January 19, 1661. My Lady went forth to dinner to her father’s, and so I went to the Leg in King Street and had a rabbit for myself and my Will, and after dinner I sent him home and myself went to the Theatre, where I saw “The Lost Lady,” which do not please me much. Here I was troubled to be seen by four of our office clerks, which sat in the half-crown box and I in the 1s. 6d. From thence by link, and bought two mouse traps of Thomas Pepys, the Turner, and so went and drank a cup of ale with him, and so home and wrote by post to Portsmouth to my Lord and so to bed.

Here, as elsewhere in his diaries, Pepys moves in a world that is full of commodities, including such trivial items as two mousetraps—a relatively humble object that, Hamlet notwithstanding, is rarely mentioned in seventeenth-century literature. But it is not just mousetraps that Pepys buys. Even in so short a passage, he makes a surprising number of purchases. In all probability, each one would have been listed in his memorandum book along with its price; his memorial reconstructions would move from expense to expense, filling in the structure of his day with reference to each. In the case of the theater tickets, the price makes its way into the diary explicitly: it is an element of social context, since the office clerks observe Pepys from better, or at least more expensive, seats than his own. Other purchases

⁵³ Pepys, Diary, 11/15/1667; 1/6/1663; 3/20/1663.

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appear without a price. The mousetraps he purchases from his cousin Thomas Pepys, who would become a wealthy West Indies merchant, are given no price. Nor is the rabbit, the cup of ale, or the purchase of a “link”— that is, the services of a torchbearer—to light his way home. It is easy to think of them simply as part of his life. But Pepys’s narrative, no less than the simpler diaries of Jackson or Mildmay, was given form and texture through the exchange of money. Almost any page of Pepys’s massive journal could illustrate the same pattern. Pepys’s brief account of the afternoon and evening of January 19, 1661 also illustrates another characteristic of the prose found in diaries. Diaries often capture part of a social milieu, giving a glimpse of a loosely linked network of persons.⁵⁴ They are records of encounters and exchanges with others, whose names make their way into the narrative.⁵⁵ In some cases, this aspect of the form derives from the diary’s relation to accounts. Persons who are paid or pay money to the diarist often enter the narrative for that reason, their names recorded as part of a transaction. In cases of debt or credit, knowing who owes what is, of course, an indispensable element of financial recordkeeping—and the wider the financial obligations, the more names will appear in any given document.⁵⁶ In fact, the first time Pepys’s own name appears in the diary, in one of only two instances, is in the context of an official account: on December 10, 1660 Pepys was visited by a tax official who had come to collect Poll Money. “I overlooked the book,” Pepys writes, “and saw myself set down Samuel Pepys, gent. 10s. for himself and for his servants 2s., which I did presently pay without any dispute.” At this ⁵⁴ As any reader of his diary is well aware, Pepys was prodigiously social, and the pages of his diary teem with names. In the year 1660 alone, Ian Archer has shown, Pepys dined or drank with 277 different individuals over the course of 833 interactions. Ian W. Archer, “Social Networks in Restoration London: The Evidence of Samuel Pepys’s Diary,” in Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington, eds., Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 76–94. ⁵⁵ This aspect of the diary is highlighted in Pepys’s manuscript version. As is well known, he composed his diary in shorthand, likely for reasons of secrecy. But he often wrote proper names in longhand, despite the fact that the method of shorthand he used could easily express them. Shelton’s shorthand is mostly a phonetic system, in which common syllables, as well as the most common words, receive discrete symbols, Thomas Shelton, Tachygraphy (London, 1641). ⁵⁶ Pepys was intimately concerned with these questions in his professional life which, among other things, involved managing the navy’s—typically overdue—payments to a vast number of persons in an age before the development of reliable forms of identification. According to The Navy Board’s official instructions, the principal officers had to be able to trace the entire series of records that verified wages, “first the Accompt by the Warrants then the Warrants by the Sea bookes and then the Sea bookes by the Muster bookes.” Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge, MS 2242, “Address to James, Duke of York, 20th August 1668, Humbly rendering him my advice touching the present state of the Office of the Navy,” 7.

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relatively early point in his career, Pepys clearly found viewing his own name in a government account interesting; it might, perhaps, be said that he entered into a kind of relation with himself through his perusal of official paperwork. It is a compelling if unusually complicated instance of how accounts merge financial and social relations. Even where diaries do not note persons as part of an accounting practice, however, their tendency to list an endless succession of individuals by name is one of the most salient, though least discussed, elements of the form. Proper names form a remarkably large percentage of the entries of many early modern diaries. Take, for example, a journal such as that of the Nicholas Assheton, a Lancashire squire, avid (though mostly unsuccessful) fox hunter, and in many ways a typical social diarist. His entry for March 15, 1618 begins: I early to Portfield. There was Cooz. Mellicent Braddyll delivd of a sonne and heir abt 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning. Mr. Ric. Shuttleworth, of Gawthorp, came bye, and Coos. Braddyll and I went with him to Whalley. Ther light at the abbey. Charges to much: idle expences: in all xxxs. Judge Bromley, Judge Denham. XI Executed.⁵⁷

In clipped prose verging on the list, Assheton records family events and his day’s activities, including his attendance at an assize. With a diarist’s typical passion for enumeration, he takes note of times and sets down quantities of money. He complains about the extent of his expenses. But what structures the passage is its proliferation of proper names: Assheton’s cousins, but also “Richard Shuttleworth” and the two assize judges, Bromley and Denham, as well as the place names, Portfield, Gawthorp, and Whalley. Only the eleven individuals who were executed—how many for crimes against property?— are not named. Assheton’s tendency to note proper names can be seen in parallel to his tendency to note time and quantities of money as part of an emphasis on precision and particularity embedded in the diary form. Names account for an even greater proportion of prose in the many skeletal diaries consisting of mere notes or phrases. Sir John Archer’s brief diary entries were written on the facing pages of an almanac, leaving room only for a cramped line or less for each day. Yet he found space to note, on January 25, 1663, that he “dind wth Lo: Maior,” citing the names of others ⁵⁷ Nicholas Assheton, The Journal of Nicholas Assheton, ed. F.R. Raines (London: Printed for the Chetham Society, 1848), 85–6.

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who attended.⁵⁸ Similarly, Jason Scott-Warren describes how, in the exchequer teller Richard Stonley’s hybrid diary and account book, Stonley began to list “Strangers at Dyner” and “at Supper” by name beneath his entries.⁵⁹ The social accounting in such diaries reflects the interest writers took, naturally enough, in other people. But diarists represent those interactions in a particular way: as discrete encounters with individuals, identified by names.⁶⁰ Each person is highly particularized, and the clipped prose in which they are represented gives the diarists’ encounters an air of randomness, as if isolated social particles were coming into haphazard contact, even when they were in fact enmeshed in determinate and traditional relations. Stonley notes “strangers”—people who were not members of his own household. By contrast, where diarists think of persons in relation to themselves rather than as independent individuals, proper names sometimes vanish: male diarists almost always refer to their spouses as “my wife” rather than by name. Like its lists of objects, the diary’s tendency to cite proper names indicates how practices of recordkeeping and writing evolved in response to the pressures of a capitalist society. In diaries, it is possible to recognize a society in which, although social ties and traditions continued to bind men and women in families and communities, persons were nevertheless coming to be understood as disembedded agents in legal and economic terms. In this era, “personal ties,” Marx remarked, “all appear as personal relations,” that is, relations between individuals, while individuals seem “free to collide with one another and to engage in exchange within this freedom.”⁶¹ For Marx, the individualism this implied was in one sense a mirage, concealing a much deeper interdependence. In reality, persons had never been more tightly bound together than in the capitalist era, with its sophisticated division of ⁵⁸ The Huntington Library, HM 70160, Diary of Sir John Archer, written in Thomas Gallen’s Almanac for 1663. ⁵⁹ Jason Scott-Warren, Shakespeare’s First Reader. ⁶⁰ James C. Scott, John Tehranian, and Jeremy Mathias have argued that the modern proper name itself, combining a given name and inherited surname, was the product of state formation, in “The Production of Legal Identities Proper to States: The Case of the Permanent Family Surname,” Comparative Studies in History and Society, Vol. 44, No. 1 (2002), 4–44. English history suggests that in the case of proper names, state formation was closely intertwined with the history of property: in England, patronymic surnames, which spread only slowly from the aristocracy downward, were likely first impelled by the desire to secure the legal inheritance of landed property. See Richard McKinley, A History of British Surnames (London: Longman, 1990), 30; Robert Bartlett, England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 543. ⁶¹ Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1973), 163–4.

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labor.⁶² Nevertheless, financial entanglements, from contracts to wage labor, assumed the existence of independent agents who entered into engagements of their own volition. What the diary and the period’s miscellaneous forms of accounting and paperwork show is that this new awareness was not merely an ideological assertion. It was also an aspect of the legal, political, and economic organization of society, which took form in part through the use of writing. With the penetration of finances into society, more and more persons appeared as discrete, disembodied proper names in legal and financial recordkeeping. In turn, their prospects were, to a growing extent, defined by them. Diaries, which existed on the fringes of this system of paperwork, absorbed its conventions. Despite its outward-looking, social character, then, diaries’ habitual citation of the names of others might in fact be its most individualistic element. Looking at diaries’ use of proper names as the mark of a society increasingly organized through finances sheds light on a much-discussed aspect of the development of literary style: the use of real names in the prose fiction of the eighteenth century. In Ian Watt’s influential analysis, the fact that the novel was the first form to use realistic proper names was emblematic of its realism and individualism. It marked the novel as the form of a bourgeois society, holding special appeal for a “trading class” much influenced by “economic individualism.”⁶³ But this “economic individualism” did not simply enter the system of writing as a reflection of social relations occurring outside it. Novels were not simply “the transposition on the literary plane,” in the words of Lucien Goldmann, “of everyday life in the individualistic society created by market production,” a formula that is almost questionbegging in implicitly depicting representational verisimilitude as a natural function of literature.⁶⁴ Rather, the development of prose conventions was inseparable from the development of social relations. In the case of proper names, as in the case of descriptions of objects, diaries reveal how styles of prose using particularity and minute individuation emerged in practice, as

⁶² For Marx, the rise of methodological individualism among philosophers and political economists was linked, in what is only a superficial paradox, with a society bound by greater mutual interdependence than ever before: “the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations” (Grundrisse, 84). ⁶³ Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London, 1957), 49. ⁶⁴ Lucien Goldmann, Towards a Sociology of the Novel, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Tavistock Publications, 1975), 7.

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part of the broad influence of financial documentation. As Adam Smyth writes, “the historical origins of the novel” was “in part a development out of financial accounting.”⁶⁵ As money transformed the production and consumption of things and recast social relations, it also produced a new form of prose.

Toward New Forms In the final decade of the seventeenth century, England’s commercial revolution would lead to the formation of new financial institutions and instruments, the most important of which were intertwined: the foundation of the Bank of England, government debt, and the bank note—paper money. These innovations developed out of England’s domestic economy and the financial instruments and forms of credit that linked it together.⁶⁶ The transformation of England into a market society, fueled by money and monetary forms, generated new forms of consumption, labor, and exploitation—as well as new forms of recordkeeping. Across the country, innumerable smaller and more informal payments and debts were slowly and unevenly incorporated into a national market. The messy, contingent, and complex forms of reckoning such transactions entailed can be thought of as innumerable tiny threads within a web of monetary practices that would, ultimately, enable the creation of a more stable form of paper money and the rise of the modern financial system. The monetary economy was deeply integrated into new patterns of labor and consumption. Via the rapid growth of credit networks, it reshaped human relationships and reoriented values, as Craig Muldrew has shown. For Muldrew, because credit, unlike coin, was eminently social, it cannot be understood as part of early capitalist society: credit, he argues, did not “alienate economic exchange from social exchanges in the Marxist sense of a ‘cash nexus.’ ”⁶⁷ But one can just as easily look at the conjunction of the social and economic in this era from the opposite angle—as the first step in a transformation of a precapitalist society into one structured in terms of ⁶⁵ Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England, 213. ⁶⁶ The inland bills of exchange, for example, which were an important step on the path to paper money, arose with the creation of regular channels of trade, linked by middlemen. See James Stephen Rogers, Early History of the Law of Bills and Notes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). ⁶⁷ Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 101.

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market exchange. The effects of monetization, still uneven in this early period, reveal the beginnings of a reorientation of values and relationships that would take a fuller form as capitalism developed. It was a moment in which money was rapidly reconfiguring society, but in which exchange relations intersected and overlapped with other social forces. By the eighteenth century, bank notes would increase the supply and circulation of currency, while the power of money to transform social bonds would not only be acknowledged, but even celebrated, as in the well-known case of Mandeville’s Fables of the Bees.⁶⁸ Because of their close relationship to financial paperwork, diaries show the effects of money on social relations in process. They demonstrate how intricately financial forms were shaping everyday existence and transforming ordinary experiences. In their pages, individuals are shown in the process of becoming enmeshed in new relations of credit and debt, whose anxieties produce some of their most emotional passages. “Now the Lord helpe me through my prentishipp, that I may be freed frome these sad charges of goods I stand indebted with,” the apprentice shopkeeper Roger Lowe exclaimed in his diary in 1664, adding, “I know not how to rest.”⁶⁹ Beyond their value as testaments to a new social reality, diaries reveal something about how writing helped to produce that world and was itself changed in the process. In doing so, they point forward to the literary history of the eighteenth century, with its new focus on the private lives of ordinary individuals—lives whose value, moreover, could be concretely specified in monetary terms. “The private world of production,” as Charles Taylor remarks, “now has a new dignity and importance.”⁷⁰ The new economic relations that had led to the emergence of the diary would flourish in the realistic fiction that took the private lives of ordinary people as the center of moral life.

⁶⁸ Many scholars have described the transformation of ideas of morality and society in the eighteenth century under the pressure of capitalism. See, for example, Deborah Valenze, The Social Life of Money in the English Past (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996). ⁶⁹ William Sachse, ed., The Diary of Roger Lowe of Ashton-in-Makerfield, Lancashire, 1663–74 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938), 60. ⁷⁰ Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 103.

5 English Literature Abroad Introduction In previous chapters of this study, I argued that the emergence of capitalism shaped patterns of textual circulation within England. As the expanding state and economy linked English society ever more tightly through texts and documents, the character of the literate language, its genres and its values, all responded to the formation of a national sphere of writing. Yet English capitalism did not, of course, affect the dissemination of documents within England alone. Today, we live, work, and read in a world deeply marked by the spread of English across the globe, via the British Empire and the economic development of England, its colonies, and former colonies. Just as the nature of English capitalism is of historical interest far outside England’s own territorial limits, so English patterns of literary circulation have implications for other cultures. In this concluding chapter, then, my argument turns outward to consider the increasing potential for English literary circulation in early modern Europe and its consequences for English writers’ reception and reputations. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, vernacular literature had acquired a new prestige across Europe. The modern literary system of native tongues and translations was crystalizing, reinforced by, though never perfectly aligned with, the nationalist ideology of an emerging territorial state system. But if the authority of the vernacular had risen in general terms, its cachet was nevertheless very unevenly distributed. While authors of French, Spanish, or Italian texts could hope that a reputation within their own languages would lead to translation and fame abroad, the same could not said for most other vernaculars, including English. Working within a language that was notoriously obscure in Europe, English writers found the possibility of a European readership, either in the original or via translation, virtually foreclosed. Yet as contemporary experience makes all too evident, English did not remain unknown, and it was in the course of the seventeenth century that its position first started to shift. Slowly, English literature took on a new place within the European literary system. By the early eighteenth Writing at the Origin of Capitalism: Literary Circulation and Social Change in Early Modern England. Julianne Werlin, Oxford University Press. © Julianne Werlin 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198869467.003.0006

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century, it became possible for English writers, who had previously labored within the obscurity of their own polity, to become famous abroad. This story, which is so significant for the history of English literature, is only now beginning to be told. While, for scholars of the eighteenth century, the circulation of English across the globe has long formed an important preoccupation, until recently the origins of this process in the seventeenth century have attracted relatively little scholarship.¹ Now, thanks to an increasingly prominent international turn in English literary research, a picture of seventeenth-century transmission and circulation abroad is slowly coming into focus. In the last decade, scholars have described new moments of English transmission and exchange in Europe.² They have shown how booksellers and translators, news writers and troupes of traveling actors, slowly introduced English literature onto the Continent. Taken as a whole, their work reveals that English literature was already coming to hold a new interest abroad by the middle of the seventeenth century. How exactly did this transformation occur? The question, clearly, cannot be answered with reference to the cultural sphere alone. Rather, the diffusion of literature was intimately connected with the growth of English political and economic power, and in fact cannot be understood without it. “In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependency of nations,” Marx and Engels wrote, “And as in material, so also in intellectual production.”³ Certainly for England, the transit of “intellectual production” followed the pathways of material production. England began the seventeenth century as a comparatively insular polity, precociously unified but lacking the international authority of its main European rivals. Over the course of the century, however, its position changed dramatically. Building on the foundation of

¹ Eighteenth-century writers, Alok Yadav writes, understood that “cultural prestige” was “linked to the geopolitical power of the polity whose culture was in question,” Before the Empire of English: Literature, Provinciality, and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 21. ² Hassan Melehy, The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England (London: Routledge, 2010); Philip Major and Lisa Jardine, eds., Literature of Exile in the English Revolution and Its Aftermath (London: Routledge, 2010); José María Pérez Fernández and Edward Wilson-Lee, eds., Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); A.E.B. Coldiron, Printers Without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). See also Helmer J. Helmers, The Royalist Republic: Literature, Politics and Religion in the AngloDutch Public Sphere, 1639–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). ³ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels Selected Works, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 112.

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the tightly unified domestic market that formed with the transition to agrarian capitalism, by the century’s end, England would emerge as Europe’s leading commercial and naval power.⁴ This final chapter, then, extends the history I have been tracing in the first four chapters of this study by showing how England’s literature, following lines laid down by its capitalist economy, first began to be a force in the larger world. In order to illustrate this point, I take one writer as a case study: John Milton. Milton’s career and reputation were intimately intertwined with England’s international endeavors. In his work as a polemicist and translator for the Council of State, Milton presented the case for the revolutionary English government to the Continent in Latin and translated official correspondence from English to Latin and vice versa. He lived and worked at the interface of an international, European, Latinate tradition and a national, vernacular literary culture. His own reputation, both at home and abroad, was closely connected to his time in office. It was as a result of his political writing for a European audience, as Miltonists including Leo Miller, Joad Raymond, and Cedric Brown have shown, that Milton first became a wellknown English author abroad.⁵ In part as a result of his initial fame as a Latin polemicist, after his death Milton became one of the first English vernacular poets to achieve currency in Europe. Milton, J.G. Robertson observed, “was the first English poet to inspire respect and win fame for our literature on the Continent of Europe, the first poet to be known and to be adjudged worthy of knowing by continental critics.”⁶ Milton’s literary fame not only trailed, but was directly shaped by, England’s changing role as an international power. But Milton does not merely offer an object lesson in literary history. He is also a source of important early reflections on literary celebrity and the relation of English letters to European culture. Throughout his career, Milton turned again and again to the question of fame, “that last infirmity of noble mind,” as he phrased it in Lycidas.⁷ In that early poem, as in many ⁴ Robert Brenner argues that England’s internal market laid the basis for its later commercial expansion, rather than vice versa, in “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review, No. 104 (1977), 25–92. ⁵ Leo Miller, “In Defence of Milton’s Pro populo anglicano defensio,” Renaissance Studies, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1990), 300–28; Joad Raymond, “John Milton, European: The Rhetoric of Milton’s Defenses,” in Nigel Smith and Nicholas McDowell, eds., Oxford Handbook of Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Cedric Brown, “Europe Comes to Milton’s Door, and Other Kinds of Visitation,” The European Legacy, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2012), 291–307. ⁶ J.G. Robertson, “Milton’s Fame on the Continent,” Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 3 (1908), 1–22. ⁷ John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London: Longman, 1971).

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of his later works, Milton dramatized a turn to divine judgment, as over and against the contingent character of earthly renown. Yet the more vehemently Milton dramatized his own rejection of literary fame, the more powerfully he described the political conditions that alternately thwarted or enabled it. As a result of this stance, his late work is full of important reflections on the problems of literary renown in the new conditions of textual circulation within a politically plural but economically interconnected Europe. ⁸ This is particularly true of his post-Restoration poems. In one crucial respect, these works can claim priority in English literature: they were surely among the first major works of English literature to be written by an author who already possessed, and knew he possessed, a European literary reputation, albeit a highly ambivalent one. Taken as both an exemplar of English literature, then, and as a theorist of literary renown in his own right, Milton helps to place England’s literary history within the framework of its seventeenth-century political and economic expansion. “Pastures new,” in the phrase of Lycidas, were precisely what awaited early modern English letters.

The International Author In the first chapter of this study, I described the rise of a single vernacular, showing how the making of a standard English prose was connected with the country’s capitalist development. The rise of the vernaculars, however, was a process that occurred in the plural, and it is to the consequences of this plurality—that is, the cast given to European literary history by the multiplicity of languages and polities in Europe—that I now turn. By the end of the sixteenth century, the process of vernacularization was well underway throughout Europe. Dialects took on a written form, received the acceptance of communities and the sanction of the authorities, and became languages. Writers endeavored to make full use of their native tongues, and indeed to expand their resources of eloquence and copiousness. In doing so, they looked to the example of their neighbors, in a literary culture characterized at once by heightened exchange and increasing rivalry.

⁸ Despite Milton’s preoccupation with fame, the subject has not been central to the scholarship; there has been only one monograph concerned with the topic, though it is touched on, in different ways, in many others. See R.B. Jenkins, Milton and the Theme of Fame (The Hague: Mouton, 1973).

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In this respect, the literary culture of the vernacular was part of a broader pattern of European development in the sixteenth century. Over the course of the period, new connections and divisions simultaneously appeared across the European continent. Individual communities were united by increasingly dense ties of trade, which brought disparate regions into close contact. Many areas became economically interdependent, as a number of regional specializations developed, from Baltic timber to Eastern European grain.⁹ But new trade meant competition as well as exchange; and it could lead to widening economic disparities as well as shared material cultures. In politics, a similar pattern held. New networks of communication and diplomacy spanned the capitals of Europe, yet at the same time, in an age of state formation, religious hostilities, and near-constant warfare, the lines separating polities were etched ever more deeply. Some of the regions that were united into what J.H. Elliot described as “composite monarchies” in the sixteenth century would become territorial states in the seventeenth century, whose borders were, at least in theory, permanent divisions separating one people from another.¹⁰ The literary culture of the vernacular participated in the simultaneous centripetal and centrifugal tendencies of the period. Writers wrote with a keen awareness of cultural, political, and linguistic difference. They knew, of course, that Europe was not monolingual, and that their compositions would be unintelligible to many of their neighbors. Yet this did not mean that they wrote merely for a domestic audience. Even as vernacular literary culture created new linguistic obstacles, the rapid growth of literary translation meant that writers might well be read in another language than their own. The era thus inaugurated, in the formula of Franco Moretti, the “unity paid at the price of diversity” that would come to characterize European literature.¹¹ The first vernacular works to receive significant currency outside their language of origin came from the most economically advanced region, the Italian city states. Already in the fourteenth century, Italian authors were read in translation abroad. Gradually, Italian writers would become icons of authorship for the rest of Europe. In The Site of Petrarchism, William ⁹ Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (Los Angeles and Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1974), 96–102. ¹⁰ J.H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past & Present, No. 137 (1992), 48–71. ¹¹ Franco Moretti, “Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch,” New Left Review, No. 206 (1994), 86–109.

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J. Kennedy has shown this process in action in what was perhaps the most influential and widely imitated of Renaissance vernacular forms, the Petrarchan sonnet. “Originally a hybrid of classical and late medieval forms in northern Italy,” Kennedy points out, “Petrarchism offered a literary model for emergently national vernaculars soon to be codified throughout Europe.”¹² The same could be said of many other literary forms, including epic, satire, and jests. Transmission was especially rapid between the Romance languages.¹³ Often via French, which served as a hub of dissemination, the writings of Italian or Spanish authors were transmitted into other European languages: German, Dutch, Swedish, even English. Even at the time, it was clear to most writers that the reputation of Italian, and, later, Spanish and French writers was not only due to individual merit or even to superior literary cultures. Rather, the potentialities of the region or polity as a whole shaped its chances elsewhere. As contemporaries well understood, the mercantile wealth and sophistication of the Mediterranean trading zones laid the foundation for the international reception of its vernacular writing. Writing flowed in the pathways pioneered by trade and politics; literature was one export among others from this exceptionally wealthy region. Florence produced both Dante and double-entry accounting; the Venetians were early masters and pioneers of finance, as well as information collection, news, and the book trade. In fact, in the early years of the Renaissance, before the implications of an international literary system had been fully appreciated, writers often drew the link between political and literary success in the most absolute terms, imagining a translatio imperii from Rome to their own polities. Roman writers had considered literary reputations and political power as coterminous, each stretching across a single, global empire. In reviving this model, Italian writers imagined a literary culture that would overtake the globe, through the unification of the Italian peninsula and its revival of Roman politics as well as Roman culture. “To no mortal man was ever the way so open, as it is to you, to make himself eternal in fame,” Petrarch addressed an unnamed figure in his Rime sparse, “for you can raise to her feet, if I do not discern falsely, the most noble monarchy in the world,” that is, the modern

¹² William J. Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 262. ¹³ Andrew Pettegree, The French Book and the European Book World (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 212.

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descendant of Rome.¹⁴ Within a universal empire, there was no need for authors to reflect on their reception in the world abroad; for the purposes of literature, there was no “abroad.” A similar model can be seen in later writers, who were ironically enough drawing on Italian predecessors. It was only slowly that the modern understanding of literary circulation began to develop, in which a sufficient national reputation would—for the lucky or meritorious few—make an international readership possible through translation. Translation, in turn, would follow wider political and economic patterns imperfectly but unmistakably. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Cervantes expressed an understanding of the international literary system: “One of the things,” says Don Quixote, “that must give the greatest contentment to a virtuous and eminent man is to see, while he is still alive, his good name printed and published in the languages of different peoples.”¹⁵ In this formula, contained within a famous episode in which Cervantes describes a fictional translation of Don Quixote itself, international renown is imagined as the product of both print and translation. Sure enough, as Roger Chartier notes, “before 1615, two translations of Don Quixote had already been published: in 1612 the English edition by Thomas Shelton, and in 1614 the French translation by César Oudin.”¹⁶ It is no coincidence that the writer of the book typically designated as the first novel would apprehend the condition of modern, European canon formation. The novel was, as Benedict Anderson has argued, always a national form—which meant, among other things, that like all creations of the nation, it existed within a plural, international world.

English in Europe In the Elizabethan era, English writers had no difficulty observing that the European literary system was increasingly structured around rival ¹⁴ Francesco Petrarch, Petrarch’s Lyrics, trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 130. Another verse by Petrarch to much the same effect served as the concluding lines to The Prince: Italy should unite, “for the ancient valour is still strong in Italian hearts,” Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 91. ¹⁵ Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 475. ¹⁶ Roger Chartier, “Crossing Borders in Early Modern Europe: Sociology of Texts and Literature,” trans. Maurice Elton, Book History, Vol. 8 (2005), 37–50. See also Miguel de Cervantes, The history of the valorous and vvittie knight-errant, Don-Quixote of the Mancha, trans. Thomas Shelton (London, 1612).

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vernaculars. Throughout the period, a remarkable quantity of texts were translated from Romance languages into the native vernacular. Every student of Elizabethan literature knows how profoundly it was shaped by the influence of Petrarch, Ariosto, Montaigne, Rabelais, Cervantes, and many others. Writers were equally aware, however, that English, though a national language, had no international reach: it was part of a literary world in which it was not yet a full participant. Before the final decades of the sixteenth century, literary works were not translated from English into other vernaculars. In the Elizabethan era, what Peter Burke has referred to as the “balance of trade” of translation was driven exclusively by imports.¹⁷ For print in general, the English Channel was a one-way passage. “Italy, Spayne and Fraunce,” Gabriel Harvey observed, rest their “reputation abroade in the world in the famous writings of the nobblist wittes,” but “the markett goith far otherwise in Inglande.”¹⁸ Harvey was speaking of the disrespect afforded to English literature in general, yet his sentence can bear a narrower construction. The English market did indeed “go far otherwise”: English publishing, like its language, was insular. The “basic structure” of English publishing, John Feather writes, “was inward-looking, seeking a domestic rather than a European market; it was for that reason primarily concerned with vernacular books.”¹⁹ In addition, the English book market was highly unified around London. In this respect, as in so many others, the book market resembled the wider market in which it participated, unified around London and dominated by internal rather than external trade, with exports in particular playing only a negligible role. It was into this literary economy that John Milton was born in 1608. The son of a scrivener, Milton grew up in a household with commercial connections near the center of the publishing industry. Milton’s early poetry testifies to his keen interest in questions of literary reputation and celebrity, as well as his understanding of the aspects of textual production and circulation that shaped them. Aspects of his context and his early perspective can be seen in his first publication, “On Shakespeare” (1630). Published in Shakespeare’s second folio, likely as a result of his father’s connections, the poem was part of an attempt to canonize Shakespeare through the ¹⁷ Peter Burke, “Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe,” in Peter Burke and R. PoChia Hsia, eds., Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). ¹⁸ Gabriel Harvey, Letter Book of Gabriel Harvey, ed. Edward John Long Scott (Westminster: Nichols and Sons, 1884), 66. ¹⁹ John Feather, A History of British Publishing (London: Routledge, 1988), 11.

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mechanism of the book trade.²⁰ This purpose of the poem was also its subject. In “On Shakespeare,” Milton imagined Shakespeare creating a “live-long monument,” a guarantee of his own enduring literary reputation, in the form of his book. “Each heart,” Milton writes, “Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book / Those Delphic lines with deep impression took.” For Milton, Shakespeare’s audience was not the heterogeneous crowd of the theater, but the solitary reader for whom the appreciation of his work was an internal process occurring in the private space of the heart. “Impression,” with its resonance of the press, extends and sharpens the emphasis on the reader. Milton’s poem is as interesting for what it does not include as for what it does, however. Shakespeare’s second folio represented a contribution to a distinctively English, vernacular literary culture, as Milton well understood. As a result, although his poem depicts Shakespeare’s verse as immortal, it does not depict it as universal. That is, in Milton’s lines, Shakespeare’s reputation extends across time, not across space. The reason for this orientation is clear. Even as Milton was imagining the possibilities for English literary fame within a national arena, he was acutely conscious of its restricted dissemination abroad. Like Harvey, he knew that English writers had no “reputation abroade”: to write in English entailed international obscurity. Milton’s keen sense of the limited circulation of English literature, in this early poem, was a result of his observation of the book trade. It was an awareness shared by many literary readers in London. But he would also gain direct experience of Continental literary culture. In 1638, when he was thirty, Milton began a tour of Europe, which led him through Paris and to the Italian academies, giving him an intimate glimpse into literary culture abroad. Most Miltonists agree that this experience shaped Milton’s outlook and poetics deeply. “It is only through a degree of ‘self-estrangement’ or the gaze of international witnesses,” Paul Stevens writes, that Milton “becomes fully aware of what he imagines his country could be.”²¹ The reverse was equally true: in Europe, Milton became aware of what his country and its poetry could not be. As Thomas Corns observes, Milton “knew how ²⁰ As Emma Smith writes, “the folio format represented a different kind of publication associated with more high-status religious, topographical, or historical contents, rather than the down-market products of the London theatre,” Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). ²¹ Paul Stevens, “Archipelagic Criticism and Its Limits: Milton, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the Matter of England,” The European Legacy, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2012), 151–64.

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peripheral English life and culture were to the mainstream of continental European and thought and art, how dependent on continental Europe the English intelligentsia were.”²² But Milton was also well aware that there was an alternative for writers from the north: he could follow the path More and Erasmus had traveled a century earlier and seek international celebrity in Latin. This was the route he would ultimately take in his polemical prose. As a writer of verse, however, Milton rejected this option explicitly. Shortly after his return from the Continent, he wrote a Latin elegy for his friend Charles Diodati, the Epitaphium Damonis. In this poem, Milton reflected on the question of language and his own poetic vocation, suggesting that, in the future, he planned to write poetry in English and on an English theme. As Victoria Moul argues, the Epitaphium Damonis marks a departure from Latin for English: “Milton has lost Virgil (and Latin) only to extend to himself the hope of finding him again in English epic.”²³ In this poem, the decision to abandon Latin for the vernacular did not merely mark a break with antiquity, but with contemporary Europe. Above all, it meant restricting the possibilities of circulation for his work. The decision to write in English entails European obscurity; as a result, he writes, he will be unknown, ignotus, and without fame, inglorius, in the world abroad. Three years later, Milton expressed a similar sentiment, but added a revealing insight. In a much-studied passage in his pamphlet Of Reformation (1642), he tied recollections of his European tour to his renunciation of European fame. He could, he thought, be known abroad if he chose to write in Latin. But he had decided instead to “be an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest things, among mine own citizens throughout this island in the mother dialect,” just as the Athenians, Hebrews, Romans, and modern Italians had done for their countries.²⁴ Milton’s last remark is indicative of a growing awareness among contemporary writers of the rise of the international system of literary culture. Rather than imagining that any one people or language could participate in the creation of a universal literary culture, Milton acknowledged that each writer had to begin by ²² Thomas Corns, “Milton and the Limitations of Englishness,” in David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens, eds., Early Modern Nationalisms and Milton’s England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 213. ²³ Victoria Moul, “Of Hearing and of Failing to Hear: The Allusive Dialogue with Virgil in Milton’s Epitaphium Damonis,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Vol. 33, Nos. 1–2 (2006), 154–71. ²⁴ John Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe, Vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 812.

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addressing a particular country before joining a transnational, transhistorical literary canon. It was ultimately through the vernacular that writers would achieve a lasting international reputation. This insight was, implicitly, a political as well as literary one. It anticipated the incipient organization of Europe into nations with separate cultures, governments, and—up to a point—literatures. Yet Milton’s insight into the structure of modern literary history, prescient as it was in many respects, could not yet anticipate the role England was to play within the international and colonial sphere. So long as England remained economically and culturally peripheral to Europe, the national and the international seemed doomed to be opposed rather than complementary for English writers. Even as Milton wrote, however, England was already on the cusp of change. In the sixteenth century, England’s imports vastly outbalanced its exports. Those exports, such as they were, were almost entirely dominated by raw wool and the coarse woolens known as the “old draperies.” Yet despite its weak position relative to the leading European commercial centers, England was laying the foundations for its later entry into the international economy. With the rise of an agrarian capitalism, inland trade rose in pace and volume. Coastal and river shipping increased, expanding England’s external shipping capacity as well as its internal modes of transport. Coal provided a new stimulus to domestic and foreign trade, as well as an incentive for English merchants to build or buy vessels adapted to the demands of bulk shipping.²⁵ By the early seventeenth century, England was beginning to experiment—not always successfully, as the disastrous Cockayne project testified—with sending more finished commodities abroad.²⁶ At the same moment, a unified English language and literature had begun to flourish. Although England was still, in literature as in trade, a culture dominated by the domestic market, there were hints that English writing was beginning to be read abroad. In the first chapter of this study, I showed how writers most closely associated with the new prose genres intertwined with capitalist development were also the first to achieve significant currency in Europe. The one exception was James I and VI, whose works were ²⁵ J.U. Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry (London: Routledge, 1932). On the consequences for naval architecture of bulk shipping, see Violet Barbour, “Dutch and English Merchant Shipping in the Seventeenth Century,” The Economic History Review, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1930), 261–90. ²⁶ Thomas Leng, Fellowship and Freedom: The Merchant Adventurers and the Restructuring of English Commerce, 1582–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

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translated into French beginning in 1589. For English writers, the foreign reception of James’s writings was exciting. Might it mark a turning point for the fate of English culture in Europe? James Montagu, Bishop of Winchester, described James’s reception abroad in the most enthusiastic terms: “there is scarce a People, Language or Nation in Christendome, out of which his Maiestie hath not receiued some answere or other.”²⁷ At least one reader found Montagu’s observation significant. In a copy of James’s Works owned and annotated by the French subject and English spy Jean de L’Oiseau de Tourval, there is a mark in the margin drawing attention to this comment.²⁸ L’Oiseau de Tourval had every reason to be interested in the European success of James’s writings, as he was the translator of another of the first English-language works to have been published in a vernacular abroad, the Characters of Joseph Hall, one of Prince Henry’s chaplains and the future Bishop of Norwich. Published in English in 1608, the year of Milton’s birth, Hall’s Characters appeared in French in Paris two years afterwards.²⁹ Only a few years later, Bacon’s Essays were translated, first into Italian by his friend Toby Matthew in 1618, then into French in 1619.³⁰ A Latin translation, Sermones fideles, followed, as well as a German translation from the Latin, Getreue Reden (1654).³¹ The popularity of Bacon’s writing in Europe was both broad and enduring, as a glance at the Frankfurt Book Fair Catalogues illustrates: his titles appear year after year, sometimes in multiple languages within a single catalogue.³² Bacon, as Anna-Maria Hartmann has shown, sought and cultivated a foreign reputation.³³

²⁷ The Workes of the Most High and Mightie Prince, IAMES (London, 1616); L’Oiseau de Tourval’s copy is in the Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14344, copy 3, Bd.w. ²⁸ L’Oiseau de Tourval was a French subject who had worked in foreign intelligence for the English government, perhaps arriving with the French embassy, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. ²⁹ Sidney Lee, “The Beginning of French Translation from the English,” Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, Vol. 8 (1906), 85–112. Hall’s Characters appeared in French translation in Paris in 1610; it went through three editions and—as in England—inspired a number of imitations. Hall became a minor literary celebrity in France as a consequence. ³⁰ Coincidentally, they were translated by two different writers at the same moment: Bacon’s acquaintance Arthur Gorges and the French writer Jean Baudoin. ³¹ Francis Bacon, Getreue Reden: die Sitten, Regiments, und Haußlehre betreffend, trans. Johann Wilhelm von Stubenberg (Nürnberg, 1654). ³² See, for example, CATALUS AVTVMNALIBUS (Frankfurt, 1653). ³³ Anna-Maria Hartmann, “ ‘A Little Work of Mine that hath begun to Pass the World’: The Italian Translation of Francis Bacon’s De Sapientia Veterum,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2010), 203–17.

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Soon others joined Bacon and Hall.³⁴ From the 1620s onward, a growing slate of English authors were translated into a wider number of languages— Dutch, German, Italian, French—with religious writers joining the ranks of literary authors.³⁵ Gradually, some of the most characteristic productions of English culture—the drama of the commercial theater, works of scientific empiricism, the devotional literature of Protestant piety—gained a certain currency in Europe. But the true turning point for England’s economic and cultural emergence as a world power would come in the middle of the century, during the period between the English Revolution and the Restoration.

Revolution and Expansion The English Revolution was a watershed, with consequences not only for England’s internal politics but its foreign relations. Nigel Smith argues that “it was in fact the English Revolution and its cultural production that began the period of high English influence on the Continent and some other parts of the world.”³⁶ In the revolutionary years, England began to turn outward. And Milton was part of it: in March of 1649, he was made Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State. The Council of State’s mandate included the responsibility to keep “amity and a good correspondency with foreign kingdoms and states,” which Milton was to facilitate as a translator from English to Latin and vice versa.³⁷ As diplomatic papers passed through his hands, he was both a witness to and a participant in England’s Continental relations. The years Milton spent in office under the Commonwealth and then the Protectorate governments represented a turning point in England’s relation to Europe precisely because they signaled

³⁴ In 1624, a version of Sidney’s Arcadia in French by Bacon’s translator Baudoin appeared; the next year, another was published by Genevieve Chappelain. By the end of the 1620s, Sidney had been translated into German; a revised translation in 1638 by the famous poet Martin Opitz helped to cement Sidney’s status as an English classic within German literature, Arcadia der Gräffen von Pembroct, trans. Valentinum Theocritum (Frankfurt, 1638). ³⁵ Jane Stevenson, “British Authors Published Abroad,” Literature Compass, Vol. 14 (2017). ³⁶ Nigel Smith, “England, Europe, and the English Revolution,” in Laura Lunger Knoppers, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 29–43. ³⁷ An Act of this present Parliament for constituting a Council of State for the Commonwealth of England, in Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1906), 382.

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England’s emergence as a capitalist world power—its rise as an exporter of goods, political influence, and, as I will argue, literature. In the 1650s, England’s trade became a new political priority. It was obvious to most observers that, in the Commonwealth and Protectorate, commercial interests were helping to drive England’s foreign relations.³⁸ Merchants began to play an important role in shaping policy, and although different factions often disagreed about strategies, there could be little question that their views held a new weight. Men such as Maurice Thomson and Martin Noell, both among England’s leading slave traders, were closely connected to government circles.³⁹ It was in part as a result of their influence that the government adopted a number of measures designed to protect trade in the 1650s. In these years, the navy swelled in size and began providing convoys to English merchant ships.⁴⁰ With the passage of the Navigation Act in 1651, imports were restricted to English ships or ships from the goods’ country of origin, a protectionist move intended to give a boost to England’s carrying trade at the expense of the Dutch.⁴¹ In Adam Smith’s classic interpretation, the Navigation Act was a consequence of merchants’ influence on the Commonwealth parliament. From his laissezfaire perspective, he thought that the act was not fit “for a nation of shopkeepers”—that is, its restrictions would ultimately damage English commerce—but it was “extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.”⁴² Few contemporary documents better support ³⁸ Richard Conquest, “The State and Commercial Expansion: England in the Years 1642–1688,” Journal of European Economic History, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1985), 155–72. Cromwell’s own motivations were complex, inflected by religion, and constrained by the crushing fiscal exigencies of maintaining a standing army. See Timothy Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy (London: Macmillan, 1995). ³⁹ Noell was, perhaps, the merchant with the closest connections to Cromwell; he was also John Thurloe’s brother-in-law. On his relationship to Cromwell, see Maurice Ashley, Financial and Commercial Policy Under the Cromwellian Protectorate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), 8–14, 100–2. For the impact of their participation in the slave trade, see John Donogue, “The Unfree Origins of English Empire-Building in the Seventeenth Century Atlantic,” in John Donogue and Evelyn P. Jennings, eds., Building the Atlantic Empires: Unfree Labor and Imperial States in the Political Economy of Capitalism, ca. 1500–1914 (Brill: Leiden, 2016), 109–31. ⁴⁰ Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1963). ⁴¹ The Commonwealth government, Robert Brenner writes, “had come to envision the secret of commercial success—as revealed by the Dutch example—as the state’s systematic support of trade . . . the passage of the navigation act followed directly from this line of thinking,” Merchants and Revolution (New York: Verso, 2003), 627–8. ⁴² Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 663. J.E. Farnell’s conclusions support Smith’s interpretation, “The Navigation Act of 1651, the First Dutch War, and the London Merchant Community,” The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1964), 439–54.

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Smith’s assertion that merchants were playing a direct role in setting English policy than Milton’s state papers. Published posthumously as specimens of his excellent Latin, the diplomatic documents Milton translated reveal a steady stream of negotiations surrounding trading rights, piracy, and the recovery of vessels and cargoes that had been seized, among other things.⁴³ When England emerged as the leading global commercial power at the end of the seventeenth century, it was in part as a result of its nascent colonial empire. Here, too, the 1650s were a key moment in the capitalist imperialism that would shape England’s economy, enabling its political and cultural influence, in the centuries to come. “Developments across the Atlantic,” Alex Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu point out, were “inscribed in the ‘generative grammar’ of the English Revolution.”⁴⁴ Cromwell’s ambitious Western Design, a plan to wrest the Americas from the Spanish, was a failure, but it signaled a new, imperialistic direction in foreign policy.⁴⁵ Its most important legacy, the conquest of Jamaica, helped to establish England’s slave trade and set the pattern for later aspects of England’s empire. From this point forward, the colonies would serve as a place to send excess workers (often by force), a source of raw materials, and a crucial market for English goods. By the end of the century, English exports would finally surpass imports, owing to re-exports from the colonies.⁴⁶ The revolutionary regimes thus marked a turning point, enabling England to shift from a primarily domestic economy to one that was newly capable of intervening in global and European markets. As in commerce, so in communications. England’s new foreign policy and its growing commercial power helped to impel a shift in the circulation of writing. The export of goods is not identical to the export of texts, but the two often rise and fall in close association; trade and diplomacy, after all, entail the transmission of documents and information. Bacon had already grasped this aspect of the culture of knowledge in the 1620s. In his New Atlantis, he depicted a state that sends “merchants of light” to gather ⁴³ Milton, Complete Prose Works, Vol. 5. ⁴⁴ Alex Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (London: The Pluto Press, 2015), 195. ⁴⁵ Timothy Venning describes the reasons for its failure in Cromwellian Foreign Policy. For a reading of Milton’s perspective on the Western Design, see Robert Fallon, “Cromwell, Milton, and the Western Design,” in Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Milton and the Imperial Imagination (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 133–54. ⁴⁶ Ralph Davis gives a calculation of the quantity of re-exports and their role in foreign trade from the 1660s in “English Foreign Trade, 1660–1700,” The Economic History Review, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1954), 150–66.

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information from across the globe, linking commerce and knowledge in the title of their office.⁴⁷ Suggestively, Bacon depicted his island utopia as a society that was exclusively an importer of knowledge, but that stood poised, at the volume’s conclusion, to become the world’s most powerful exporter of ideas—an allegory that could serve as a much idealized emblem of England’s trajectory from literary importer to literary exporter in the years following his death. In the intellectual milieu around the governments of the 1650s, Bacon’s vision seemed on the verge of realization. In the circle surrounding the German polymath Samuel Hartlib, with which Milton was loosely associated, theories of free trade, a vision of global diplomacy, and a new emphasis on the circulation of knowledge all coalesced. Proposals for inventions such as an “office of address,” a bureau of communications meant to centralize information, especially that relating to trade and employment, generated passionate interest and frenzied activity. While the office of address never materialized, the English revolutionary government itself provided an outlet for some of the Hartlib Circle’s ambitions. Many members joined Milton in working for the government in the 1650s. Men such as Scottish-Dutch minister John Dury, the German poet Rudolph Weckerlin, and the English mathematician John Pell formed a loose international group of intellectuals centered around the Council of State. Together, these men cultivated dense informational networks as spies, diplomats, and translators that created new channels of communications between England and Europe. In addition, many of them promoted a program of commercial expansion and free trade that was closely connected to their vision of the circulation of information. Benjamin Worsley, an associate of Hartlib’s, was one of the authors of the Navigation Act, as well as two pamphlets in favor of free trade printed by William Dugard, the printer to the Council of State.⁴⁸ Weckerlin, echoing the general sentiments of this group, instructed an emissary to urge the Swedish Crown to “assist

⁴⁷ Francis Bacon, New Atlantis, in Brian Vickers, ed., Francis Bacon: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For a suggestive economic interpretation of this text, see Sarah Hogan, Other Englands: Utopia, Capital, and Empire in an Age of Transition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). ⁴⁸ Charles Webster, “Benjamin Worsley: Engineering for Universal Reform from the Invisible College to the Navigation Act,” in Mark Greengrass et al., eds., Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 213–35; Benjamin Worsley, The Advocate (London, 1652); Free Ports (London, 1652).

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our just designes, Especially in freeing the Commerce & Trade every where.”⁴⁹ The men who participated in this milieu often saw their own reputations spread along the very networks they pioneered. Pell could remark of his mathematics, “Almost all Christendome hath seene my undertaking. England, Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, France, Italy, Spaine, Poland, I thinke also Denmark, Sweden, Bohemia & Hungaria, sure I am some of those countreys have seene it, my name is tost up & downe.” Pell’s remark is resonant of Milton’s claim in his sonnet to Cyriack Skinner that “all Europe talks from side to side” of his polemical work the Defense of the English People. For Milton as for Pell, it was as a result of his connections to government circles that the first of his English works was translated into a foreign vernacular. While Milton’s first officially commissioned work, Eikonoklastes (1649), was directed primarily at an English audience, it was translated into French by Milton’s friend and colleague John Dury in a version published in 1652. In his preface to the edition, Dury notes somewhat apologetically that he has adopted an extremely literal approach to translation in order to avoid losing Milton’s “sense and fine expressions” (sense & des belles expressions), and that therefore the reader should be prepared for “some Anglicisms, or English modes of speech” (quelques Anglicisms, ou facons de parler Angloises).⁵⁰ Dury anticipated, through Milton, not only the diffusion of English arguments, but the diffusion of English modes of speech through the vehicle of translation. Even after the Restoration, Milton’s connections to a diplomatic milieu would continue to shape the translation of English-language writing: Paradise Lost first appeared in a manuscript translation of Book I into German by Milton’s former colleague Theodore Haak.⁵¹ It was Milton’s Latin writing, however, that extended his reputation abroad in the Interregnum years. Commissioned as an official response to Claude Saumaise’s denunciation of the execution of Charles I, the Defensio regia, Milton’s Defensio pro populo Anglicani (1651) quickly became well known. Much of the attention it received was hostile, but it was not

⁴⁹ The British Library, Add MS 72437, f. 81v. ⁵⁰ John Milton, Eikonoklastes, ou Réponse au Livre intitulé Eikon Basilike, trans. John Dury (London, 1652). ⁵¹ Nigel Smith, “Haak’s Milton,” in Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro, eds., Milton in the Long Restoration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 379–96.

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ignored.⁵² As Christopher Hill remarks rather laconically, “the seventeen editions of the Defensio speak for themselves.”⁵³ As Milton’s reputation grew, his fame—or perhaps notoriety—extended beyond the distribution of this particular work. People who had never read his writing knew that he possessed literary gifts. In a letter of intelligence in the Thurloe papers in 1653, a correspondent could remark, “You have in England a blind man named Milton who has the reputation of having written well” (Vous aves en Angleterre un aveugle nommé Milton, qui a le renom d’avoir bien escrit).⁵⁴ Similarly, Louis XIV’s ambassador the Comte de Comminges, reporting on what he declared to be the parlous state of letters in England, thought that the only recent writer worth mentioning was “a man named Milton who is infamous for his dangerous writings.”⁵⁵ To some extent, then, Milton’s work fit into the dichotomy he had anticipated: his Latin writing put him in contact with Europe—and in the case of the Defensio, made him famous there. His English writing remained, with the exception of Dury’s translation of Eikonoklastes, confined to England. Yet the situation was more complex than this binary division reveals. For although Milton’s Latin addressed a European audience, he was not abjuring the field of English letters or English politics for participation in a universal sphere of letters. Rather, it was precisely his engagement in the national field that gave him his rationale for addressing Europeans in Latin. Albeit in a different sense than for later authors, Milton’s engagement with Europe was predicated on his immersion in the English national context, and it relied on international interest in English events for its dissemination. Milton’s international reputation, then, was not precisely a form of participation in the republic of letters, much less in Curtius’s Latinate Christendom. Despite his use of Latin, his writings in these years anticipated the national character of international literary fame. The Commonwealth and the Protectorate ended a period of comparative isolation, and England emerged as a greater player in European affairs in a ⁵² It was burnt at Paris, and it was challenged in dissertations, as in Jacob Schaller, Dissertationis ad quaedam loca miltoni (Strasbourg, 1652). A refutation, Regii Sanguinis Clamor (1652), inspired Milton to write a second work, the Defensio Secunda. This work was popular enough to attract purchasers: it was listed in the Frankfurt Book Fair catalogues—with Salmasius’s Defensio Regia pro Carolo I listed anonymously beneath it. CATALOGUS AVTVMNALIBUS (Frankfurt, 1652). ⁵³ Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1978). ⁵⁴ “A Letter of Intelligence from the Hague, 20 Junii, 1653,” A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, Volume 1, 1638–1653, ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1742). ⁵⁵ “ . . . d’un nommé Miltonius qui s’est rendu plus infâme par ses dangereux écrits,” qtd. in Robertson, “Milton’s Fame on the Continent.”

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military, political, and economic sense. “All Princes now in Europe made address, / By their Embassadours to his Highness [i.e., Cromwell],” one Royalist poet wrote, disapprovingly.⁵⁶ In the second half of the seventeenth century, England would become the leading economic and naval power of Europe. The middle of the seventeenth century, the years of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, served as an essential hinge between a period of English isolation and the growth of England as a force in European politics. It was easy to see how contemporaries could come to believe, as Andrew Marvell wrote, that Cromwell had “once more joined us to the continent.”⁵⁷ From within the offices of the Council of State, Milton was able to observe this process in action.⁵⁸ And through his polemical writing, Milton’s own reception was conjoined to the wider arc of English history and capitalist development.

The Restoration and Europe When the monarchy was restored in 1660, the Crown and its supporters attempted to create the illusion of an unbroken continuity between the reign of Charles I and that of his son. Through the Act of Oblivion, they sought to draw a veil over nearly two decades of English history. In some respects, the Restoration really did mark an uneasy return to older modes of power. But many of the innovations of the Interregnum could not be undone. Older political forms and property relations, in particular, could not be reestablished. The Restoration parliament moved quickly to confirm the abolition of the remaining feudal tenures and the institutions associated with them such as the Court of Wards, a reform that William Blackstone thought was “a greater acquisition to the civil property of this Kingdom than even Magna Carta itself.”⁵⁹ Instead trying to “live off his own,” the monarch was to be funded by regular taxes, a mode of financing that made his dependence on ⁵⁶ The British Library, Add MS 34363, George Cartwright, The Brittish Rebellion in Heroick Vers, f. 89. ⁵⁷ Andrew Marvell, “A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector,” The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (Harlow: Longman, 2003), 172. ⁵⁸ Rosanna Cox, “ ‘The mountains are in labour, only mice are born’: Milton and Republican Diplomacy,” Renaissance Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2010), 420–36. ⁵⁹ Blackstone continued, “that only pruned the luxuriances that had grown out of the military tenures, and thereby preserved them in vigour; but the statute of King Charles extirpated the whole, and demolished both root and branches,” qtd. in John R. Commons, Legal Foundations of Capitalism (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 220.

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private subjects clear. In addition, trade retained its political centrality. Charles II quickly perceived that he could not afford to ignore the commercial questions that had been so important to Commonwealth and Protectorate policy. As Blair Hoxby writes, Charles “cultivated an ideal of noblesse that was compatible with merchandizing.”⁶⁰ The Navigation Act was confirmed in a revised form, signaling the continuation of Interregnum commercial policy. Milton’s work, life, and reputation were, of course, intimately affected by the politics of the Restoration. As one of the best-known supporters of the execution of Charles, the Restoration made him an outcast, subject to social opprobrium and, for a time, in personal danger. In the minds of his contemporaries, he remained closely associated with the revolutionary government. The pall this association initially cast on Milton’s reputation in England is well known and much studied; as Sharon Achinstein writes, “in the Restoration, Milton’s name was synonymous with rebellion.”⁶¹ At the same time, however, there were hints of a different perspective. For anyone discontented with the Restoration, Milton’s connection to the revolutionary regime could be a source of fascination or a potent political symbol. The circle of people who found reason to complain of aspects of Restoration policy was broader than might at first appear, especially after 1667, the year of the English defeat in the Second Dutch War, when the incompetence of the administration led many to reflect back on Cromwell’s record of naval victories. Even a devoted, if entirely self-interested, servant of the government such as Samuel Pepys could muse darkly on the incompatibility of commerce and monarchy, reflecting on “the unsafe condition of a bank under a monarch.”⁶² To an extent, then, the immediate reception of Milton’s work was affected by his association with a commercial, imperialistic regime, his own opposition to such policies notwithstanding. This was at least as true of Milton’s international as his national reputation. As Jason Peacey writes, it was becoming clear that “English domestic politics was inextricably bound up with European affairs, and that Milton’s work could be used to explicate

⁶⁰ Blair Hoxby, “The Government of Trade: Commerce, Politics, and the Courtly Art of the Restoration,” ELH, Vol. 66, No. 3 (1999), 591–627. ⁶¹ Sharon Achinstein, “Milton’s Spectre in the Restoration: Marvell, Dryden, and Literary Enthusiasm,” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 1 (1996), 1–29. ⁶² Pepys, Diary, 8/17/1666.

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Whig policies both at home and abroad.”⁶³ Whether he wished it to be or not, by the Restoration, Milton’s reputation as a writer was closely bound up with both the domestic and foreign aspects of English policy. Milton’s late writings offer a glimpse of what it might mean for English writers to work in this milieu, in which a capitalist England was taking a new role on the world stage. Milton’s post-Restoration poems are, of course, closely concerned with domestic problems—above all, the aftermath of revolution and “the experience of defeat.” Perhaps more subtly, scholars have shown that they are concerned with England’s turn outward as a colonial empire.⁶⁴ They also, however, reflect the position of an England, and an English literary culture, newly poised to enter the European arena. Milton’s final two major works, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, are the compositions of a writer returning to familiar problems of literary circulation, but within a changed environment. Paradise Regained is, among other things, a meditation on authorship, with implications for the history of the vernacular. The idea of imitatio Christi admittedly does not usually extend to questions of authorship and publication. Yet in the person of Jesus, Milton depicts a figure with suggestive parallels to the modern writer. Rather than selecting a more overtly dramatic incident, Milton describes Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness, a period in which he retreats from the world, encounters Satan in an intellectual combat whose conclusion is foregone, and is finally ready to emerge and reveal his nature to the world, inaugurating the rise of Christianity.⁶⁵ It is a structure that places the crucial emphasis on the rise of a new order of knowledge, rather than the concrete possibility of salvation. It is not difficult to discern connections between this episode and the work of the writer. For Jesus, as for literary writers, a period of solitary labor and reflection forms the basis for public revelation and

⁶³ Jason Peacey, “Miltonic Texts and European Politics, 1674–1672,” in Hoxby and Coiro, Milton in the Long Restoration, 397–413. ⁶⁴ David Armitage, “John Milton: Poet Against Empire,” in David Armitage et al., eds., Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 206–25; John Martin Evans, Milton’s Imperial Epic: Paradise Lost and the Discourse of Colonialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); more recently, Charlotte Sussman, Peopling the World: Representing Human Mobility from Milton to Malthus (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). ⁶⁵ Douglas Lanier has argued that the persistent themes of secrecy and openness, of privacy and public revelation, mirror the questions of authorship and print with which Milton was grappling, “ ‘Unmarkt, Unknown’: Paradise Regained and the Return of the Expressed,” Criticism, Vol. 37, No. 2 (1995), 187–212.

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influence.⁶⁶ In addition, at a few points in the epic, Milton’s language underscores the connection between the predicament of Jesus and that of the writer, as when Jesus begins his seclusion by wondering how he should “publish his Godlike office now mature.” This formulation, as Patricia Taylor points out, encourages the reader to consider the analogy between Miltonic authorship and Jesus’s divine calling.⁶⁷ In considering the authority and publicity of the author, Milton naturally turns to the vernacular. Paradise Regained was, of course, a vernacular work. Perhaps more than any of Milton’s other works, it cultivated a comparatively simple English style, turning away from the classicism of diction and syntax that marked his other compositions. It is not surprising, then, that Milton imagines Jesus as a vernacular author of a sort. Classical knowledge and the classical tradition are among Satan’s temptations, which Jesus, of course, rejects like the others.⁶⁸ The Hebrew Bible, he suggests, is a superior source of knowledge—and a more valuable form of literature—than anything the Greeks or Romans could produce: Or if I would delight my private hours With Music or with Poem, where so soon As in our native Language can I find That solace? (4.331–4)

His rejection of the temptation of classical learning clearly sets up an antithesis between religion and the secular world, favoring the former at the expense of the latter. But that is not all it does. Hebrew, in Jesus’s lines, is not simply the language of God. It is, in addition, the vernacular, the national language set in opposition to a classical literary tradition and the classical empires within which it circulated. Hebrew, by contrast, is “our native language,” whose plural pronoun ties Jesus to a community of speakers. ⁶⁶ As David Loewenstein argues, Jesus does not represent a “complete retreat from the world” but rather “the inward-oriented saint remains a prophetic figure” whose influence is predicated on his apparent withdrawal, Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 259. ⁶⁷ Patricia R. Taylor, “The Son as Collaborator in Paradise Regained,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Vol. 51, No. 1 (2011), 181–97. ⁶⁸ Leo Braudy writes, “Milton makes the Gospel Jesus, who evades fame, into the new model for human nature in general and for the writer in particular, in whose books the theatrical orations of the classical past can be morally overturned,” The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 360.

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In writing Of Reformation three decades prior, Milton had given Hebrew as an example of a language in which men wrote for their own nations in “the mother dialect.” In that text, he had explicitly ruled out the idea that his English writings might be read abroad. In returning to the same theme, is the possibility still foreclosed? Milton does not say, but there are reasons to suspect it is not. In an irony of which Milton would have been well aware, the language Jesus endorses is not the one in which his teachings circulated.⁶⁹ But this fact only underscores the new fate of vernacular literature— that is, translation. If Jesus’s speeches originate in one language, with one people, this specificity is no obstacle to their dissemination. Jesus’s role is “to guide Nations in the way of truth / By saving Doctrine” (2.473–4). The reception of Jesus, and of the Bible, exemplifies how the literary production of one vernacular, one nation, can become the common property of nations in the plural. Given the key importance of biblical translation to Protestant religion, it is perhaps not surprising that for Milton it would serve as the most powerful example of literary transmission into and across vernaculars. Scattered across languages, its message nevertheless remains intact. As Milton wrote in his final publication, the tract Of True Religion (1673), the Church has translated the Bible into English, so “all sorts and degrees of men, not understanding the Original, may read it in their Mother Tongue.”⁷⁰ In the modern literary system, the fate of the Bible epitomized, on the grandest level, the fate of all books.⁷¹ As English entered the European literary system, English writers, too, might hope for an international reputation that went through the vernacular, rather than circumventing it. Yet the international character of the literary system raised problems as well as offering opportunities. As European literature embraced a vernacular model of literary production in the second half of the seventeenth century at the expense of Latin culture, the connections binding literature to particular polities only became stronger. The international sphere was not a republic of letters: it was, rather, many republics, or many kingdoms, with their own distinctive interests. The growth of an international canon was therefore ⁶⁹ Though from the context, Jesus is clearly referring to Hebrew, it is worth remembering that the New Testament is written in Koine Greek. Milton’s old antagonist Salmasius was known, in part, for his debate with Daniel Heinsius on whether the New Testament’s Koine Greek constituted a language, that is, the property of a people and a nation, or merely a dialect, that is, the local variant of an imperial lingua franca. ⁷⁰ Milton, Complete Prose Works, 8.434. ⁷¹ See Nigel Smith, “Retranslating the Bible in the English Revolution,” in Kevil Kileen et al., eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c.1530–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 98–112.

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marked by stark differences of interpretation and reception. England, and English, entered European culture, but greater contact could mean greater enmity, not greater amity. This aspect of Milton’s Restoration context also makes its way into his writing. It is perhaps most readily apparent in Samson Agonistes which, as Linda Gregerson has argued, represents a model of tragedy that brings the form of the nation, and nations in the plural, to the fore. In Gregerson’s account, Samson Agonistes is “the tragedy of two nations fighting over a single geographic place,” and thus a work that highlights the potential for conflict inherent in the universal claims of religion, on the one hand, and the necessary particularity of human communities, on the other.⁷² For Gregerson, Milton’s penetrating investigation of rival groups takes the ongoing conflicts between different factions in the wake of the English Revolution as its primary reference. This is no doubt part of the context for Milton’s tragedy—yet the problem of rival nations obviously has implications that extend outside of domestic history, touching on international relations and England’s role in Europe. For literature, too, the existence of rival nations poses a distinctive set of problems. In an oft-cited passage, Dalila says, Fame if not double-fac’t is double-mouth’d, And with contrary blast proclaims most deeds, On both his wings, one black, th’ other white, Bears greatest names in his wild aerie flight. (971–4)

Fame, then, will interpret Dalila’s actions in a very different way than Samson does. And literature, as always, will be one of the agents of this fame: her story will be “sung at solemn festivals.” In this line, Dalila’s speech evokes a parallel moment in Paradise Lost. While waiting for Satan’s return from Paradise some of the fallen angels pass time singing “Their own Heroic deeds and hapless fall / By doom of Battle”—that is, the story of the war in Heaven, reimagined as an oral epic with the devils as heroes.⁷³ In both cases, Milton imagines a narrative within a narrative, a counter-literature told from the perspective of the losing side. Dalila, needless to say, is no more reliable a character than the fallen angels. Yet Milton does not imply that her

⁷² Linda Gregerson, “Milton and the Tragedy of Nations,” PMLA, Vol. 129, No. 4 (2014), 672–87. ⁷³ John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd edition (London: Longman, 1998), 2.549–50.

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view of fame is mistaken. Among enemy nations and warring religions, as among angels and devils, fame is indeed double-mouthed. Her mistake, rather, lies in making a relativistic equation between the variability of fame and an underlying instability of values. What response should we take to a fame that is so variable and partial? The answer, Milton implies in Samson Agonistes, is simply to ignore human fame in favor of divine judgment. Yet for writers, this task is not so simple as it might seem. Writers work within a public world. If that world is structured by divisions, if reputation inevitably varies by people and by region, that fact cannot help but be crucial for literary history. Milton, that is, writes in a milieu in which he anticipates and preemptively reacts to opposition and incomprehension. In part, the alien environment he expects his writing to encounter is the world of Restoration England. But it is also, for all writers who seek to enter the European canon, the intricately partitioned world outside the domestic sphere. For Milton, who had far more experience of this world—and its potential for hostility—than most of his contemporaries, this is one reason the nation becomes so salient a theme for reflecting on literary history and literary fame in his two final verse compositions. In different ways, then, both of Milton’s final works reflect on the problem of literary reception within an international arena. Writing in the second half of the seventeenth century, Milton saw that it was not possible to sever literary history from its relationship to particular nations, as he had done from his earliest writing. But what his own experience had led him to intuit was that, even for England, the national need not be the insular: rather, it could be the privileged pathway to the international. Of course, in the 1670s this possibility could be glimpsed only dimly. Yet if there was a long way to go before English authors could expect immediate translation and reception in neighboring vernaculars, the situation was already considerably different from what it had been when Milton published his first poem in Shakespeare’s second folio.

Europe and Beyond In the decades following his death, Milton became a canonical author in England. “The British Muse,” the poet Richard Daniel wrote in 1706, would launch English literature with Chaucer, before inspiring “An Eden lost and won, A Fairy Queen / A Moor to Doubts betray’d, and lofty Cataline.”⁷⁴ ⁷⁴ Richard Daniel, The British Warrior, a Poem. In a Letter to his Excellency the Lord Cutts, occasion’d by the late glorious Success of her Majesty’s Arms (London, 1706).

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Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson—a version of the Renaissance canon that persists to this day. As Daniel’s formulation suggests, Milton’s place in that illustrious company was largely the result of Paradise Lost. By importing the character of the classical epic into a national idiom, Paradise Lost simultaneously looked backward to a literary sphere united by a single language, and forward to an era in which Europe was divided into distinct languages and polities. Milton, living through most of the seventeenth century, encapsulated the changing position of English literature within his period. John Denham, the author of the famous poem “Cooper’s Hill,” is said to have entered parliament with sheets of the newly published Paradise Lost in his hands, saying that it was “part of the Noblest Poem that was ever wrote in Any Language, or Any Age”—a formulation that simultaneously suggests growing confidence and residual insecurity about the place of English literature among the ancient and modern languages. Writing on the border of two eras, Paradise Lost marked Milton as at once a “Renaissance” and an “early modern” poet. As Jack Lynch has remarked, it was precisely the transitional character of Paradise Lost that ensured its “classic status” within a few decades of Milton’s death, perhaps prior to any other English literary work.⁷⁵ By the time Addison wrote his influential series of articles on Paradise Lost, it was clear that Milton had achieved the literary status in English to which he had always aspired. But to his early English admirers, Milton’s fame in Europe was at least as impressive as his reputation in England. Almost all of his early biographies placed special emphasis on this aspect of Milton’s legacy. “To conclude,” Anthony Wood wrote in the final sentence of his life of Milton, “he was more admired abroad, and by Foreigners, than at home.”⁷⁶ And again, according to John Toland, he was “esteem’d indeed at home, but much more honor’d abroad,” while the year after his death, his nephew Edward Phillips claimed, “his Fame is sufficiently known to all the Learned of Europe.”⁷⁷ The perception that Milton was, if anything, more famous on the Continent than in his native country, while inaccurate, is revealing. English critics and biographers knew they were writing in a new environment, in which the ultimate mark of literary success in the national context ⁷⁵ Jack Lynch, “Betwixt Two Ages Cast: Milton, Johnson, and the English Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 61, No. 3 (2000), 397–413. ⁷⁶ Helen Darbishire, The Early Lives of John Milton (London: Constable, 1932), 48. ⁷⁷ John Toland, in Darbishire, Early Lives, 193. See also Edward Phillips, Theatrum Poetarum (London, 1675), 113.

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was success abroad. It was not until the early eighteenth century that Milton’s reputation as a poet would truly penetrate Europe with Paradise Lost. Following Haak’s initial translation of Book I, it would appear in published versions in German, Latin, French, and Italian. The reversal of the flow of poetry and poetic reputations from England to Italy rather than in the opposite direction began with Paradise Lost.⁷⁸ Yet once it did so, the testimony was brilliant enough. Voltaire, writing in English in 1727, made his admiration plain in an extended appreciation: Milton had an “undisputable Claim to the unanimous Admiration of all Mankind,” he concluded. For Voltaire, Milton plainly belonged to European letters, the property not of the English but of “mankind.”⁷⁹ Needless to say, Milton’s writing was a beneficiary of the new dissemination of English literature abroad rather than its cause. If his work reached a European audience early and regularly, it was not just because of the special quality of his writing, but because his life, work, and reputation were so closely intertwined with the forces that brought English into global circulation. Nevertheless, beginning in the Restoration, he was not the only English-language writer who might have anticipated a European reception. Scientists and philosophers, following in the path broken by Bacon’s work, began to excite interest abroad. Because Robert Boyle wrote in English rather than Latin, he became one of the most widely translated scientists of the age; as John Evelyn remarked, he had “so universal an esteeme in Foraine parts” that visitors to England constantly sought him out.⁸⁰ Toward the end of the century, in the 1690s, Locke’s works began to be translated and published abroad within a few years of their initial English publication. Locke found a number of willing translators into French, in particular: his Two Treatises on Government appeared in 1689 in English, and the second treatise appeared in 1691 in French. Some Thoughts Concerning Education appeared in English in 1693, in French in 1695, and in Dutch in 1698. By the eighteenth century, English literature had a profound impact across Europe: Locke, Bacon, and Newton were among the most influential of Enlightenment authors; Addison’s Spectator went into eighteen editions ⁷⁸ George E. Dorris, “Paolo Rolli and the First Italian Translation of Paradise Lost,” Italica, Vol. 42, No. 2 (1965), 213–25. Dorris focuses on the first published edition of Paradise Lost in Italian translation in 1735, but notes that the work had inspired at least three partial manuscript translations in the early eighteenth century, reflecting considerable interest in the work. ⁷⁹ Voltaire, An Essay upon the Epick Poetry of the European Nations from Homer down to Milton, qtd. in Robertson, “Milton’s Fame on the Continent,” 7. ⁸⁰ John Evelyn, qtd. in R.E.W. Maddison, “Studies in the Life of Robert Boyle,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 11, No. 1 (1954), 38–53.

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in translation in the Netherlands, as well as fourteen in France and four in German-speaking lands.⁸¹ Robinson Crusoe, one of the best-selling novels of the eighteenth century, was translated into French, German, and Dutch within two years of its publication, and into Italian, Danish, and Swedish by the middle of the century.⁸² At the end of the nineteenth century, it had been published in at least 110 translated editions. At the same time, an older English canon was discovered by Europe; the impact of Shakespeare on German literature, in particular, is well known. English had been added to the small number of European languages that together formed, for most educated European men, their modern literary canon. Writers working in English could expect that, if they achieved sufficient celebrity in their own language, they might also become famous in other tongues. This transition was, as I have argued throughout, inseparable from the political and linguistic organization of Europe, including England. From the Renaissance onward, Europe became ever more connected by trade, and yet at the same time, divided more sharply into territorial states. The modern literary system was predicated on both European contact and European division. But it was only over the course of the seventeenth century that England’s ascent to become the leading economic power of Europe as the pioneer of capitalism, as well as an imperial power, led it to play a role in the European milieu. Ultimately, the spread of English through colonialism to the Americas, India, and elsewhere ensured that its literature would be read not only in Europe but around the globe. Writing in praise of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat captured the interlinked nature of English imperialism and its literary history. London, he wrote, “is the head of a mighty Empire, the greatest that ever commanded the Ocean: It is composed of Gentlemen, as well as Traders: It has a large intercourse with all the Earth: It is, as the Poets describe their House of Fame, a City, where all the noises and business of the world do meet.”⁸³ For writers, the growth of England’s “empire,” its crucial role in the “business of the world,” influenced their works’ dissemination and their reception. For readers—and scholars—it still shapes what we read and study.

⁸¹ Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, “The Spectator, or, The Metamorphoses of the Periodical: A Study in Cultural Translation,” in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, 142–61. ⁸² Pat Rogers, Robinson Crusoe (London and Boston: George Allen and Unwin, 1979). ⁸³ Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1959), 88.

Conclusion The Arc of Change

The formation of a national market in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was both predicated on and entailed a revolution of communications, which altered the patterns of circulation, form, and character of English writing. Many aspects of the literature of early modern England, in turn, developed in response to these changes in the use and dissemination of texts. Taken together, these two simple assertions outline the argument of this book, while investigations of their implications make up its substance. In taking this approach, I have sought to make use of the now considerable findings of book and textual history, as well as to honor the spirit of empiricism that drives that subfield—even if I have used it for what some practitioners will surely see as unorthodox purposes. Above all, however, I have attempted to write a Marxist literary study that considers textual history, rather than ideology, as an essential conjuncture between capitalism and literature. This is not to deny that the analysis of ideology can be highly illuminating for the study of literature. The social and political orientation of writers shapes their work deeply, and it is a major part of why we find literature interesting to read, even if we read it across the chasms opened by the passage of centuries. But readings of the ideology of a literary work can become readings of a literary work as ideology—the literary work as defined solely by its political coordinates. This, it goes without saying, is a mistake; “literature,” as Terry Eagleton writes, “is not just some form of documentary access to ideology.”¹ Paradoxically, the more crudely materialist perspective I have adopted in drawing connections between a national market and a national sphere of textual circulation may, in the end, leave greater scope for literary interpretation than some overtly intellectual modes of analysis. Many of the

¹ Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (New York: Verso, 1976), 185. Writing at the Origin of Capitalism: Literary Circulation and Social Change in Early Modern England. Julianne Werlin, Oxford University Press. © Julianne Werlin 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198869467.003.0007

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fundamental questions that underlie the material history of texts, after all, have an evident bearing on the history of style and form, such as who writes, who reads, in what circumstances, and why. Knowing whether a particular genre circulated among tradesmen or noblemen—or whether it was sold on an open market where it might be purchased by either—is of course essential to analyzing its formal development. More than that, in such cases the question of textual circulation can serve as the most direct point of connection between the economy, on the one hand, and literary style, on the other. It was with this understanding of the social basis of literature in mind that I sought to write a literary history grounded in the production and circulation of writing across society as a whole, not in the political content of individual works. Taken together, the case studies in this book, then, make an argument for the seventeenth century as an era of transition in the style and form of literature, as well as its material history. Two subjects, in particular, occupy many of its pages. The first is the emergence of a simple, practical, descriptive English prose. It was through the quotidian character of practical writing within a market society that new conventions of prose emerged— and more fundamentally, that prose triumphed over verse to move to the heart of literary history. A basic English prose, concerned with precise description and the forms of production and consumption that structure daily life, developed in texts at the threshold of literary forms and forms of documentation. The second is the rise of a new kind of literary value, mediated by the literary market, which placed a theoretically vast, yet in practice highly circumscribed, power in the hands of the literary consumer. The slow attenuation of rival sites of literary circulation, including local literary cultures and aristocratic coterie writing, and the erosion of their codes of composition and evaluation, was one consequence. Both of these aspects of early modern writing were fundamental to the rise of a capitalist literary culture, and for that reason, both can be traced into our own present. English literature has, of course, not stood still in the centuries following. It is no longer confined to one nation or even one empire. Today, as a result of England’s colonial legacy and America’s role in global capitalism, a great deal of English-language literature is remote, literally as well as metaphorically, from its early modern point of origin. Yet a plain prose on quotidian themes—production and reproduction—is still at the center of literary culture. Literary sentence length has only shortened in each successive century; the endless, elegant Renaissance period has truly

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vanished.² Contemporary bestsellers still often focus on work or domestic relationships, the stuff of ordinary life, described in equally commonplace prose—although the increasing prominence of genre fiction may signal yet another transformation.³ Above all, the continuities between literary style and the modes of production through which literature is published and circulated are more obvious than ever. No one seeks to hide the entanglement of cultural commodities and commerce—on the contrary, a vast industry of publicists and journalists constantly call attention to it. In a moment in which capitalism and media are so obviously connected, examining the literature of early modern England reveals a culture that is both familiar and strange. The era shows that the contemporary social system, the economy and culture of capitalism, has a long history and a deep logic. But it also suggests that it is neither inevitable nor immutable.

² Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad, Register, Genre, and Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 151–6. ³ Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers, The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016).

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Index For the benefit of digital users, table entries that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. absolutism 102–4 aesthetics 5–6, 71–3, 80, 100–2; see also style accounting 17, 21–8, 41, 105–28, 135 Adorno, Theodor 54, 75–6 agriculture 21–2, 60–2, 68, 113–14, 118–19, 122 almanacs 115–16, 125–6 Ambrose, Isaac 116–17 Amsterdam 18, 110; see also Netherlands Anderson, Benedict 13, 62, 136 Anderson, Perry 104 antiquity 71–2, 135–6, 151 aristocracy 9–10, 15–16, 24–5, 31–2, 34–5, 55–6, 63–6, 72, 80, 82–3, 93–104, 114, 122–3, 159 Assheton, Nicholas 125 audiences 50–71, 75–6, 96–7, 101, 132, 134, 137–8, 146–7, 156 Auerbach, Erich 72n.59, 87n.27 Bacon, Francis 43–50, 140–2, 144–5, 156–7 ballads 14, 51–79, 99–100; see also broadsides banking 108–12, 128–9, 149 Barker, Robert 90 Beale, Robert 40–1 Beadle, John 114 Bible 28–9, 88–91, 151–2 biography, see life writing black-letter type 52–3, 55–8; see also ballads, broadsides books 1–7, 15–16, 38–9, 51, 55–6, 59, 62, 80–95, 97–100, 137, 152 bourgeoisie 15, 17, 23, 43, 50, 74–5, 93, 102–4, 106–7, 114, 127–8 Boyle, Robert 156 Brenner, Robert 8n.19, 82n.7, 132n.4, 143n.41

broadsides 3, 5, 14, 52–8, 62, 75–6; see also ballads Britain, see England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales British Empire, see colonialism Burnet, Gilbert 44–5 business 13, 31–2, 35–7, 41, 43–6, 48–50, 108–9 Butter, Nathaniel 46–7 Cambridge 116–17 canon 18–19, 48–9, 93–4, 103–4, 136–40, 152–5 capitalist transition 1–8, 26, 28, 107–8, 111–12 Carew, Thomas 80, 94–7, 100 Caxton, William 12, 32–3, 44–5 censorship 83–93; see also regulation Cervantes, Miguel de 136–7 character books 46–9 Chamberlain, John 46–7 Charles I 16–17, 80–104, 146–7; see also Personal Rule, revolution:English Charles II 97, 148–54; see also Restoration Chaucer, Geoffrey 25–9, 44–5, 154–5 cheap print 31–2, 52–4, 75; see also ballads, broadsides, print Chettle, Henry 59 Child, Josiah 113 circulation (textual) 1–7, 11–15, 17–20, 27–9, 34–5, 68, 81–2, 84–5, 93–6, 130–3, 136–9, 144–5, 150–2, 158–60 coterie 93–103; see also circulation: manuscript manuscript 6, 21–2, 81–2, 93–5 Civil War, see revolution:English class 2–3, 15, 24–5, 33–6, 55–6, 71–5, 84–6, 97–8, 104, 119–20; see also aristocracy, bourgeoisie, laborers Colchester 33–4

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colonialism 7, 10–11, 20–1, 34–5, 77, 96–7, 130, 135–6, 144, 149–50, 157 commodities 3, 5–6, 12–15, 18–19, 51–63, 68, 81–3, 92, 94, 103–4, 120–4, 140, 160; see also consumption, trade Commonwealth and Protectorate 142–9 companies 73–4, 91–2 Stationers’ 88–92 consumption 51–2, 54–6, 59–61, 63, 65–6, 68–73, 79, 83–5, 101, 105, 121–2, 127–9, 159 literary 3, 5, 11–12, 15–16, 59, 74–7, 79, 98, 101, 103–4, 159 by women 69–71 Cornwall 7–8 countryside 14, 59–62 court 16, 80–7, 90, 93–8, 102–4 courtly literature 48–9, 80–104 credit 71, 108–9, 112–14, 116–17, 119–20, 124–5, 128–9; see also debt Croll, Morris 48–9 Cromwell, Oliver 144, 147–9; see also Commonwealth and Protectorate Daniel, Richard 154–5 Daniel, Samuel 31–2 Davenant, William 80, 96–8, 100 Day, Angel 43 debt 30–1, 71, 112–13, 118–20, 124–5, 128–9; see also credit decorum 54–5, 71–2, 80–3, 119–20 Denham, John 154–5 Dering, Edmund 117–18 dialects 12–13, 24–5, 34–5, 133, 139–40, 152; see also English language diaries 17, 46–7, 105–29; see also life writing Drake, William 117–18 drama 19, 38–9, 46–7, 50, 52–4, 73–4, 76–7, 80, 95–7, 122, 137–8, 142 comedic 71–3, 121 tragic 71–2, 74–5, 153 Drayton, Michael 93–4 Dugard, William 145–6 Duppa, Brian 84–5 Dürer, Albrecht 110–11 Dury, John 145–7 Eagleton, Terry 102–4, 158 economy 7–12, 14, 16–20, 22, 26, 30, 35, 43, 51–5, 60–1, 77, 83–93, 101, 103–19, 128–35, 139–40, 144, 158–60

education 26, 32–3, 114; see also literacy Elias, Norbert 102 enclosure 8–9 English language 20–9, 34–7, 44–9, 115–16, 130–2, 134–43, 146–7, 152, 155–7, 159–60 English Revolution, see revolution:English Erasmus, Desiderius 110–11, 139 essay 13, 46–50, 140–1 Europe 4, 7–11, 16–20, 28–9, 31–2, 37, 42, 44–6, 54, 61–2, 65–6, 80, 87, 89, 108–14, 130–3, 136–57; see also France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands Evelyn, John 156 Eyre, Adam 117–18 fairs 13–14, 61, 140–1 fame, see reputation Fielding, Henry 72 Fletcher, John 72 Florence 108, 110, 135; see also Italy France 10–11, 45–7, 54, 59–60, 80, 102–4, 115–16, 156–7 French 24–30, 32–5, 45–6, 130–1, 134–6, 140–2, 146, 155–7 Fumerton, Patricia 14, 55–6, 63 genre 12–13, 23, 47–50, 54–5, 71–2, 74–5, 130, 140–1, 158–9; see also ballads, character books, diaries, drama, essay, letter writing, life writing, masques, news, notetaking, novel, poetry, prose, romance German 28–9, 111–12, 134–5, 140–2, 146, 155–7 Germany 10–11 grammar 13, 22–4, 27–8, 35–42, 44–5; see also punctuation, sentences, spelling Guillory, John 13, 42–3 Haak, Theodore 146, 155–6 Hall, Joseph 46–9, 140–2 Hartlib, Samuel 144–6 Harvey, Gabriel 137 Hebrew 151–2 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 25, 74–5 Herrick, Robert 94–5 Hill, Christopher 82n.7, 86n.22, 89–90, 146–7 Hobbes, Thomas 19 humanism 12, 20–1, 32–3, 35–6, 71–2

 ideology 5–7, 16, 20–2, 41, 43–4, 50, 77–9, 81–2, 84, 90–2, 94, 104, 127, 132, 158 improvement 8–9 individualism 15, 17, 106–9, 114, 118–29 Industrial Revolution, see revolution: Industrial Inflation 8–9; see also prices Information 12, 18, 135, 144–6 economic 5, 18, 21–2 Ireland 7–8, 34–5, 103 Italian 130–1, 134–6, 140–2, 155–7 Italy 108–13, 134–5, 155–6; see also Florence, Venice Jackson, James 122–3 James VI & I 84–5, 94–5, 121, 140–1 Johnson, Samuel 103–4 Jonson, Ben 39–40, 49–50, 80, 84–5, 95–8, 121–2, 154–5 journals, see diaries judgment (literary) 93–104; see also taste labor 5, 11–12, 28, 39–40, 51, 54–5, 63–79, 113–14, 118–19, 126–9, 159–60 laborers 10, 14, 26, 34–5, 51–2, 54–9, 63–79, 82–3, 98, 105, 113–16, 118–19, 144 agricultural 51 domestic 70–1, 74–5, 118–19, 124–5 women 66, 70–3; see also laborers: domestic Lambard, William 38–40 Latin 24–8, 30, 32–3, 35–6, 132, 139–44, 146–53, 155–6; see also vernacularization Laud, William 83–5, 91–2 law 13–14, 88–9, 91–2, 101 law courts 27–8, 50, 91–2, 108, 113, 117–18, 148–9; see also Star Chamber leisure 25, 64–5, 67, 77–8 letter writing 13, 21–2, 26–8, 33, 35, 38–41, 43, 46–50, 132 life writing 106–11, 155–6; see also diaries literacy 2–3, 9–10, 12–13, 20–2, 24–6, 28–43, 46–51, 71–2, 119–20; see also education Locke, John 16–17, 156–7 London 3, 7–8, 12–13, 18, 26–8, 31–2, 34–5, 50, 52–4, 59–60, 68, 73, 91–2, 97–8, 103–4, 121–2, 137–9, 157 luxuries 51–2, 60–1, 86–7

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manuscripts 1, 3–4, 6–8, 25, 38–40, 48–9, 81–2, 93–5, 106–7, 118, 146; see also circulation:manuscript markets 2–3, 6–18, 20, 22, 27–8, 45–6, 50–7, 59–63, 68, 70–1, 79, 83–93, 103–4, 111–14, 119, 121–2, 128–9, 144, 158–9; see also trade fairs 13–14, 61, 140–1 literary 16, 20, 35–6, 46, 54, 56–7, 59–63, 66–8, 71–2, 75–80, 83–104, 127–8, 137, 143–4, 158–9 Marvell, Andrew 147–8 Marx, Karl 10–11, 21–2, 78–9, 126–7, 131–2 Marxist theory 1–7, 20, 28, 30, 81–2, 107–8, 113–14, 128–9, 158 McShane, Angela 55–8, 75–6 merchants 5, 10–11, 18, 21–2, 26–8, 31–3, 43, 61–2, 85–6, 99–100, 102–3, 108–10, 113–14, 123–4, 140, 143–5, 157 Milton, John 12, 18–19, 90–2, 131–3, 136–42, 148–57 Middle Ages 7–9, 20, 23–8, 66–7, 71–2, 108, 134–5 monarchy 9–10, 16, 34–5, 66, 80, 93–104, 134–6, 148–9; see also Charles I; Charles II; Cromwell, Oliver; James I; monopolies; privileges, prerogative (royal) money 51, 58–9, 68, 90, 99–100, 105–29 monopolies 84–92, 97, 101–2 Montaigne, Michel de 47–8 Mordaunt, Elizabeth 116–17 Moretti, Franco 17, 23, 139 Mun, Thomas 85–6 Muldrew, Craig 112–13, 128–9 names (proper) 125–8 Navigation Act (1651) 143–6, 148–9 Netherlands 12–14, 59–60, 110–11, 115–16, 120, 149, 156–7 News 13, 46–9, 131, 135 Newton, Isaac 156–7 notetaking 17, 21–3, 38–41, 105, 108–11, 117–19, 121–3, 125–6 novel 46, 50, 72, 74–5, 106–7, 127–8, 136, 156–7 orality 37–8, 42–3, 51–4, 58 Oxfordshire 34–5

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Palmer, Thomas 118–19 pamphlets 38–9, 48–9, 59, 89, 139–40, 145–6 paper 1, 4, 20, 89, 97 paperwork 13, 17, 22–3, 26, 32–6, 39–50, 106–8, 110–11, 119, 124–5, 127, 129, 159 paratext 96–8 Parker, Martin 63–4, 69–70, 78–9 Parliament 81, 85–7, 92, 103, 143–4, 148–9, 154–5 Paris 138–41; see also France patronage 80, 84–5, 96–8, 100, 103–4 peasants 26, 61–2, 71–2, 98 peddlers 59, 61–2 Pell, John 145–6 Pepys, Samuel 55–6, 105, 123–5, 149 Personal Rule 80–3, 86–7, 89–103; see also Charles I, revolution: English Petrarch, Francesco 134–7 Phayer, Thomas 32–3 plain style 13, 23, 42–6, 48–50; see also style plays, see drama poetics 80, 95, 101–2, 138–9 poetry 12–13, 24–5, 46–7, 56, 80–1, 93, 96, 100, 103–4, 137–9, 155–6; see also ballads poets 12–13, 16, 25, 55–6, 80, 82–3, 93–104, 132, 145–8, 154–6 popular culture 14, 52–6, 63, 75–9 population 7, 26 Porter, Endymion 89, 96–8 porters 73–4, 78–9 Pory, John 46–7 poverty 16–17, 33–4, 56, 64–5, 73, 112–14, 118–19 prerogative (royal) 16, 81, 83–93, 103 prices 3, 8–9, 17, 58–60, 68, 83–4, 88–9, 120, 122–4 print 3–4, 13–14, 18, 20, 28–30, 38–9, 46–9, 52–60, 67, 71–2, 75–6, 81–97, 100, 121, 136–7 printers 28–9, 56–7, 90–2, 145–6 privileges 84–8, 97, 101–2 profit 5–6, 8–10, 31–2, 52, 56–9, 75–6, 84, 114 property 3, 22, 32–5, 42–3, 45–6, 77, 87, 125, 148–9, 152 literary 87–8, 155–6 prose 12–13, 20–3, 35–50, 72, 105, 107–10, 119–28, 133, 139–41, 159–60; see also diaries, essay, letter writing, life writing, news, notetaking, novel, plain style, vernacularization

Protestantism 20–2, 28–30, 78–9, 116–17, 142–3, 152; see also religion Prynne, William 90–1, 101–2 punctuation 28–9, 36–8, 67, 76; see also grammar, sentences, spelling Pym, John 86–7, 92 Randolph, Thomas 99–100 regulation 16, 45–6, 81, 83–93, 101–2; see also censorship religion 23–4, 28–30, 42, 56, 81–2, 84–5, 90–2, 115–16, 134, 142, 151–4; see also Protestantism rents 8–10, 30–1, 105, 113–14, 118–19 revolution 8–9, 21–2, 28, 30, 128, 158 English 16–17, 81–2, 89–91, 95–6, 101, 103, 132, 142–4, 149–50; see also Commonwealth and Protectorate Industrial 10–11, 17–18 reputation 18–19, 130–3, 135–42, 146–57 Restoration 97, 103–4, 146, 148–54, 156; see also Charles II Rogers, Richard 116–17 romance 15, 65–6, 72, 96–7, 122 Romance languages 134–7; see also French, Italian, Latin, Spanish Sanudo, Marin 109–10 satire 66, 73–4, 77–8, 99–100, 121–2, 134–5 Scotland 7–8, 16, 77, 103 Selden, John 55–6 sentences 13, 36–40, 48–9, 159–60; see also grammar, punctuation, spelling Shakespeare, William 12, 33–4, 41, 59, 65–6, 72, 137–8 Slingsby, Henry 35, 118–19 Smith, Adam 143–4 Smith, Nigel 93n.47, 142–3, 152n.71 Smith, Thomas 63–5 Smyth, Adam 17, 106–7, 115–16, 127–8 Spain 54, 59–60, 144, 146–7 Spanish 65–6, 130–1, 134–5 Sparke, Michael 90–2 spelling 13, 23–4, 27–9, 50; see also grammar, punctuation, sentences Spenser, Edmund 12, 154–5 standardization (linguistic) 12–13, 20, 22–9, 36–7, 39–40, 42–50, 133; see also plain style, prose, vernacularization

 Star Chamber 33, 91–2, 96 state formation 12, 21–2, 24–5, 42–3 Stationers’ Company, see companies: Stationers’ Stewart, Alan 17, 106–7, 116–17 style 6, 13, 16, 23, 35–46, 48–50, 56, 80, 93, 105, 119–20, 127–8, 151, 158–60; see also aesthetics, plain style Suckling, John 80, 94–7, 99–100, 102–3 taste 15–16, 44–5, 80, 82–3, 93, 100–4; see also aesthetics, judgment (literary), style taxation 9–10, 103, 120, 124–5, 148–9 Taylor, Charles 107, 129 theaters 52, 123–4, 137–8 Thompson, E.P. 3–4, 15, 49–50 Toland, John 155 trade 5, 7–14, 17–18, 21–2, 51–2, 83–7, 89–90, 108, 111–13, 134–43, 148–9; see also markets, markets:literary routes 7, 61 trades 31–2, 66–7, 71–2, 78–9; see also companies, labor translation 22, 28–9, 32–3, 42, 47–8, 130–7, 140–7, 152, 154–7; see also vernacularization Trundle, John 66 Tuvill, Daniel 47–8

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Venice 87, 121–2; see also Italy vernacularization 12–13, 18–22, 25–30, 32–3, 35–6, 38–9, 41–2, 44–8, 107–8, 130–42, 146, 148–54; see also English language, Latin, prose, standardization: linguistic verse 23–5, 36–7, 46, 93–103, 138–9, 154; see also poetry Voltaire 155–6 Wales 7–8, 34–5, 59–61 Weber, Max 116–17 Welsh 34–5 Weckerlin, Rudolph 145–6 Williams, Raymond 5–6, 24n.10, 44n.69 Wolfe, John 46–7 women 66, 68–73, 129; see also laborers:women Wood, Anthony 155 Wood, Ellen Meiksins 9n.24, 12–13, 43–4, 63, 113–14 working people, see laborers, peasants Worsley, Benjamin 145–6 Wrightson, Keith 10n.27, 60–1 yeomen 31–2, 68, 122 Yorkshire 7–8, 34–5, 117–19