Dobranski 2005

Dobranski, Stephen B. Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Introduction: Renaissance omissions

"I am interested in the interpretive implications of works with actual missing pieces. The seventeenth-century phenomenon of printing apparently unfinished works ushered in a new emphasis on authors' responsibility for written texts while it simultaneously reinforced Renaissance practices of active reading. ... The book's overarching premise is that authors, like all speakers, can convey ideas by saying almost nothing; the best writers can create moments of audible silence, or as Milton envisions in Paradise Lost, of 'darkness visible'." (2)

Caxton, printings of Chaucer included and inspired Chauceriana; Spenser himself attempted to follow Chaucer in his own (incomplete) Faerie Queene

"That England's two greatest poetic sons had never finished their greatest poetic works presumably provided sufficient precedent for later Renaissance stationers and writers who wanted to take incomplete works to press." (4)

"These writers and publishers wanted 'defects' in their texts not because they 'cannot say anything worth reading' but because they had something to say that required, as we will see, special emphasis." (5)

"Scrutinizing the blank spaces in publications by Sidney, Jonson, Donne, Herrick, and Milton helps us better understand the changing conditions of authorship in early modern England: while the notion of an autonomous author was emerging, an equally empowering concept of active readers was also taking shape. The omissions I examine pull in both directions. when viewed as moments of exquisite authorial control, omissions seem to suggest that a text was created by an 'author,' a single individual who oversaw the production and could finesse even the most subtle poetic nuances. But, if early modern readers were then expected to make something meaningful out of a text's missing pieces, Renaissance omissions seem to imply that readers shared responsibility for the author's work. Simultaneously authorizing both writers and readers, the omissions that I address provide a unique window into English literary history: through these blank spaces we glimpse the tension between implication and inference, and between an individual author and a collaborative community." (5-6)