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)