Introduction

This chapter introduces Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England. Early modern lyric poetry was a social form, but print publication made poems available to anyone who either had the means to a buy a book or knew someone who did, radically expanding the early modern reading public. The study focuses 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 to acknowledge changes in both the economics and aesthetics of poetry book publication. It argues that publication in its broadest sense is a form of mediation between multiple agents and material forms. Because print did not change poetry in a single way, this book presents a series of case studies. This chapter concludes with a brief overview of each.

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.

“Nor is the Printing of such Miscellanies … unpresidented”

This chapter traces the influence of Poems, by J.D. in poetry collections published in the 1640s and 1650s. It begins by surveying prefaces and title pages that offer accounts of gathering and organizing manuscript sources for print publication. Although editors have sometimes challenged the veracity of these accounts, they show that the diverse agents responsible for poetic publication believed readers would prefer accurate, authoritative texts. Such texts were necessary to memorialize poets in print. After the publication of the 1635 edition of Poems, by J.D., biography became an important paradigm for reading poems, especially by members of the clergy. A final section considers the power and pervasiveness of this model in relation to an ambitious poet who resisted it: John Milton.

Poems, by J.D. (1633 and 1635), the O’Flahertie Manuscript, and the Many Careers of John Donne

This chapter shows how the 1635 second edition of Poems, by J.D. promulgated the tale of Jack Donne’s transformation into Doctor Donne in response to concerns about the volume’s reception by an unidentified reading public. The 1633 first edition had presented Donne’s poems in a loosely organized collection resembling a manuscript miscellany, while the O’Flahertie manuscript (Harvard MS Eng. 966.5), created around the same time, divided the poems by genre in order to highlight Donne’s religious poems. Critics have long recognized that the changes in the second edition of Poems, by J.D. made it more biographically suggestive than the first, but they have taken for granted that this version of Donne’s life story would have been self-evident to readers in 1635. This chapter argues that the revised second edition created this narrative and, in the process, radically changed the way readers read and understood both John Donne and poetic authorship.

Typography, Genre, and Authorship in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) and Shake-speares Sonnets (1609)

This chapter argues that Thomas Thorpe’s 1609 edition of Shake-speares Sonnets was stymied by the success of The Passionate Pilgrim, a poetry collection first published by William Jaggard in 1599 and reprinted in 1612. Critics have suggested that the success of Jaggard’s volume may “have spoiled the market for authentic ‘sugred Sonnets’ by Shakespeare.” But to date, no one has read The Passionate Pilgrim as a sonnet sequence in its own right. This chapter outlines a history of sonnet publication that reveals striking resemblances between The Passionate Pilgrim and the printed English sonnet sequences then in fashion. Moreover, every element of the book—the title page, the poems it contained, and even its format—seems designed to highlight its place within Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Thus, when Thorpe’s Shake-speares Sonnets was printed in 1609, it appeared to be less sequence-like and less Shakespearean than The Passionate Pilgrim.

Conclusion

This short chapter summarizes the book’s major findings about the print publication of early modern English poetry. Between 1590 and 1660, the social form of the lyric was increasingly recognized as a literary genre worthy of preservation and careful reading. Stationers played an important, if often unacknowledged, role in delineating genres, addressing readers, defining poetic authorship, and assembling texts. Because these mediations have influenced our canons, texts, and histories, a fully historical formalism must account for both the literary content and material forms of printed editions. Doubtful Readers ultimately proposes a new methodology, and the chapter concludes with a call for further study.

Selling the Illusion of Access

This chapter argues that Aemilia Lanyer’s publisher Richard Bonian published the extensive dedicatory material in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum to appeal to an emerging female reading public. The volume’s permeable boundary between text and paratext also anticipates the replacement of dedicatory poems with commendatory verses in the coming decades. The chapter therefore closes by considering two additional books with an unusual investment in dedicatory and commendatory verse: Coryats Crudities (1611), which inspired a competing book that only reproduced its preliminary verses, and Mary Fage’s Fames Roule (1637), a collection of anagrams and acrostics on court figures. Together, these books reveal authors and their publishers navigating poetry’s uneasy transition from a pursuit driven by patronage to one oriented toward the commercial book trade. In the process, the books also give the reader new insight into the privileged social networks of their authors and addressees.