Bibliography and Textual Studies: Early Modern Authorship

Bibliography and Textual Studies: Early Modern Authorship

Session Coordinator: Stacy Erickson

Department of English, University of Iowa

308 EPB, Iowa City, IA 52242

stacy-erickson@uiowa.edu

Session I (Chair: Stacy Erickson, University of Iowa)

1. Shared Authorship: The Plays of Richard Burbage

Could an early modern actor be the author of his own plays? Certainly, if we’re thinking of William Shakespeare, or any of the other player-playwrights. But can the same be said for an actor who, as far as we know, never penned a line? I propose to address this question in the person of Richard Burbage, the most famous actor of the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men, and the preeminent sharer in both companies. Most of the extant evidence for the performance of particular roles concerns the King’s men, and Burbage acted known roles for both Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, who themselves adopt very different attitudes towards the authorship of early modern plays. For it is not, I think, the case that current criticism embraces a developmental model of authorship, at least in the special case of plays; this probably shouldn’t surprise us,

Marilyn Claire Ford 

Indiana University

marford@indiana.edu

Appropriating John Donne: The 1633 and 1635 Printed Editions of  Donne’s Poetry  

John Donne chose to circulate his verse in manuscript among confidants  rather than printing it for a mass audience. Unlike Spenser and  Jonson, Donne never sought public acclaim for his poetry, never courted  a vatic Muse, and never construed his work as founding a national tradition. Donne’s friends and familiars, not the poet himself,  established his literary canon by assiduously collecting and preserving  his verse. These privileged few avidly read, copied, and shared  Donne’s verse with others, so his poetry proliferated beyond his  primary audiences. The sheer number of manuscripts existing from this  eclectic transmission attests to the remarkable popularity of Donne’s  poetry among his contemporaries. John Marriot, the first publisher to capitalize on Donne’s cultural status, exploits the matrix of coterie  poetry to print Poems, By J. D. with Elegies on the Authors Death in  1633. He depicts this commercial venture as merely extending the  coterie to include the public. In the second edition of 1635, Marriot  enlists the aid of Izaak Walton to cast Donne as a poet turned priest –  one who repented writing secular lyrics in his youth, so he focused  exclusively on religious themes as an adult. This hagiography translates Donne into a cultural commodity.

given the fundamental basis of collaboration in the realization of any play, a phenomenon particularly noticeable on the Renaissance stage, where collaboration was the norm in every stage of textual production. If early modern texts are the product of group work, we should be sure to share the authority—and the authorship—wherever it is due.

Christopher Holmes

University of Toronto

cajholmes@yahoo.com

2. “Diuers faults commited by the printer”? Errata Lists as Evidence of Authorial Presence in the Early Modern Printing House

In the second edition of his Catalogue and Succession of the Kings, etc. of England (1621), Ralph Crane apologizes for “diuers faults,” in the first edition, “commited by the printer, in the time of the authors sicknesse.” How do we, separate errors committed by the printers from errors committed by the author? One method is the study of errata lists, the lists of corrections sometimes inserted by printers at the end of published works. This paper proposes that errata lists are useful in determining the degree of authorial involvement in preparing a particular publication. Crane’s preface implies that, but for his illness, he would have visited the print shop to oversee corrections personally. The work of Thomas Wilson provides a case in point. Errata lists appended to Wilson’s work are substantively different from others produced contemporaneously by his printer, implying significant authorial involvement in the correcting process. This paper examines Wilson’s errata lists in detail, proposing Wilson’s work as an important case study of a means by which editors and critics can use errata lists as a way of illuminating the problem of textual authority.

Elizabeth Hutcheon

The University of Chicago

hutcheon@uchicago.edu

3. “As the Author of the Booke”: Mary Wroth’s Entry Into the Print Marketplace

Early modernists continue to debate the extent of Mary Wroth’s agency and authority as a woman writer. In order to fully consider Wroth’s reaction to and possible revisions of the patriarchal and elite literary traditions embraced by her famous relatives and friends, we must examine the details of the controversial print publication of the 1621 folio containing her Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Unlike many critics, it is my contention that Wroth embraced her roles as a woman and a writer by actively choosing print and carefully selecting the book producers who presented her works to the public. Working behind the scenes and pushing against the constrictive role set out for her, she was able to reap the benefits of the democratizing and public medium of print and pave the way for women writers and readers for decades and centuries to come. A close look at Wroth’s interactions within the London book trade, then, encourages us to boldly revise our notions of what women writers were able to accomplish during the early modern period.

Stacy Erickson

University of Iowa

stacy-erickson@uiowa.edu

Session II (Chair: Stacy Erickson, University of Iowa)

1. “But the Page of Prowess”: The Metempsychosis of Early Modern Authorship in Nashe’s Anti-Harvey Satire

While “metempsychosis” fails to capture the violent satiric commotion of Strange Newes and Have with You to Saffron Walden, it aptly epitomizes their preoccupation with the circulation and reception of authors as texts. It also emphasizes the unstable position of early modern English male writers at the end of the Elizabethan period despite the promise of humanism. For these two pamphlets satirize the traditional paradigms of humanist imitatio, which their principal satiric object, Gabriel Harvey, publicly advocates but never achieves through publication. Instead, Nashe emulates the scandalous models of personal satire that Pietro Aretino and Martin Marprelate afford him to become his own “man in print.” Yet his frequent self-aggrandizing rhapsodies about his satiric “difference” and aesthetic apotheosis repeatedly collapse amid their own truncated articulations of desire. Rather than re-empowering this stifled voice via invocations of his self-promoting “bibliographic ego,” Nashe often passive-aggressively ventriloquizes the words of Ovid, most notably Metamorphoses Book XV. Ultimately, this literary re-appropriation permits Nashe to share and to blame his cultural dislocation as an “author” and the uncertain fate of his “page[s] of prowess” with and upon Harvey, his readers, and the humanist heritage itself.

Sean Michael Morris

University of Kentucky

smmorr@gmail.com

2. Appropriating John Donne: The 1633 and 1635 Printed Editions of  Donne’s Poetry  

Marilyn Claire Ford

Indiana University

marford@indiana.edu

3. “The Marke of Praise”: Donne and Jonson

In Underwood, the posthumous volume of Ben Jonson’s poetry included in the 1640 Jonson Workes, Donne’s “Expostulation” is included as Underwood 39. When we consider Donne’s poem’s content and conceits in relationship to Jonson’s poetry, and particularly to Jonson’s Underwood 22, which begins by playing on a phrase from the Donne poem, we glimpse Jonson and Donne interacting through manuscript circulation. How the poem ended up embedded in Jonson’s posthumous Underwood is unclear; its presence, though, demonstrates Jonson’s engagement with Donne’s poetry, not merely through reading, but more pointedly through study and appropriation. If we think of Jonson and Donne as two participants in a community of writers, we see here one poet building on the work of the other, turning on the devices of his peer. The result of such intertextuality is to align, to link, the two poets, by more than just the accident of the publication of the Donne elegy as part of Jonson, and by more than literary age. In a sense the publication error provides us with a concrete example of the continuing culture of coterie circulation in literary production, present beside, or beneath, the growing print culture of the era.

Barbara Mather Cobb

Murray State University

barbara.cobb@murraystate.com

4. Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea’s “Defense of Poesie”

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720) transformed her authorial self-presentation according her intended readership, and while her more public works not surprisingly feature relatively conventional subjects and genres, in her private works Finch enacts her own “Defense of Poesie,” a female, private, retiring model in implicit, yet specific, contrast to that of her renowned predecessor, Sir Philip Sidney. In varying her meta-poetic representation of the process of inspiration and composition, Finch utilizes her references to Sidney in her published work as the mark of her communion in the fellowship of great writers and in manuscript as a declaration of independence from that lineage. Even such apparent renunciation, however, ironically works to promote her stature through an implicit claim to innovating the very tradition that she explicitly purports to reject. The way in which the author-figure’s relationship with her personal muse moves between facilitating her writing in her published work and providing the benign contention whose energetic spark enables the poet in the manuscript poems to define herself against such traditionalism to which she was “By the alluring Muse betray’d,” illustrates both Finch’s collaboration with classical and early modern models and her individuated departure from them.

Fiona Murphy

University of California Berkeley

fmurphy@berkeley.edu