Woudhuysen 1996

Woudhuysen, H. K. Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

Sidney's modern scholarly editor chose early printed editions for his copy-text, recording substantial variants where they occurred in 2 or more witnesses

"Ringler's analysis of the textual relations and of the evolution of Sidney's poems was brilliantly reasoned and mostly persuasive; but could his text, based as it was on printed copy deriving from lost authorial transcripts, be improved by reconsidering the readings in the extant scribal manuscripts?" (2)

"They [manuscript witnesses] certainly played an important part in establishing Sidney's texts, but they might possibly reveal something about the social relations of the world in which he moved, and about the larger business of the manuscript circulation of literary works. The poems themselves were a prominent feature of this since so many were found in the manuscript miscellanies of the period, but there were also the examples of the many handwritten copies of the Old Arcadia, the dozens of copies of his letter to Queen Elizabeth concerning her proposed French marriage, and the stray manuscripts of his other works to consider. What might a study—not primarily a textual study—of these witnesses have to say about the circumstances and about the communities in which his works were first copied and read?" (3)

"In the past few years, largely as a result of Beal's work, manuscript studies may be said to have come of age, but they have not yet grown up. The subject still needs its STC to catalogue the

books themselves, its McKerrow and its Gaskell to explain how they were physically produced, and its Greg and its Bowers to establish how they should be described, what can be deduced from their make-up, and how their role in the editing of texts might be freshly considered in theory and in practice." (6)

after accession of Elizabeth, "it becomes possible to begin to assemble evidence that copying was undertaken not just as a private exercise for the writer's own pleasure, or for a specific patron, but as a public, even as a commercial, venture. If one author or his works could be said to have played a leading part in this transition, it has to be Sidney, whose practice indicated a new use of manuscript publication. The textual evidence shows that he allowed at least eight copies of the Old Arcadia to be made in the space of as little as two years. Similarly, his A letter to Queen Elizabeth, which survives in numerous copies, was extensively circulated only in manuscript to complement the printed attack on the French marriage which cost its author, John Stubbs, his right hand. Considered in this light, Sidney ceases for the purposes of this book to be a conveniently representative figure. Instead, I shall argue that he may have changed the private character of manuscript production, altering and reviving it while at the same time seeking to preserve its origins, which he saw as primarily literary. Sidney's role in the process of changing manuscript culture can be related to his self-consciousness as an author: in his most famous works he presents himself—or versions of himself—as Philisides and Amphialus, as Astrophil, and as the confiding first-person defender of poetry. In that work, (p.9) which addresses a community of readers rather than just a community of writers, he might be said to have begun the creation of a literary, reading public. He presented himself as a specific author addressing an identifiable audience. The writer, in his works, became a fictional character, became, up to a point, a hero in his own right. In all of this it might be said that Sidney followed his master Chaucer in more ways than one." (8-9)

Sidney as exemplary case; many manuscript compilers seemed not to care whether poem was by e.g. Donne or Jonson; not the case with Sidney

"The attraction of manuscript circulation lay in the medium's social status, its personal appeal, relative privacy, freedom from government control, its cheapness, and its ability to make works quickly available to a select audience. Print, on the other hand, let writers attract and manipulate readers not just through the familiar forms of dedications and addresses, but by exploiting the special feel that the medium has—a feel which allows the creation of what has been called ‘charisma’. A work in manuscript is transformed when it is put into print. This is especially so with poetry, part of whose aesthetic experience lies in the look of the poem on the page:" (15)

"Modern readers tend to regard a printed work as in its final form, but for some Renaissance writers (and later authors, such as Tennyson), a first printing was only an intermediate stage in the creation of a work. Neither Daniel nor Drayton appeared able to stand back and see what they had written clearly, until it had reached print, and then the process of revising, rewriting, and rearranging could properly begin, sometimes almost at once." (15)

" To professional poets print was the only medium that mattered. Some writers like Turbervile or Gascoigne do not appear to have let their work circulate in manuscript at all. Other writers had a more complicated attitude to the copying of their works in manuscript." (16)

"Print was not necessarily always a more finished or final form than manuscript, since the dialogue between writer and reader could be continued by the reader's handwritten additions to the printed text. Manuscript and print were not entirely separate entities." (22)

examples:

"The Oxford musician John Lilliat seems to have bound together a collection of his own and others’ manuscript poems at the end of a copy of Thomas Watson's Hekatompathia (1582).53 In the case of the important St John's College, Cambridge, manuscript of William Alabaster's poems, the evidence of binding is clearer: the sonnets, copied between 1627 and 1628, are written on leaves preceding a Book of Hours printed at Lyons in 1558, bound in sixteenth-century decorated calf. When taking notes from Holinshed's Chronicles, Lambarde decided that it would be pleasant to interleave them in a copy of T. T.’s A booke, containing the true portraiture of the kings of England, a series of woodcut pictures published by the writing-master Jean de Beauchesne.55 Having got hold of William Harrison's copy of Adolphus Occo's printed work on coins, D’Ewes especially bought a copy of the book so that he could transcribe Harrison's many manuscript additions into his volume.5" (22)