Marotti 1995

Marotti, Arthur F. Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

"In short, the various manuscript and print forms in which texts were recorded and transmitted can be the basis of a socioliterary history that unlike traditional literary history considers texts in their material specificity (rather than their edited 'ideal' forms), attends to their reception and reproduction in a variety of social and historical circumstances (and not just in the context of the print publication process), and emphasizes an inchoate or developing definition of literature and authorship (rather than a stable definition based on alleged authorial 'intentions')." (xi-xii)

"In the older, manuscript system, the modern boundary between the literary and the nonliterary had not yet solidified, and texts were immersed in social worlds whose conditions enabled them to be produced and consumed." (xii)

"Printed texts of lyric verse -- something of an innovation and a matter also of printers' fortuitous access to the literary communications of restricted social groups and coteries -- yield a distorted picture of literary history or of the place of literary texts in the life of the society that produced and consumed them." (xiii)

Lyrics and the Manuscript System

"Single poems as well as sets of poems were written as occasional works. Their authors professed a literary amateurism and claimed to care little about the textual stability or historical durability of their socially contingent productions." (2)

poems on rings, food trenchers, glass windows, paintings, tombstones and monuments, on trees (3) [see footnotes for citations]

prison poetry (4-5)

occasional poetry for specific social occasions (9)

"When social verse passed in the system of manuscript transmission beyond its original environments of production and reception, it was usually recoded and recontextualized, especially when poems were collected or anthologized in a process that converted them into works of 'literature'." (10)

writing in blank or "table" books (16)

• more common in 17c, but some early examples

manuscript collections "range from casual, personal, or family commonplace-book collections to carefully arranged, sometimes professionally transcribed, volumes" (17)

"in England, unlike in France, the practice of assembling carefully planned, sometimes decorated or illuminated, manuscripts of lyric verse did not take hold in the early Renaissance, and so the manuscripts in which one finds courtly poems are not true lyric anthologies but collections of different types in which the transcription of lyrics was, if not an afterthought, at least a casual practice" (17)

lyrics often inserted in books given over for other purposes (17)

personal miscellany different from the professional collection (18)

• e.g. John Shirley

manuscripts often mix the works of multiple authors, but a few are given over to single authors (22)

John Donne: found in more surviving manuscript documents than any other English Renaissance poet (24)

women were taught to use italic, rather than secretary, script (25)

Donne's poem showing his preference for manuscript circulation (27)

layout of a manuscript differs from that of a printed text (27)

John Lyly, preference for the crooked lines of a manuscript text (28)

"Some professionally transcribed manuscripts of verse include rudimentary forms of ornamentation and deploy poems on the page with some sense of aesthetic design." (28-9)

some manuscripts have features of calligraphy and ornamentation; "generally, however, there is a marked difference between the iconicity of ornamented or unornamented or unornamented texts in printed editions and the appearance of the same texts in manuscript collections where their physical appearance does not call attention to them as aesthetic objects" (29)

poets giving instructions for layout of verse in print (29)

Print and the Lyric

printed lyric verse in Italy and France had a cultural centrality by 16c that it didn't in England (209)

reasons:

• "absence of a clear and strong tradition of vernacular literature into which such publications could be incorporated" (210)
• "class issue sharpened by print culture" -- stigma of print (210)
• "perception of love poetry and immature, not intellectually serious writing" (210)
• "association of love lyrics with privacy" -- not fit for publication (210)
• "association of yrics with specific social occasions" -- "ephemeral artifacts" (210)

precedent of Chaucer (211)

last third of 16c, "stigma" of print began turning into "prestige" (211); important moments in this transition

• Tottel's Miscellany (1557)
• Sidney's 'Astrophil and Stella (1591, 1592), and Ponsonby's 1598 folio of Sidney's collected works
• Ben Jonson's Workes (1616)
• editions of Donne and Herbert (both 1633)

Tottel's Miscellany (1557)

• "not only inaugurated the fashion for publishing anthologies that disseminated privately circulated, mostly courtly, poetry to a wider public, but it also demonstrated some of the sociocultural implications of print as a medium" (212)
• went through 9 editions and more printings in 30 years
• led to other Elizabethan poetry collections: The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576); a Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578); A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1566); Brittons Bowre of Delights (1591); The Phoenix Nest (1593); The Arbor of Amorous Devices (1597); England's Helicon (1600); Belvedere: or the Garden of the Muses (1600); Englands Parnassus (1600); A Poetical Rhapsody (1602)