Patents, Pictures and Patronage by Elizabeth Evenden

CITATION: Evenden, Elizabeth. Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor Book Trade. Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2008. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did the presentation of Day's most famous books result in his reputation as master of the trade?
• Answer: Day "saw the necessity of patronage in the Church and at court in securing the patents and... the crucial importance of patronage by proving himself the best man for the job... by proving his technical mastery of the trade... [b]y creating visually impressive books..." (178)
• Method: Evenden explains Day's business acumen through his patents, bookshops, and advertisements, and describes his courtly politicking in terms of religious conflict and prestigious illustration.
• Assumptions: Evenden has mixed assumptions about the status and format of illustrated books. She claims on 69-70 that A&M "created yet another prized monopoly" by "putting an end to what could otherwise have been an open market for printers of smaller, ephemeral martyrological works."
  But on 103, she argues that Day might hypothetically "produce pamphlets made up of various woodcuts in order to maximise the range of customers and so increase his income, as one might expect a printer to do, in order to ensure a healthy profit." There are a few discrepancies between these two accounts:
  (a) the profitability of pamphlets for Day relative to a "monopoly" on A&M, and
  (b) the role of A&M--passive or deliberate--in preventing a market for martyrological formats.
  It's unclear whether Evenden believes that early modern consumers treated large folios and pamphlets as comparable, or the degree to which Evenden believes Day was subject to the profit motive. 
• Sententiae: "Day borrowed woodcuts from Grafton on a number of occasions, particularly since Grafton, the King's Printer, owned a stock of elaborate woodcuts that emphasized the monarchical imperialism and the central position of the monarchy within the Reformation." (11)
  "... Day's connection to Stamford has appeared tenuous; especially since the only evidence, hitherto known of his printing De vera obedientia in Stamford rests upon this single comment by Foxe which, moreover, only appeared in the first edition and was never reprinted.
  "Day was [sic] in Lincolnshire at some point during the period 1553-54, for during that time he rented two acres in the village of Barholm, on land owned by William Cecil...
  "There is also typographical evidence to prove that the Michael Wood texts were printed by John Day. The roman type found in these tracts also occurs in Day's edition of John Ponet's A short catechisme from early 1553 and also in Sir Thomas Elyot's The Banket of Sapience from 1557...
  "Nevertheless no works appear bearing the Michael Wood imprint after May [1554], and even if De vera obedientia was printed in early June, it seems that the Michael Wood press remained inactive through that summer and early autumn. Why? It is likely that Day had run out of paper." (32-35)
  "Day's and Cecil's attempt to house an illicit press in England, while bold and not bereft of concrete results, nevertheless was doomed to failure." (46)
  "[Day's] production of Foxe's huge work effectively smothered any potential English competition, putting an end to what could otherwise have been an open market for printers of smaller, ephemeral martyrological works." (69)
  "It was only a matter of time before Day's demand outstripped supply... In July 1566 John Foxe made a request to Cecil that the law limiting the number of foreign workmen allowed to work for a printer to four be lifted for Day." (96)
  "Nor did [Day] simply produce pamphlets made up of various woodcuts in order to maximise the range of customers and so increase his income, as one might expect a printer to do, in order to ensure healthy profit." (103)
  "The removal of [John Day's] stock [by Richard Day and Henry Bynneman], however, became blatantly obvious when one of John Day's most notorious woodcuts, the initial C, which depicted him alongside William Cecil and John Foxe in attendance of the queen, was used in a book printed by Bynneman." (163)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Clearly I'm smitten with Evenden. She has a special talent at stringing together narratives that are both clear and revealing regarding Day, his relationship to Cecil, and to early modern print. I have nothing but praise for this eminently readable book.
• Synthesis: Naturally Evenden leans heavily on her shared research as part of Evenden & Freeman. But furthermore, Evenden offers a surprising response to Collinson's argument in an essay I have yet to read--one in King and Highley's John Foxe in His World.
• Application: Evenden presents an ambivalent pair of views, noted in "Assumptions," regarding the profit motive and status. My hypothesis is that Day refrained from re-packaging A&M for pamphlets because he wanted to preserve the status of the folio. That is, I believe, commensurate with profit-maximizing motives. Yet I struggle to imagine a test suitable to the hypothesis: there were so few contemporaneous printers as successful and prestigious as Day that it's hard to tell how an alternative strategy would have done.
  Also, Evenden repeatedly remarks on Day's replenishment-rate of paper, which leads me to wonder whether there's an absolute "speed of paper" for all non-royal stationers. If so, it's tantalizing to imagine that early modern English print can be expressed by a definite production frontier, fixed by the fixity of paper.

The Religion of the Protestants by Patrick Collinson

CITATION: Collinson, Patrick. The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559-1625. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How can Jacobean-historiographical taxonomies of "Anglican" and "Puritan" be reformed?
• Answer: The Puritan movement was more conservative and consistent with the episcopacy, and Laudians reacted to Calvinist pressures in universities to become the main agitators of religious discourse prior to the Civil War.
• Method: Collinson focuses on the social, not theological, formation of English Protestantism. He nearly disregards high philosophy in favor of institutional practices.
• Assumptions: Collinson responds to two related streams of criticism: one which attributes the Civil War to Puritan anti-ecclesiastical tumult; another, championed by Christopher Hill, which treats the Puritans as necessary and inevitable precursors to revolutionary socialists.
• Sententiae: "So the protestant governing class progressed from the Elizabethan demand for a new religious order to the Jacobean enjoyment of such an order, already partly achieved. And when in the reign of Charles I that order appeared in danger of overthrow by a new conjunction of the forces which had never ceased to threaten it, the recation was defensive and conservative. But whether in assertion or defence, the animating spirit was not one of disobedience or ill-affection but of a profound veneration for order and a strong disposition towards obedience: the double need to objey God and his earthly representatives, and in turn to exact the obedience due from inferiors." (153)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Collinson's argument is persuasive and edifying for my Puritanical tendencies.
  Lastly, I won't lie: I had a long, hard time with this book. The evidence is too far removed from my main interests, and the argument seems far removed from present discourses. What one reviewer called "his distaste for literary organization" obfuscates the structure of Collinson's lectures.
• Synthesis: I'm having trouble conceiving how Knapp related his research to Collinson's, at least since this work focuses on the Jacobean period. But I suppose that Collinson relocates iconophilia to the insurgent Laudians--and accordingly the iconophobic culture of the Puritans could be related to the dominant ecclesiastical institutions in the Jacobean period.
• Application:It would be interesting to re-examine parodies of academics in the Jacobean period--eg, Love's Labours Lost--for an overtone of institutional cooperation with Puritans.

The Idolatrous Eye by Michael O'Connell

CITATION: O'Connell, Michael. The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Understanding

• Question: How did drama negotiate word and image during early modern debates regarding iconoclasm?
• Answer: While early modern dramatists did not directly respond to contemporary scholars, they responded to Medieval ecclesiastical debates regarding incarnation, text, and embodiment.
• Method: First, O'Connell refers to ecclesiastical restrictions on religious and secular theater alike in order to establish their common idolatrous visuality. Second,  O'Connell contextualizes logocentric early modern humanism against a tradition of embodied Christianity stretching through the early modern period. Third, O'Connell proposes the importance of dramatic bodily torture to late-medieval religious drama. Fourth, O'Connell juxtaposes dramatic bodily torture with a textualized dramatic God. Fifth and finally, O'Connell addresses Jonson and Shakespeare's image-textual epistemology in the tug-of-war between humanists and Puritans.
• Assumptions: O'Connell assumes that pre-Filioquean controversies reverberated in a meaningful way through the York cycle and into Shakespeare's plays.
• Sententiae: "What I am proposing is that the iconoclasm of the Reformation was not a mere change in the style and emphasis of the worship of Christian Europe. Rather, it emerged from tensions in the relation of image and word that inhere in the central religious doctrine of Christianity, the incarnation, the belief that God, in taking on a human form, became subject to representation as an image." (200)

Overstanding

• Assessment: O'Connell has buried the lede, which says that the incarnation of power and pain in Christ implicates the bodies and consciousnesses of the audience. This seems to extend from a passage of Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, but is necessary for understanding O'Connell's treatment of iconicity, iconophobia, and iconoclasm.
• Synthesis: O'Connell's project is an interesting compliment to Knapp's, because O'Connell treats the prehistory of early modern image, whereas Knapp addresses early modern history in images.
• Application: The most interesting challenge from O'Connell is to locate how, exactly, early modern dramatists propose that their senses were embodied by players. What play-texts support an extension of Scarry's Christology?

The First Folio of Shakespeare by Peter W.M. Blayney

CITATION: Blayney, Peter W.M. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Washington, DC: Folger Library Publications, 1991.
Understanding

• Question: How do the resources of the Folger Library reflect the origins of Shakespeare's first folio?
• Answer: Charlton Hinman contextualized the Folger's variant copies of the folio through textual collation to a time and a group of collators, and Blayney adds to that research information about the inclusion of Troilus, sales, rentals, and resales of the edition, paratexts, and reception.
• Method: Some of the bibliographic methods include: the collation of broken type (to time); collation of spelling variants (to compositors); collation of copperplate alterations (to an engraver); collation of proofsheets (to stop-press corrections); the synthesis of records of purchase and rebinding.
• Assumptions: Blayney draws extensively from Hinman's work, but accepts modifications to Hinman's description of compositors: he abandons Hinman's five-compositor account for the fullest nine-compositor account.
• Sententiae: "The printing of the Shakespeare Folio began in early 1622, perhaps at the beginning of February, when Jaggard was still working on two books that had been started in 1621. One of them--an edition of Thomas Wilson's Christian Dictionary--was almost complete... Augustine Vincent's Discoverie of Errours--was of greater importance to William Jaggard than was the First Folio." (5)
  "Like many pages in the text, [the engraved portrait on the Folio title-page] is variant. In the first few copies printed, there is so little shading on the ruff that Shakespeare's head seems to be floating in mid-air. The plate was therefore modified, most notably by shading an area of ruff below Shakespeare's left ear... It is unlikely that anyone but [engraver Martin] Droeshout would have considered those alterations necessary." (18)
  "Some booksellers, though, apparently did lend books for a fee... The most likely interpretation of the note [in Folger copy 60] is that [Thomas] Bourne lent out this folio (perhaps more than once) for an unknown sum that included a 'security deposit' of half the cost of replacing the book." (29)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Obviously Blayney knows what he's doing, and he's synthesizing a great deal of information in the Folger collection into a very concise format.
• Synthesis: Blayney's treatment of Droeshout's engraving--as something worthy of revision--conflicts slightly with the "iconic" understanding argued by Katherine Acheson. Whereas the Folio illustrated a popular personality, Acheson's books illustrated "foure-footed beastes," and therein may be the difference.
• Application: Blayney's interpretation of the notes in Folger copy 60 might be interpreted in light of the division of profits: it might be revealing to consider the proportion of the "security deposit" relative to the profits of other parties (printers' thirds, etc.).