Doubtful Readers

Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England focuses on early modern publishers’ efforts to identify and accommodate new readers of verse that had previously been restricted to particular social networks in manuscript. Focusing on the period between the maturing of the market for printed English literature in the 1590s and the emergence of the professional poet following the Restoration, this study shows that poetry was shaped by—and itself shaped—strong print publication traditions. By reading printed editions of poems by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and others, this book shows how publishers negotiated genre, gender, social access, reputation, literary knowledge, and the value of English literature itself. It uses literary, historical, bibliographical, and quantitative evidence to show how publishers’ strategies changed over time. Ultimately, Doubtful Readers argues that although—or perhaps because—publishers’ interpretive and editorial efforts are often elided in studies of early modern poetry, their interventions have had an enduring impact on our canons, texts, and literary histories.

Reading Printed Poetry in Early Modern England

This chapter traces poetry’s reach in early modern England by introducing the imagined reading public and the documented audience for printed poetry books. It surveys poets’ and publishers’ speculations about the reading public for early modern poetry and their efforts to accommodate readers as described in paratexts, treatises on vernacular poetics, and metapoetic works. Quantitative studies of the print publication of poetry understate its cultural importance; while some genres moved to print or stayed in manuscript, poetry continued to be circulated in both manuscript and print. Printed poetry books reached audiences who did not leave traces in the books they read, as well as readers whom we can identify using evidence of book ownership in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Authors, printers, and publishers involved in the publication of poetry developed a set of conventions to appeal to new readers, even as the cultural status of poetry remained in flux.

Translation and Cultural Convergence in Late Sixteenth-century Scotland and Huguenot France

Examining poetical exchanges between James VI of Scotland and the Huguenot courtier Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas in the 1580s, Chapter 7 demonstrates how poetry contributed to diplomatic initiatives, and how diplomatic concerns fostered expressiveness in the composition and presentation of poems. Early modern poetry, especially poetry in translation, could contribute to building better international cultural relations. Ambassadors and elite political figures were sometimes involved in such poems as writers, translators, readers, dedicatees, or recipients. When they were, these poems could contain subtle gestures consistent with the cultural diplomatic aims to express shared identity and strengthen political ties. The poetic exchanges between James and Du Bartas in the 1580s contained many signals of the common literary and political culture in Scotland and Protestant France, signals that are found in the subject matter, prosody, diction, structure, and other poetic features of the verses that they exchanged. This chapter examines the poetic techniques that James and Du Bartas used for expressing cultural convergence between Scotland and France when translating and composing original verse for each other, and then shows how the print publication of their poems enabled a broader international community to participate in this cultural moment.

Collusion and Delusion

This chapter focuses on the notion of artificial ambiguity, understood at the level of speech-acts, which classical and early modern scholars usually conceived of either as puns—that is, ambiguities that are not really ambiguous—or as equivocations—ambiguities engineered to deceive. Then as now, wits prided themselves on their facility with double meanings, and chief among these was Cicero. The witty ambiguity, exemplified in the puns of Cicero, seemed to critics very different to the fraudulent ambiguity, embodied in the language of Satan, or in Jesuitical equivocation: the one was joyous and elegant, giving pleasure and reinforcing social bonds, whereas the other, undermining trust and moral security, begat sin after sin. However, they were only ever two ends of the same wand, and their proximity could bring delight to the equivocation or discredit to the pun. The chapter then analyses that paradox, first modelling the ambiguity in the classical witticism and then considering its relation to the figure of the hypocrite in early modern poetry and theology. It also evaluates the sixteenth-century argument over the legitimacy of equivocation and mental reservation.

The Male Body in Medicine and Literature

Investigations of male potency and the ‘ability to perform’ have long been mainstays of social, political and artistic discourse and have provoked spirited and partisan declarations about what it is to be a man. This interdisciplinary collection considers the tensions that have developed between the historical privilege often ascribed to the male and the vulnerability to which his body is prone. Using a variety of historical and literary approaches, the essays in this work consider the critical ways in which medicine’s interactions with literature reveal vital clues about the ways sex, gender and identity are constructed through treatments of a range of pathologies, including deformity, venereal disease, injury, nervousness and sexual difference. The relationships between male medicine and ideals of potency and masculinity are searchingly explored through a range of sources, including African American slave fictions, southern gothic, early modern poetry, Victorian literature and the modern novel.

Poetic Deictics and Extra-Textual Reference (Mallarmé, Scève, Ronsard, Du Bellay)

This study considers the effects of deictics, which are among the expressions called, in recent linguistics, and particularly cognitive pragmatics, ‘procedural’ expressions, in poetic expression in the first person. It examines a variety of examples drawn primarily from the early modern period (Scève, Ronsard, Du Bellay, Muret's and Belleau's commentaries on Ronsard), but with several modern points of comparison (Keats, Mallarmé). The article studies, in particular, the question of extra-textual reference in poetry and poetic commentary, arguing against an anachronistic understanding (based in nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas about authorship) of the forms of early modern poetic reference and of the varieties of first-person action early modern poetry can instantiate.