LITMIR.BIZ

Figure 3. Shakespeare’s King Lear, part of a 1619 series of plays, detached, cut out, and inlaid, page by page, while in possession of a modern collector. Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

      The first chapter, “Special Collections: Book Curatorship and the Idea of Early Print in Libraries,” provides a historically elaborated counterpart to the set of issues raised in this introduction. Beginning with medieval compiling practices and their persistence into print, I chart the shift from a malleable early print textuality to the self-enclosed book of modernity through case studies drawn from two key archives: the eighteenth-century Cambridge University Library and the Renaissance library of Archbishop Matthew Parker, now at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The University Library preserves striking evidence of the modern development of curatorial processes in a superseded shelf list of special-collections materials called the AB catalog. The catalog, long forgotten in the library records, reveals that most of the early printed books in the designated AB class at Cambridge were formerly in composite arrangements but have since been disbound into single, modern units. The pattern, as I’ve been describing it, was common in institutional libraries, but rarely do traces survive that allow us to reconstruct a collection as it looked to its early users and to actually read early assemblages of text, as we can here. My second case study offers a candid look at a Renaissance library of similar proportions whose books remain in their original composite states. Matthew Parker’s habit of aggregating and patching together manuscripts recovered from the dissolution of the monasteries is well known to scholars of the Elizabethan period, but his vast collection of printed books has not been examined for evidence of the same curatorial activities. In his collection at Corpus Christi, I uncover configurations of text similar to those listed in the AB catalog, but ones that remain intact, with traceable provenances. I go on to demonstrate that Matthew Parker used these seemingly unwieldy assemblages of material in order to generate his own text, mining his anthologies for ideas for projects on theology and ecclesiastical history, which would eventually materialize in his printed works.

      The second chapter of this study, “Making Shakespeare’s Books: Material Intertextuality from the Bindery to the Conservation Lab,” develops the historical account set out in Chapter 1 by examining early assemblages of high-prestige literary texts that are now encountered primarily in discrete and self-enclosed books. Scholars have long been interested in the apparent mutability of Shakespeare’s works in early print culture: how parts of Love’s Labour’s Lost were mixed with texts by other poets in William Jaggard’s printed anthology The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), or how John Benson’s 1640 Poems volume changed the order of the Sonnets (and at times, the gender of Shakespeare’s addressee), mixing his work with that of others. This chapter demonstrates that early readers also compiled Shakespearean works, creating multitext volumes to suit their tastes and uses. Surveying extant compilations—and focusing particularly on the changing contexts of Henry IV Part 1 and Lucrece—I show that the combinatory activities of publishers like Jaggard and Benson reflected a more general readerly desire for flexible, adaptable works in print. These works with each new assembly gave rise to different juxtapositions and different forms of canonicity, many of which are surprising to us today, a counterpoint to the organization of Shakespearean texts in modern editions. But as I go on to demonstrate, in modern archives most of these early compilations were disassembled, their texts rebound separately, eliminating the evidence of previous uses in favor of a Shakespearean text that looks modern. This chapter argues that such assembly practices play a role in generating meaning—that the frameworks for reading and interpreting Shakespeare emerge out of the productions of collectors and conservators who make Shakespeare’s books.

      The first part of this study thus introduces a concept of “material intertextuality”—an intertextuality based on physical rather than purely discursive proximity—into Renaissance reading and reception history, excavating early compilations and assessing the interpretive implications of their varying logics of assembly. The second part investigates these methods of assembly from the standpoint of literary production, arguing that habits of compiling and customization were integral to Renaissance writing as well. Chapter 3, “Transformative Imitation: Composing the Lyric in Liber Lilliati and Watson’s Hekatompathia,” examines the work of a little-known Elizabethan choral musician named John Lilliat and a related—in fact, materially connected—printed sonnet collection from the 1580s. Lilliat, like many of his contemporaries in the Renaissance, channeled his social aspirations into poems of unrequited love using Petrarch and other writers as models. But Lilliat’s manuscript book, preserved at Oxford, physically incorporates his primary model into his text. Liber Lilliati, as he titled it, consists of fair-copy manuscript poetry written on leaves that had been added to a printed book, Thomas Watson’s sonnet sequence, The Hekatompathia. This assemblage of manuscript and print gives us a privileged look at the Renaissance compileras-writer at work: not only does Lilliat model his text after Watson’s; he makes use of decontextualized lines and stanzas from the Hekatompathia to form his own poetry, assembling verse in much the same way that he assembles his book. This chapter examines both texts side by side to argue that the injunction to compile and imitate in this way was already present in Watson’s sequence, giving us a new way to think about the demands printed verse collections made on readers and the poems that such curatorial routines ultimately helped produce.

      The fourth chapter, “Vernacularity and the Compiling Self in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and Montaigne’s Essays,” explores the work of assembly in two key texts whose authors forged what we would see as hybrid compilations, much like Lilliat’s. Beginning with a well-known manuscript in Spenser’s hand now at the Folger (itself formerly part of a compilation once in Spenser’s possession) and the famous “Bordeaux copy” of Montaigne’s Essays, I investigate how these two Renaissance authors represented the writing self as a maker or augmenter of books, encoding what they themselves did. Spenser, I argue, marshaled the material features of the early printed text—glosses, woodcuts, typography, the apparatus—in order to announce the arrival of the New Poet in his debut, The Shepheardes Calender. The text, I suggest, is not only appropriative in the sense of deriving models from classical exempla but also in the sense that Lilliat’s is: it inhabits and transforms an existing printed

Скачать книгу