The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy

CITATION: Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, C.1400-C.1580. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did traditional English religion function before the Henrician reformation?
• Answer: Traditional--more widely held than "popular"--religion regularly included commoners and guilds in feasts, fasts, and rituals that show the broad base of English Catholicism, which fell to the reformation on the strength of early Tudor authority.
• Method: The first two-thirds of Duffy's book cover various aspects of traditional religion, and the final third covers the reformation. In the chapters on traditional religion, Duffy itemizes traditional observances and explores their function at multiple levels of society. The reformation chapters are a more straightforward narrative.
• Assumptions: Duffy responds to a Protestant, Whiggish perspective on religion in England 1400-1580. That is a perspective that views traditional religion as oppressive, superstitious, and ripe for revolt.
• Sententiae:
• "To judge by the amount of interest that has been shown in them, the English religious landscape of the late Middle Ages was peopled largely by Lollards, witches, and leisured, aristocratic ladies. It is my conviction, and a central plank of the argument of the first part of this book, that no substantial gulf existed between the religion of the clergy and the educated elite on the one hand and that of the people at large on the other." (2)
• "In a famous passage of Actes and Monuments, John Foxe asserted the incompatibility of popery and printing: 'How many presses there be in the world, so many block houses there must be against the high castle of St Angelo, so that either the pope must abolish knowledge and printing, or printing must at length root him out.' Had Foxe attended to the history of printing in and for England until the early 1530s, he would not have made this claim. The advent of printing in the 1470s and the enormous surge in numbers of publications after 1505 did not flood the reading public with reforming tracts or refutations of the real presence." (77)
• "... [T]here is an evident preoccupation with the refutation of attacks on the sacramental teaching of the Church in much fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century writing about the power and pre-eminent sanctity of the Eucharist... Grace came by gazing on the Host: to see it was to be blessed. But what one saw was misleading, and Lollardry was only possible because the appearance of bread in the Host cloaked the divine reality which was the true source of blessing." (102)
• "The saint's heroically maintained virginity was important not primarily as an example to be followed in all its craggy contradiction, but rather as the source of their special intercessory relationship with Christ... These virgin saints an their male counterparts were invoked by the prosperous and pious donors of the East Anglian screens not as exemplars calling away from marriage and money-making, nor as patterns of perpetual chastity or defiant disobedience to patriarchy and government, but as helpers of those who would 'have their boon or else a better thing'..." (178)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Frankly I'll have to revisit this. There's too much raw information to process on this schedule, which I believe is a mark of quality.
• Synthesis: Duffy's scholarship seems incompatible with Eisenstein's account of the Printing Revolution. Duffy seems to be working with a much shorter window of observation. I'll have to revisit the Johns-Eisenstein debate.
• Application: A few stray thoughts:
• The saintly image is profoundly anti-mimetic; it is not of this world, it seeks to transfigure the world. Therefore some of the Protestant objections to the representation of Biblical figures accomplishes two things. First and most obviously, it guarantees that grace is achieved only through the Spirit. Second, it promotes a materialist realism within the arts, even as a compliment to low-church Protestantism.
• Foxe's progressive view of print history seems at odds with a profoundly Christian eschatology. Why should it matter that the Pope lose the print war, since Christ is surely coming soon?

Poetry (1) by Robert Herrick

PRIMARY SOURCE: (circa 1648)

1. "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time"
2. "To Marigolds"
3. “His Prayer to Ben Jonson”
4. "Delight in Disorder”

Context

• Publication: Born to a well-to-do London goldsmith and educated at St. John's and Trinity. Consorts with Ben Jonson at the Devil Tavern. Employed as a deacon and chaplain on Buckingham's expedition against Ile de Re, 1627.Vicar of Dean Prior in Devonshire, 1629-47. Enters poems in the Stationers' Register, 1640. Expelled from vicarage for Royalist sympathies, returns to London. Publishes Hesperides in 1648. Returns to Devonshire in 1660, dies in 1674. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars have read Herrick for the Son of Ben poems, as well as his connections to the Royalist faction. Herrick's poetry resembles a neo-classical interest in sexuality and beauty.
• Why I'm reading it: The counter-canon, illustrated title page.

Content

• Form:

1. "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time"
   Ballad meter, abab; four stanzas.
2. "To Marigolds"
   Iambic pentameter, couplets.
3. “His Prayer to Ben Jonson”
   Iambic trimeter in ballad style, abab; three stanzas.
4. "Delight in Disorder”
   Iambic tetrameter; couplets.

• Genre:

1. "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time"
   Commendation
2. "To Marigolds"
   Erotic nature poem
3. “His Prayer to Ben Jonson”
   Elegy, prayer
4. "Delight in Disorder”
   Love lyric?

• Conceit:

1. "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time"
   Life as a day; people should marry young, since they will have old age to tarry.
2. "To Marigolds"
   Marigolds should open to the sun and be maids when he goes away. Marigold flowers = lady parts
3. “His Prayer to Ben Jonson”
   Herrick's poems are prayers to Saint Ben, whose writing is in Herrick's psalter.
4. "Delight in Disorder”
   A little disorder in a woman's dress is more attractive than a perfect outfit.

• Other notes:

The Comely Frontispiece by Margery Corbett and RW Lightbown

CITATION: Corbett, Margery, and R W. Lightbown. The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England, 1550-1660. London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1979. Print.
Understanding

• Question: What is the nature of the illustrated frontispiece in Renaissance England?
• Answer: The Renaissance English drew from classical and Continental sources to produce four dominant forms of title-page illustration, defined by: (1) geometric frames, (2) single design, (3) cartouche, and (4) architecture.
• Method: A lengthy introduction surveying the Renaissance conception of the frontispiece is followed by many case-studies of illustrated title-pages.
• Assumptions: Oddly, the authors presume a strong influence of the author on the creation of title-page illustrations: "Perhaps something is added to a knowledge of [authors'] minds; on a different level the idiosyncracies of character which are revealed from time to time afford us an unexpected glimpse of their personalities." (47)
• Sententiae:
• "The four types of design which occur in this book are the title-page divided into geometrical compartments, the title-page which is a single overall design, the title-page whose dominant motif is a cartouche and, most important and interesting of all, the architectural title-page." (3)
• "In origin the device was a characteristic invention of northern fourteenth-century chivalric culture, and spread from France into Italy during the fifteenth century... in its Renaissance guise it was imported north of the Alps where it was believed by many in the late sixteenth century to be an Italian invention. Essentially the device was a heraldry of the mind, a symbol chosen to blazon a personal preoccupation in war or love, an aspiration, an ambition, a vow, a declaration of courageous purpose, of amorous hope, constancy or despair." (10)
• "It will be obvious that emblems, being intended to suggest subjects for craftsmen, were bound to differ from devices, whose application was purely personal, even when their significance might have a wider interest or appeal." (17)
• [from Whitney's A Choice of Emblems, "To the Reader"]:
  "[Emblems are] for adorning of the place: hauinge some wittie devise expressed with cunning woorkemanship, somethinge obscure to be perceiued at first, whereby, when with further consideration it is vnderstood, it maie the greater delighte the behoulder. And althoughe the worde dothe comprehende manie thinges, and diuers matters maie be therein contained; yet all Emblemes for the most parte, maie be reduced into these three kindes, which is historicall, Naturall, & Morall." (17)
• "The prime source from which the Renaissance derived its knowledge of hieroglyphs was not one to weaken such a belief [that hieroglyphs contained the truths of religion and philosophy]. This was the Hieroglyphica for Horapollo... Horapollo's book was rediscovered in 1419 and brought to Florence. In fifteenth-century Italy it was eagerly copied and studied and was printed in the original Greek in 1505 and in a Latin translation in 1515." (23)
• "But in general medals were highly esteemed as a source for allegorical figures and representations of the ancient gods." (26)
• "The Lord commanded Moses to see that 'every man of the children of Israel shall pitch by his own standard, with the ensign of their father's house' (Numbers 2:2). Rabbinical commentators as early perhaps as the fifth century were of the opinion that the standards were emblazoned with the emblems of the twelve sons of Jacob drawn from his Blessing." (94)
• "In an era when merchants travelled all over the world it is not surprising that the impetus which led to a study of 'The naturall Language of the Hand' came from reflections that this was a way in 'which, without teaching, men in all regions of the habitable world doe at first sight most easily understand'; that there were those that drive 'a rich and silent Trade, by signes'; 'In this garbe long ago / We spake with th'Indian Apochankano.' The benefit of a sign language to the deaf and dumb also attracts his notice; it was not his chief interest at this time, but only four years later he was to publish the Philocophus." (205)
• [The argument of Bulwer's Philosophvs: or, the Deafe and Dumb mans friend]
  "EXHIBITING THE Philosophical verity of that subtile Art, which may inable one with an Observant Eie, to Heare what any man speaks by the moving of his lips. UPON THE SAME Ground, with the advantage of an Historicall Exemplification, apparently proving, That a Man borne Deafe and Dumbe, may be taught to Heare the sound of words with his Eie, and thence to speake with his Tongue." (213)
• "'Al sensation is performed by contact'; it follows, therefore, that 'one sense may be exercised by the Organs of another, by changing the offices of the Senses.' This is the 'anagram' or 'transposition to make something new' which is going to make it possible for the deaf and dumb to hear and speak." (215)
• "The title-page is invariably described as anonymous in the English literature, bibliographical and otherwise, of Hobbes and his Leviathan. Yet in France it has been ascribed since the middle of the seventeenth century to one of the most famous Parisian engravers of the day, Abraham Bosse (1602-76) and it has figured regularly in the literature of this artist as an unsigned work. The ascription dates back to Bosse's Parisian contemporary, the Abbe Michel de Marroles (1600-81), a famous connoisseur and collector of engravings, who included the frontispiece in his volumes and engravings by Bosse." (221)

Overstanding

• Assessment: The case studies are less applicable than the introduction, which provides a nice background on the early modern conception of title pages.
• Synthesis: Corbett & Lightbown provide a very interesting set of data to compare to Goldberg, especially in the passages regarding Bulwer's work on sign-language and the mutability of the five senses. In a very real way, the whole world is made text by Bulwer's system: text to be assembled and reassembled in anagrams with comparable meaning.
• Application: I'm most interested in pursuing the work on Bulwer--especially as it presents a materialist yet logocentric theory of perception. Some subsequent questions include: How did Bulwer conceive of the different arts--as mutually intelligible, or signifying differently through the approximation of different senses? How did Bulwer understand the operation of metaphor--on a materialist level of transcription and transliteration?

"Technopaigneia, Carmina Figurata, and Bilder-Reime" by Jeremy Adler

CITATION: Adler, Jeremy. "Technopaigneia, Carmina Figurata, and Bilder-Reime: Seventeenth-Century Figured Poetry in a Historical Perspective." Comparative Criticism 4 (1993): 107-48. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.
Understanding

• Question: How did Renaissance and early modern Europeans understand figured poetry?
• Answer: Renaissance European poets recovered the classical tradition of figure poetry, though they added to this the effects of metrical correspondence and appropriate subject matter. These additions suggest a belief in the correspondence between forms and meaning, and the pursuant possibility of religious articulation.
• Method: Adler divides several forms of figure poetry according to terminology, and accordingly, by language and culture. Consequently, Adler observes the different formal possibilities emended by different cultures to figure poetry, and therefore, theories of meaning.
• Technopaigneia: "poems written in lines of varying length which follow the outline of an object." (118)
• Carmina figurata: "the use of pictorial additions, after the manner of Hrabanus Maurus." (120-1)
• Gesamtkunstwerk: "poems [that] combine verse, music, and typography." (122)
• Bilder-Reime: "depend primarily on the normal devices of the (printed) language, which exists at one remove of the object, yet partakes in its nature. They require no pictorial adornment (but do not preclude it), since the necessary visual quality can be found in language itself." (129)
• Assumptions: Adler takes up Foucault rather naively, and thereby Adler seems to attribute a peculiar theory of language--so-called the "Book of Nature"--to the early moderns. 
• Sententiae:
• "As Wiliamowitz Moellendorff observed, the form of the poems does not emerge fully from the texts: they require calligraphic adjustment... Although the texts followed iconic principles to establish a general shape, iconicity was not their sole purpose. It provided a framework, not a grid, and departures for linguistic or metrical reasons were adjusted graphically. This gives a tripartite scheme of composition, which was re-adopted in the Renaissance: (1) iconic form; (2) linguistic formulation; (3) graphic execution. These three vehicles of meaning are interdependent. Interdependence does not, however, mean equality, and in the technopaigneia, language is central... For if the technopaigneia were so inscribed, the shape was secondary: the earliest texts were not autonomous picture-poems." (109)
• "Apart from their shape, these poems have a second, and quite distinct, visual quality: the peculiar arrangement of their lines. Three of them discard sequential linearity and invite a playful, yet also concentrated, manner of reading... The playfulness of this device is particularly evidenct in the 'Egg,' where the dexterity involved in handling the egg to discover its meaning is part of the fun." (110)
• "The form [of patterned poetry] was as inimical to the ethic of taste as it was irrelevant to the following ethos of Romanticism, and it is only very recently that writers have approached it with critical understanding... Sacrificing accuracy to effect, [Addison] (perhaps unwittingly) exaggerated the importance of the 'Procrustian' shape in the Greek technopaigneia, ignoring the fact that they follow metrical principles to create an outline which is only finalized calligraphically." (116)
• "Poets had become attuned to spatial methods of composition. Poetologically, however, figured poetry could be understood to develop the doctrine of ut pictura poesis... Generically, [figure poems] belonged with forms such as anagram and the number-poem as a playful kind, but also with the emblem. In emblematic terms, the figured poem conflates pictura  and subscriptio into a single word-image, thereby to become a kind of telescoped emblem, a modern equivalent of the hieroglyph. Finally, therefore, patterned poetry assumes an intellectual role comparable to that of the hieroglyph, by reflecting the universal and ideal 'language' of the 'Book of Nature' (Cook, 'Figured Poetry'). Underlying this metaphor of the 'book' is a set of ontological assumptions, apparent in the theory of language itself... On this view, language is not just a set of intelligible (human) signs, but is affined to Nature and partakes in the character of natural realities like stones or plants." (128)
• "The typography of the earliest editions [of "Easter Wings"] is worth attention in so visual a poem. In these, the stanzas appear vertically on facing pages, recalling the normal printing of Simias' 'Wings' and the wings of angels. But Herbert introduces two pairs of wings where Simias has one; this recalls the Renaissance printings of the technopaigneia in parallel Greek and Latin texts, which stimulated imitations in the late sixteenth century. Such parallel texts probably provided Herbert's iconographical source, and this may have a bearing on his poem." (139)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Adler's methodology seems a bit naive, especially considering the invocation of Foucault. The most glaring example is his attribution to early moderns of the "Book of Nature" theory of language. Less naively, I'd be interested in seeing how the early moderns interpreted classical technopaigneia, and what modes of meaning they attributed to it.
• Synthesis: Despite the above, the theory of language that Adler attributes to the early moderns resembles a claim by Norbrook: "Milton adopted a Protestantised version of the Renaissance theory that music and poetry had once been indissolubly allied, that the music of the ancients had unusual emotional power because each note was precisely adjusted in pitch and quantity to a corresponding syllable."
  Adler's attention to figure poetry has the potential to drastically revise the projects of scholars explicitly interested in image-texts, including Aston and Ingram. After all, what can be considered piece of print art, when type itself is print art? Gaskell may be interested to describe print art without a "mysterious collaboration" between printing-house and engraving shop. Watt may be interested to think about non-tabular, "illustrated" ballads without the necessary mark-up for expensive woodcuts.
• Application: Of course, Adler's argument regarding Simias' influence on Herbert is interesting, but it remains to be seen whether Latin-Greek figure poetry was sold in England in Herbert's time, much less whether or not Herbert owned any.
  Adler's argument reminds me that all print literature is a visual medium. Type is never far from xylography.

The Maid's Tragedy by Beaumont & Fletcher

PRIMARY SOURCE: The Maid's Tragedy (1619)
Context

• Publication: First performed 1610-11, by the King's Men, probably at the Blackfriar's, then at court. Fletcher is believed to have written 2:2, 4:1, 5:1-2, several notable for their sudden reversals. Registered to Richard Higgenbotham (2) and Francis Constable in 1619. There are two issues of the first edition, varying by the imprint: Higgenbotham (2) or Constable. DEEP has six editions. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars are interested in the representations of courtly politics and tyranny in the play, as well as the development of the tragi-comedy under Beaumont & Fletcher.
• Why I'm reading it: The counter-canon, ekphrasis, the court, tragicomedy, women.

Content

• Form: Play in five acts.
• Genre: Courtly/romantic tragedy.
• Conceit: Melantius returns from war to Rhodes, only to find that the King has given the hand of his sister Evadne to his friend Amintor, a courtier. The problem is that Amintor had already promised to marry Aspatia, daughter of old lord Calianax. Aspatia grieves, Calianax insults Melantius, and all watch a masque--the king bids Amintor to father a great warrior, and wishes all a good night. Evadne prepares for bed accompanied by Aspatia, who kisses Amintor while leaving. As Amintor regrets his reversal, Evadne reveals that she will never share her bed with him. Under threat from Amintor, she admits to being the queen's kept woman. Amintor will make the king's bastards appear to be legitimate children. Amintor sleeps on the floor to maintain the illusion.
  Aspatia commends her servants to never give away their hearts. For her broken heart, Calianax vows revenge. Vengeful Amintor casts aspersions on Evadne to Melantius, and makes the king doubt Evadne's loyalty as a kept woman. Amintor admits that Evadne has been faithful to the king, and vows non-violent vengeance. Amintor shares the truth with Melantius, who had just brushed off a threat from Calianax. Melantiaus threatens Amintor with death for this slander, which Amintor welcomes. Melantius is disabused, though Amintor threatens in order to die. They reconcile and plot against the king. Covertly, they plot with Calianax to secure the fortress as a faithful citadel. Melantius threatens Evadne into confessing her tryst, and she swears to kill the king. She reconciles with Amintor. Calianax leaks the plan to the king, who summons the conspirators. On the strength of his reputation, Melantius convinces the king that Calianax is a fool. They win control of the fortress, and Melantius persuades Amintor not to harm the sacred body of the king. Instead, Evadne puts the king in bondage, kills him with a knife, and forgives him.
  The king's brother Lysippus regroups to the citadel, under Melantius' control. Melantius and Lysippus agree to amnesty. Aspatia duels Amintor in disguise, on the pretense of avenging Aspatia's (her own) honor. Amintor stabs her, and Evadne enters with a bloody knife. She asks to be his wife, but he leaves in disgust. Evadne stabs herself and dies. Aspatia reveals her true identity before dying, and Amintor--bereft of all hope--kills himself. The bloody scene is uncovered by Melantius, Calianax, and Lysippus. Melantius tries to kill himself; Calianax stops him, and they are reconciled; Lysippus vows to be a chaste king.
• Sudden reversals by Fletcher:
• 4:1 Melantius pulls a double-reverse on Calianax before the king.
• 5:1-2 The bloody end.

• Other notes: In an extended ekphrastic section, Aspatia amends a number of classical allusions to make them match her sorrow.
• Mneumonic: Mel(antius) Ev(adne) Am(intor) Asp(atia) Cal(ianax) Lys(ippus)
  Melting evidence amounts (to) aspermous calamitous licensciousness.

Poetry (2) by Thomas Wyatt

PRIMARY SOURCE: (1557)

1. “If waker care, if sodayne pale Coulor”
2. “They flee from me”
3. “They flee from me” [manuscript]
4. “Mine Own John Poinz”

Context

• Publication: Wyatt was born c. 1503 to a Privy Councillor and Tudor loyalist. Wyatt studied at St. Johns College, Cambridge.  He married Elizabeth Brooke, daughter of Lord Cobham, c. 1520, though he divorced her c. 1525 on charges of adultery--around the same time he seems to have interested in Anne Boelyn. Asked to translate Petrarch in 1527, around the same time Henry VIII was interested in Anne Boelyn. Committed briefly to the Fleet for a brawl with the Sergeants of London in 1534. Imprisoned  to the Tower, probably as an ally of Anne, upon Suffolk's suggestion in 1536. After diplomatic missions 1539-40' is arrested in 1541 for association with Cardinal Pole. After a long life of public office in Kent, Wyatt is seized with fever after hard riding and dies at Sherbone. Wyatt's poetry circulated in manuscript, then published in A Booke of Ballets and Certain Psalms. Richard Tottel published 47 of Surrey's poems alongside 90 by Wyatt in the 1557 Miscellany. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars have been interested in Wyatt's early adoption of the sonnet, his role in politics, and in his use of heraldry.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, the court, sonnets, songs.

Content

• Form:

1. “If waker care, if sodayne pale Coulor”: Roughly a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic pentameter: abbaabbacdcdee
2. “They flee from me”: Rhyme royal (ababbcc), iambic pentameter.
3. “They flee from me” [manuscript]: Rhyme royal, iambic pentameter.
4. “Mine Own John Poinz”: Terza rima, iambic pentameter.

• Genre:

1. “If waker care, if sodayne pale Coulor”: Petrarchan love sonnet.
2. “They flee from me”: Love poem / erotic
3. “They flee from me” [manuscript]: Love poem / erotic
4. “Mine Own John Poinz”: Epistolary poem, Horatian satire.

• Conceit:

1. “If waker care, if sodayne pale Coulor”: The speaker is utterly devoted to Phyllis (totally not Brunet) and looks for signs of Phyllis's love in return.
2. “They flee from me”: The central gag is hunting as seduction. Remember "kind." In the Tottel version, the last line is a question but the penultimate line clarifies that the speaker was treated unkindly.
3. “They flee from me” [manuscript]: The central gag is hunting as seduction. In the Egerton manuscript, the last line is not a question, but the penultimate line is more ambiguous.
4. “Mine Own John Poinz”: In an extended passage, the speaker inventories all the ways he can't lie about human failings, including several references to song, birdsong, and painting.

Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts by DF McKenzie

CITATION: McKenzie, D F, and D F. McKenzie. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How can bibliography respond to changes in the nature of critical theory and texts?
• Answer: Bibliography can think expansively about the definition of the text, the text's interconnections within society, and the text's meaning within that society.
• Method: Largely speculative, though there is an extended discussion of film conservation towards the end.
• Assumptions: McKenzie responds to the 'high' bibliography tradition of Greg and Bowers, as well as the emergent deconstructive trend of the eighties.
• Sententiae:
• "The partial but significant shift [the acceptance of historical bibliography] signals is one from questions of textual authority to those of dissemination and readership as matters of economic and political motive." (1)
• "Like every other technology [the book] is invariably the product of human agency in complex and highly volatile contexts which a responsible scholarship must seek to recover if we are to understand better the creation and communication of meaning as the defining characteristic of human societies." (4)
• "The problem is, I think, that the moment we are required to explain signs in a book, as distinct from describing or copying them, they assume a symbolic status [as opposed to icons or indices]. If a medium in any sense effects a message, then bibliography cannot exclude from its own proper concerns the relation between form, function, and symbolic meaning." (10)
• "In speaking of bibliography as the sociology of texts, I am not concerned to invent new names but only to draw attention to its actual value. Derrida's 'Grammatology,' the currently fashionable word 'Textuality,' the French 'Textologie,' or even 'Hyphologie' (a suggestion made, not altogether seriously, by Roland Barthes) would exclude more than we would wish to lose. Nor is bibliography a sub-field of semiotics, precisely because its functions are not merely synchronically descriptive. Our own word, 'Bibliography,' will do." (16)
• "The history of material objects as symbolic forms functions, therefore, in two ways. It can falsify certain readings; and it can demonstrate new ones... it could be argued that we reach the border between bibliography and textual criticism on the one hand and literary criticism on the other. My own view is that no such border exists. In the pursuit of historical meanings, we move from the most minute feature of the material book to questions of authorial, literary, and social context." (23)
• "Saussure's insistence upon the primacy of speech has created a further problem for book-based bibliography by confining critical attention to verbal structures as an alphabetic transcription of what are conceived only as words to be spoken. Other formalized languages, or properly perhaps, dialects of written language--graphic, algebraic, hieroglyphic, and, most significantly for our purposes, typographic--have suffered an exclusion from critical debate about the interpretation of texts because they are not speech-related. They are instrumental of course to writing and printing, but given the close interdependence of linguistics, structuralism, and hermeneutics, and the intellectual dominance of those disciplines in recent years, it is not surprising perhaps that the history of non-verbal sign systems, including even punctuation is still in its infancy, or that the history of typographic conventions as mediators of meaning has yet to be written." (34)
• "I find it more worrying that such a view [to never conflate any one version of a text with another] of the function of textual criticism fails to account for 'intention' as a 'speculative instrument' (in IA Richards's phrase), a means of creating a master-text, a kind of ideal-copy text, transcending all versions and true to the essential intention of the 'work.'" (37)
• "The argument that a rock in Arunta country is a text subject to bibliographical exposition is absurd only if one thinks of arranging such rocks on a shelf and giving them classmarks. It is the importation into Arunta land of a single-minded obsession  with book-forms, in the highly relative context of the last few hundred years of European history, which is the real absurdity." (41)
• "The ostensible unity of any one 'contained' text--be it in the shape of a manuscript, book, map, film, or computer-stored file--is an illusion. As a language, its forms and meaning derive from other texts; and as we listen to, look at, or read it, at the very same time we re-write it." (60)
• "[B]ibliography is the means by which we establish the uniqueness of any single text as well as the means by which we are able to uncover all its inter-textual dimensions." (61)
• "It is my contention of course that this distinction [between film as text and cinema] ultimately fails, since the definition of meaning--in reading the conventional details of a text--is logically dependent upon prior decisions and social effect." (67)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Inspiring! Although speculative, McKenzie points forward with a bibliographical approach balanced between high theory and high bibliography--and capable of generative integration with both.
• Synthesis: Immediately after reading Goldberg, McKenzie seems to be both dramatically under-theorized (it is not enough to be conversant with Barthes, one must deconstruct Barthes himself!) and sublimely clear. Aside from that, McKenzie seems to pick up on the New Historical trend with some alacrity--comparing the Arunta story-scape to an inverted Faerie Queene was a deft move, worthy of Greenblatt--though McKenzie may not necessarily de-privilege the literary according to the challenge of Shakespearean Negotiations. McKenzie's approach clearly lays the groundwork for the bibliographical image-text research of Evenden, Freeman, and Gaskell.
• Application: The large number of sententiae above indicate the passages that I believe point towards an integration not only between book history and image-text, but more significantly, book-history and a historicized theory of formalism.

Actes and Monuments (selections) by John Foxe

PRIMARY SOURCE: Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church (1563-70)
Context

• Publication: Naturally, this is deveolped at length by Evenden & Freeman. EEBO link 1. EEBO link 2.
• Scholarship: Scholarship on Actes and Monuments largely considers Foxe as a Protestant propagandist, his political connections, and the development of a Protestant iconography.
• Why I'm reading it: Illustrations! The Canon, history of religion.

Content

• Form: Illustrated prose.
• Genre: Protestant history. Martyrology.
• Conceit:
• 1. "Dedication to Queen Elizabeth I"
     Foxe compares Elizabeth to Constantine and himself to Eusebius as an analogy to elicit Elizabeth's support for this martyrology.
  2. "The Miraculous Preservation of the Lady Elizabeth"
     Foxe narrates the seizure, transport, trials, and imprisonment of Elizabeth following the Wyatt rebellion. Elizabeth is imprisoned around Palm Sunday, transferred on Trinity Sunday, and sent to Woodstock until the death of Mary. Foxe ventures an interesting side-narrative to exhibit the unloyal nature of a metonymic Catholic merchant.
  3. "From the Life of William Tyndale"
     
     
  4. "The Burning of Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley"
     
     
  5. "The Examination and Execution of Alice Driver and Alexander Gouch"
     
     
  6. "The Hairbreadth escape and Exile of the Duchess of Suffolk"
     
     
  7. "The Deliverance of Catherine Parr from Court Intrigue"
     
     
• Other notes:

Writing Matter by Jonathan Goldberg

CITATION: Goldberg, Jonathan. Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1990. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How is power embedded in the cultural practices of handwriting in the English Renaissance?
• Answer: The secretary's hand is the locus for the inscription of the individual and modernity.
  Various writing texts surrounding the English Renaissance discuss certain modes of writing as natural, but the act of instructing writing actually produces the writing presumed as natural. Throughout these practices, writing instruction anatomizes the student into a hand and an eye; writing instruction individuates students through the practices of copying; writing instruction creates its own narrative as a mimetic, natural language in the past and future; writing instruction creates an arch-writer, who functions as the right hand of the sovereign, and thereby becomes the exemplary human.
• Method: Derridean analysis, some new historicism, and a bit of antihumanist metaphysics.
• Assumptions: The entire Derridean apparatus is a heavy import. More lightly, Goldberg riffs pretty heavily on a quill and a knife through phallic and oral metaphors, respectively. I think it's utter bunkum to take these metaphors so seriously in relation to a period when knives were practical tools--in a period, namely, before sliced bread.
• Sententiae: [I honestly have extensive notes that I might put here. I would prefer not to.]

Overstanding

• Assessment: I defer to John M. Ellis' Against Deconstruction for the following:
• "First of all... Even in admitting that speech cannot exist until writing is possible, Derrida is conceding the logical priority of speech, since it is speech's existence that makes writing possible. The second point is that Derrida's attempt to shift the meaning of the word writing... also fails... Derrida, given where he wants to go next, is not in a position to advance an argument that appeals to an irreducible kernel of anything. He will soon rule out the possibility of any central, essential meaning for a word. The major objection to this stage of Derrida's argument, however, lies in its being an example of a very well known logical mistake. We begin with three terms: language, speech, and writing. The first contains the second and the third. The question is now which of these last two has priority. Derrida is attempting to prove that the third has priority over the second, in the face of some obvious arguments to the contrary. To do so, he replaces our first triad of terms (language speech, writing) with a different triad: writing, phonic, graphic. He substitutes the second triad for the first, and now writing has precedence over everything." [emphasis original] (23-4)
• Synthesis: There are some superficial resemblances between Goldberg's book and other New Historical projects, but I believe these belie the deeper methodological differences. In my most charitable reading, Goldberg responds responsibly to Ong's charge--that deconstruction creates a tyrannous similarity by interpreting all things as texts--by reinvesting in the materiality of all texts. In such an interpretation, Goldberg's approach is very sympathetic to Fleming, and possibly to new bibliographers.
• Application: Continuing the charitable reading above, Goldberg's position could support further material history. For my purposes, I'm interested in possible art-historical responses to the problem of differance: how do graphic graphics escape the problem of logocentrism, while still participating in the media of writing and print?

Poetry (1) by Thomas Wyatt

PRIMARY SOURCE: (1557)

1. “My galy charged with forgetfulnes” 
2. “Marvaill no more all tho”

Context

• Publication: Wyatt was born c. 1503 to a Privy Councillor and Tudor loyalist. Wyatt studied at St. Johns College, Cambridge.  He married Elizabeth Brooke, daughter of Lord Cobham, c. 1520, though he divorced her c. 1525 on charges of adultery--around the same time he seems to have interested in Anne Boelyn. Asked to translate Petrarch in 1527, around the same time Henry VIII was interested in Anne Boelyn. Committed briefly to the Fleet for a brawl with the Sergeants of London in 1534. Imprisoned  to the Tower, probably as an ally of Anne, upon Suffolk's suggestion in 1536. After diplomatic missions 1539-40' is arrested in 1541 for association with Cardinal Pole. After a long life of public office in Kent, Wyatt is seized with fever after hard riding and dies at Sherbone. Wyatt's poetry circulated in manuscript, then published in A Booke of Ballets and Certain Psalms. Richard Tottel published 47 of Surrey's poems alongside 90 by Wyatt in the 1557 Miscellany. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars have been interested in Wyatt's early adoption of the sonnet, his role in politics, and in his use of heraldry.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, the court, sonnets, songs.

Content

• Form:

1. “My galy charged with forgetfulnes”: Roughly a Shakespearean sonnet, variable meter.
2. “Marvaill no more all tho”: Iambic trimeter, eight-line stanza, ababacac.

• Genre:

1. “My galy charged with forgetfulnes”: Petrarchan boat poem.
2. “Marvaill no more all tho”: Petrarchan lament

• Conceit:

1. “My galy charged with forgetfulnes”: Sailing-by-starlight metaphor for a Stoic lament.
2. “Marvaill no more all tho”: A synesthetic inventory of lament results in an aestheticized sadness, and thanks to Fortune for the song.

"Printing House and Engraving Shop" by Roger Gaskell

CITATION: Gaskell, Roger. "Printing House and Engraving Shop: A Mysterious Collaboration." Book Collector, 53 (2004), 213-54. Web.
Understanding

• Question: How can copperplate engravings in books be described with the tools of analytical bibliography?
• Answer: Records of the Oxford press adduce information about the working conditions of copperplate engravers, as do 17th C. manuals on the proper operation of the copperplate press.
• Method: Analytical bibliographical, of course. Gaskell also begins with a quirky New Historical-flavored anecdote about Oxford copperplate pornography, or "Aretino," discretely.
• Assumptions: Gaskell struggles with the possibility of a four-man copperplate press team, as opposed to a smaller team that could be more remunerative to the pressmen.
• Sententiae: 
• "Book illustrations are often discussed in the print literature, but with little acknowledgement that their production may well be different from that ofsingle leaf prints; and that their interpretation certainly must be." (214)
• "The Cambridge University Press did own a copperplate press in the late seventeenth century, but significantly it did not directly employ copperplate printers, but hired itinerant workmen. These are the excep- tions that prove the rule: copperplate printing for book work was carried on in separate workshops, by firms independent of the printing houses, and this was the rule for the whole of the hand-press period." (216)
• "In England copperplate printers were not controlled by any guild, they did not have to be members of the Stationer's company, and very little is known of their organisation. In the Pepys Library there is an invitation card for a dinner organised by the 'Loving Society of Roling-Press- Printers' in about 1685." (217-8)
• "The actual process of taking an impression from a copperplate was described for the first time by Abraham Bosse in the caption to his large plate of 1642, and in more detail in his manual of 1645. The copper plate, a few millimetres thick, is first warmed over a brazier, making it easier to work the rather stiff ink into the lines engraved on the plate. This is done with a rubber, a tight roll of old linen cloth, stippling and rubbing the ink into the lines, using the fingers as well if necessary. After this all the ink has to be wiped from the surface of the plate. Two stages of wiping with rags, the second stage rags replacing the first as they be- come soiled, are followed by wiping with the heel of the hand, the fleshy part below the little finger of the right hand. The plate is now briefly returned to the brazier before being carried to the press, the edges given a final wipe and the last traces of ink polished off the surface with some French chalk on the hand. (I'm told that traditionally copperplate printers, because of their inky palms, would greet visitors with a sort of Masonic hand-shake using only their thumb and first two fingers.) Since the surface of the plate produces the white areas of the image, the slightest smudge, or a fine scratch that holds ink, will show up." (219)
• "On wooden or common presses, speeds of up to 250 impressions an hour were quite normal. Working a ten hour day or more, output figures at the Cambridge University Press at the end of the seventeenth century were regularly between about 1500 and 3000 impressions a day, or between 750 and 1500 perfected sheets (printed on both sides). Copperplate printing is much slower, mostly because the inking of the late, and particularly the wiping, are very time-consuming and skilled operations. A few hundred impressions a day at the most could be printed, and then probably only of single illustrations, rather than the 4, 8, or 16 pages printed on a sheet for a folio, quarto or octavo book. " (220)
• "McKenzie calculated this from the fact that the printer, John Ebrall, who charged 8d. per 100 impressions, put in a bill for 15s. for three days work. If this is correct, it is a very high output compared with figures I have found for the print-trade, but it is in line with figures given much later in Berthiau and Boitard's 1837 manual, where it is stated that 400 impressions a day might be achieved with a three man crew, raised to 700 impressions with a four man crew. Thus the Cambridge University Press figures possibly suggest that a press crew or four men was being employed, in which the inking and wiping would have been shared between two or three men. McKenzie assumed that the payment of 5s. a day was for a single workman, so he was led to the conclusion that copperplate printing at 5s. a day was better paid than letterpress printing at from IS. 6d. to 3s. per day. But if my suggestion is right, then the 5s. had to be divided among four workmen, making them worse paid than the letterpress printers." (221)
• "A standard assumption is that paper accounted for half the production costs ofa book at this time, so that leaving aside composition and engraving, we can see that adding a plate to a quarto of 30 sheets (240 pages) in an edition of $00 copies is like adding three sheets, it adds 10 per cent to the machining costs or 5 per cent to overall production costs. The cost of cutting the woodblock compared with engraving a plate would in some cases be more, in some less, depending on the subject. The above figures are probably not generally applicable, but this analysis suggests the kind of approach that should be used in trying to get a sense of the cost implications of including copperplate illustrations in a book." (222)
• "The real reason that plates are printed on different paper is not that better paper is strictly necessary for everyday bookwork, but has to do with the fact that the copperplate printers were independent of the letterpress printers, and their paper was bought in a different way... I am convinced that the copperplate printer supplied his own paper." (225)
• "[T]the oblong shape of the plate is in the same orientation as the oblong shape of the full sheet of paper. The position of the plate relative to the edge of the sheet is significant because it tells us something about the planning of a book... The stub will almost invariably be seen coming out a few pages back, or further on in the book, looking as if a leafhas been cut out (alarming for the novice book collector)." (226)
• "[I]in fine work, where the binder removed the plates before beating, the most natural course would be to put them back where they came from, but with the possibility that they would go back in the wrong place. This seems to be borne out by the observation that multiple copies of seventeenth-century books in contemporary trade bindings tend to have the plates in the same places and similarly folded, but position and folding are more variable in higher class bindings." (228)
• "Could the difference between printing on cut leaves as opposed to several at once on a single sheet have had something to do with the size of the press crew? With three or four men inking and wiping plates, a pressman might be kept busy pulling impressions as the plates were pre- sented to him one at a time. On the other hand one man working alone would perhaps find it more economical to ink and wipe several plates, then lay out and print them on a single sheet of paper all at once with only one pass through the press. But this is pure speculation. There is something else very intriguing about the possibility of a three- or four-man press crew. With three men, four plates would be being printed concurrently, since one plate is warming on the brazier while the other three are being inked, wiped and printed. With a four-man team five plates would be in concurrent production. So if a book had only one or two plates, this could mean they would have been printed con- currently with the plates for another book. If we could identify the paper stock, perhaps it would be possible to identify a particular copper- plate printer working on the plates for two or more books, perhaps even doing work for two different publishers at the same time." (229)
• "Therefore copies of a book with the same title-page and text can have later impressions and states of the plates, or even different plates, and this can indeed be observed." (230)
• "Different kinds of illustration have different relationships with the text and this relationship may be revealed by the internal reference system used, or the lack of one. There are three principal ways in which text can refer to images: first the illustration is placed adjacent to the text which refers to it; second a reference system is used in the text, such as plate and figure number; third an explanatory caption, not part of the narrative of the text is attached to the plate or printed on a facing page." (232)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Well-researched, strong bibliography--though perhaps not carrying the interpretive ramifications I would like.
• Synthesis: This may be the first true bibliography that I've read in a while. Nevertheless, the mode of Gaskell's method provides a more focused approach to New Historicism than some of the flightier connections between, say, Othello and a shepherd's record of a black ram's tupping. That is, with a focus on analytical bibliography, scholars can precisely understand some of the discourses that shaped the previously privileged "literary" texts.
• Application: I would love to apply some of these interpretive tools to the copperplate illustrations in Paradise Lost.

The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker

PRIMARY SOURCE: The Roaring Girl (1611)
Context

• Publication: Written by Decker and Middleton for Prince Henry's Men; performed in 1611. Printed by Nicholas Okes for Thomas Archer. The title-page features an illustration of Moll. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars are interested in the gender-epistemology invoked by a character like Moll. Is she a proto-feminist, or an exceptional character that rather reaffirms the norm (as per Greenblatt)? Her Amazonian nature resembles established stereotypes, as well as Spenser's Brittomart.
• Why I'm reading it: The counter-canon, social satire.

Content

• Form: Iambic pentameter couplets. Five acts.
• Genre: Comedy.
• Conceit: 
• The titular character, Moll Cutpurse, is modeled on Mary Frith. She famously wore men's clothing, roared, associated with criminals, and came before the court many times for theft.
• In the main plot, Sir Alexander Wengrave prevents his son, Sebastian, from marrying Mary Fitzallard, because of her small dowry. Sebastian pretends to love Moll Cutpurse, to make Mary look acceptable in comparison. Moll gently rebuffs Sebastian and confirms her chastity. Sir Alexander falls for Sebsatian's trick, but hates Moll as a thief and so hires a spy, "honest Ralph" Trapdoor, to defame Moll. Moll takes on Trapdoor as a servant, but then learns of Sebastian's plot and agrees to help. Moll diverts Trapdoor's plots with cunning, but defends him from a gang nevertheless. In the end, Trapdoor confesses his plot and apologizes. Moll and Sebastian create one final ruse for Sir Alexander and Sir Fitzallard, showing them the value of the Mary-Sebastian match. Sir Alexander sees the true virtue in Moll, and Sebastian may marry Mary.
• In one subplot, Laxton seduces Mrs. Gallipot for thirty pounds from Mr. Gallipot. Mrs. Gallipot becomes disillusioned with Laxton and confesses to her husband, denouncing Laxton.
• In another subplot, Goshawk tries to Mrs. Openwork, but Mr. and Mrs. Openwork outmaneuver Goshawk and expose him.
• Other notes:
• In the closing soliloquy, Moll anatomizes her own face and then relates it to the plot.
• Mneumonic: Wen(grave) Seb(astian) Mar(y) Moll Tra(pdoor) La(xton) Gal(lipot) Go(shawk) Op(enwork).
• When sybarite marriages mollify a transvestite lad, gallantry guards obedience.

Shakespearean Negotiations by Stephen Greenblatt

CITATION:
Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How do Shakespeare's works acquire their compelling force?
• Answer: Artistic works that are fully committed to their cultural contingency can transfer social "stuff" from one domain to another.
• Method: [This book is more of an exposition in method than a single-minded argument.] In short, Greenblatt restores contemporary documents from "context" to comparison with Shakespeare's plays. In most cases, Greenblatt observes the way that political forces constitute their own subversion, whether in real or fictional discourses.
• Assumptions: Greenblatt adopts the Foucauldian perspective towards power and the individual, which is not entirely compatible with other methods which interest me.
• Sententiae: 
• "Despite the wooden walls and the official regulations, the boundaries between the theater and the world were not fixed, nor did they constitute a logically coherent set; rather they were a sustained collective improvisation." (14)
• "Conversely, we identify as principles of order and authority in Renaissance texts what we would, if we took them seriously, find subversive for ourselves: religious and political absolutism, aristocracy of birth, demonology, humoral psychology, and the like. That we do not find such notions subversive, that we complacently identify them as principles of aesthetic or political order, replicates the process of containment taht licensed the elements we call subversive in Renaissance texts: that is, our own values are sufficiently strong for us to contain alien forces almost effortlessly." (39)
• "The concrete individual exists only in relation to forces that pull against spontaneous singularity and that draw any given life, however peculiarly formed, toward communal norms." (75) 
• "I hasten to disclaim that Shakespeare took a lively interest in the medical discourse about sex, or that he favored one theory of generation over another... But there is no unmediated access to the body, no direct appropriation of sexuality; rather sexuality is itself a network of historically contingent figures that constitute the culture's categorical understanding of erotic experience." (86)
• "This strategy--the reinscription of evil onto the professed enemies of evil--is one of the characteristic operations of religious authority in the early modern period and has its secular analogues in more recent history when famous revolutionaries are paraded force to be tried as counter-revolutionaries." (98)
• "For Harsnett the theatrical seduction is not merely a Jesuitical strategy; it is the essence fo the church itself: Catholicism is a 'Mimic superstition.' Harsnett's response is to try to drive the Catholic church into the theater, just as during the Reformation Catholic clerical garments--the copes and albs and amices and stoles that were the glories of medieval textile crafts--were sold to the players." (112) 
• "In a move that Ben Jonson rather than Shakespeare seems to have anticipated, the theater itself comes to be emptied out in the interests of reading... Where institutions like the King's Men had been thought to generate their texts, now texts like King Lear appear to generate their institutions. The commercial contingency of the theater gives way to the philosophical necessity of literature." (127-8)
• "The aesthetic space--or more accurately, the commercial space fo the theatrical joint-stock company--is constituted by the simultaneous appropriation of and swerving from the discourse fo power. And this doubleness in effect produces two different accounts of the nature of mimetic economy. In one account, aesthetic representation is unlike all other exchanges because it takes nothing; art is pure plenitude... [T]here is another version of mimetic economy, one in which aesthetic exchanges, like all other exchanges, always involve loss, even if it is cunningly hidden; in which aesthetic value... is the very soul of scarcity." (159-160)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Admittedly, no one waits with baited breath to hear of what I think of Greenblatt. Nevertheless, I hesitate to quibble with the absolute dissolution of the individual, although I enjoy the critical license granted to me by the Foucauldian work of spotting discourses. Ultimately, that critical license may prove dangerous. The critic has the privilege of associating cultural elements--however disparate--and making the case for an episteme that is subtly--invisibly and therefore powerfully--governing all things. That is, this method runs the risk of making stone soup.
• Synthesis: The natural compliment to Greenblatt is Norbrook, though King, too, may have benefitted from some of Greenblatt's paradoxes. Whereas Greenblatt coyly observes the interplay between political and literary texts under the same episteme, King sets the arts downstream from political culture--understandable in the case of commissioned art, but dangerous at large.
• Application: Greenblatt's given me a lot to mull over, but I'm interested in the degree to which the "representative anecdote" of New Historical analysis can be substituted or complimented by large-scale statistical analysis. While population statistics don't belie the paradoxical institutions of power, they do speak to the material effect of many discourses over time.

Poetry by Henry Howard

PRIMARY SOURCE:

• "I never saw my lady lay apart"
• "The sun hath twice brought forth his tender green"
• "London! hast thou accused me"
• "Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest" 

Context

• Publication: Surrey was born eldest son of Thomas Howard and Elizabeth Stafford (daughter to Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham), entitled Earl of Surrey at age 7 when his father ascended to Duke of Norfolk upon his father's death, and raised alongside Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, from age 12. Surrey spent a year at the French court, returning for Anne Boelyn's wedding. Surrey wed Frances de Vere, daughter to the Earl of Oxford, in 1532. The Seymours conspired against Surrey at court, eventually resulting in Surrey's imprisonment in Windsor. He returned to favor, but was imprisoned in Fleet for drunken rioting, where he composed "London hast thou accused me." Despite his service in war, the Seymours won a campaign to have Surrey convicted of treason. Among other reasons, Surrey displayed the royal quarterings on his shield. Surrey's poetry circulated in manuscript long after his death, and Richard Tottel published 47 of them alongside 90 by Wyatt in the Miscellany. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars have been interested in Surrey's early adoption of the sonnet, in his Ovidianism, his erotic politics, and in his use of heraldry.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, the court, sonnets, songs, heraldry.

Content

• Form:
• "I never saw my lady lay apart": Iambic pentameter. Shakespearean rhyme scheme.
• "The sun hath twice brought forth his tender green": Iambic pentameter. abab
• "London! hast thou accused me": Iambic tetrameter. abab
• "Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest": Iambic pentameter. abab
• Genre:
• "I never saw my lady lay apart": Sonnet.
• "The sun hath twice brought forth his tender green": Lover's lament.
• "London! hast thou accused me": Satiric jeremiad.
• "Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest": Elegy and encomium.
• Conceit:
• "I never saw my lady lay apart": The speaker can't see his Petrarchan lover through her hairpiece.
• "The sun hath twice brought forth his tender green": A pathetic environment mourns the speaker's spurning by his lady.
• "London! hast thou accused me": The speaker hides his unruly behavior with a feigned jeremiad.
• "Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest": The speaker anatomizes Wyatt's corpse to praise his virtues.

Poetry by Thomas Carew

PRIMARY SOURCE: "An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of Paul's, Dr. John Donne" and "To Ben Jonson" (1640)

Context

• Publication: Carew wrote throughout the 20s and 30s, and associated with the Jonson circle in the Caroline court. Carew was made gentleman of the Privy Chamber Extraordinary and Sewer in Ordinary to the King (dining planner). Carew's courtly output was mixed: he borrowed from Giordano Bruno's philosophy for Coelum Britannicum, and translated nine Psalms, despite his reputation for witty society poems and libertine ethics. Poems printed by John Dawson for Thomas Walkley in 1640. Quarto. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Carew's drawn attention as a master of late Caroline courtly poetry, a successor to Jonson and Donne, and an earlier commentor on contemporary English poetry.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, the court, formalism.

Content

• Form: Iambic pentameter couplets.
• Genre: 
• Elegy. 
• Ode.
• Conceit:
• The elegy begins with a lament and memento mori based on Donne's passing. The poem then praises Donne's rhetorical powers of convention and invention. Ultimately, the poem praises Donne as a priest of both Apollo and God.
• The ode begins by praising Jonson's powers as a censor to bad poetry, but then switches to praising the harmony in his lines and characters: all showing the same mind, but all different. Other poets aspire to match his craft, but he is justly greater than them.

“The Iconography of A Book of Christian Prayers (1578) Illustrated” by Samuel Chew

CITATION: Chew, Samuel C. "The Iconography of "a Book of Christian Prayers" (1578) Illustrated."Huntington Library Quarterly. 8.3 (1945): 293-305. Print.
Understanding

• Question: What do the woodcut illustrations of A Book of Christian Prayers reveal about their production?
• Answer: John Daye and his son, Richard, gradually but haphazardly replaced woodcuts in opposition to possible subjects for Catholic adoration.
• Method: Chew analyzes successive editions of A Book of Christian Prayer for subject, substitutions, order, and maintenance.
• Assumptions: Chew presumes that Daye's entire illustrative crew was Dutch or German. Chew also assumes that John Daye exercised strong control over the illustrative content under his son's purview until his death.
• Sententiae: "In the Booke of Christian Prayers of 1578 the iconographical scope has been immensely enlarged, in fact, enhanced greater than in any French Houre I have ever seen... Intelligent supervision is at work. Richard Daye (or whoever was in charge in 1578--and it was probably he) made two drastic changes in the sequence [removing the central Pieta, substituting the Maries visiting the Tomb], changes which are not without interest doctrinally and were perhaps forced upon him by authority. " (299)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Solid bibliographic work, though  underdeveloped in its conclusions.
• Synthesis: Chew's work must now be read in light of Evenden and Freeman, for further clarity on Daye's labor force, his political restrictions--which I believe were more shaped by aspiration than decree--and his working relationship with Richard.
• Application: Chew's work does not directly address any items on my list, but it does provide a cursory glance into the shop of Daye and a general window onto the religious iconography surrounding Gascoigne, Sidney, and Spenser.

Volpone by Ben Jonson

PRIMARY SOURCE: Volpone (1605/6)
Context

• Publication: Opened at the Globe in 1606 with a cast that had recently performed Othello. The original run was successful until the closing of the playhouses. Published both in the 1607 Quarto Volpone and the 1616 Folio Works. Corrections to the F are relatively minor, with the exception of Celia's reaction to the rape at the end--she is rendered desperate in Q, rational in F. Quarto printed by George Eld for Thomas Thorppe. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars read Volpone to understand Jonson's shifting comedic effects--from morality plays to dark social satire.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, social satire.

Content

• Form: A play in five acts. No constant verse.
• Genre: Comedy, social satire.
• Conceit: Volpone has amassed a fortune through questionable means. He works with Mosca to feign fatal illness and attract sycophants. Mosca assures Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino that they are all the favorites to be Volpone's heir--and he advises Corbaccio to disinherit his son. Volpone commits to sleep with Corvino's wife, Celia. While selling snake oil, Volpone haggles with Sir Politic and Peregrine and sees Celia. Mosca persuades Corvino to send Celia to Volpone. After a tortuous encounter with Lady Would-Be, Corvino delivers Celia to Volpone, saying that she should prove her virginity. Mosca diverts Bonario. Volpone nearly rapes Celia, but Bonario saves her. Corbaccio enters but sees Volpone as an invalid. Mosca reassures Corbaccio, then convinces Voltore to help him defraud Corbaccio, and that Bonario attacked Volpone. Voltore prosecutes Bonario and Celia, and the witnesses are Corbaccio, Corvino, and Lady Would-Be: the Lady is motivated by Mosca's promise of Volpone's inheritence. Volpone fakes his death, and sends Mosca out as his heir. The sycophants begin to rescind their stories without any further incentive, and Mosca is ready to confirm Volpone's faked death unless Volpone concede actual riches. Volpone reveals himself, and justice is served.
• Other notes: Mneumonic: Vol(pone) Mos(ca) Cor(baccio) Bo(naria) Cor(vino) Ce(lia) Wou(ld-Be)
  Volition must corrupt both co-receivers, seen woolgathering.

Cheap Print and Popular Piety by Tessa Watt

CITATION: Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Print.
Understanding

• Question: Does "cheap print" reflect a popular culture, or one defined by limited access to markets, limited literacy, and Protestant propaganda?
• Answer: The cheap print market was limited by its illiteracy and remoteness to musical and godly ballads, controlled in the 17th C. by a cartel of "ballad partners." Illustrated broadsides reflect the background of woodcut illustrations in Protestant epistemologies and reveal the application of printed illustrations for popular decoration. The chapbook trade shifted in the 17th C. from polemical and religious print to news pamphlets and plays.
• Method: Watt tracks surviving copies of ephemeral literature and reconstructs trends with the aid of the Stationer's Register.
• Assumptions: 
• Watt responds to a tradition that views both the popular press and Protestantism to be monolithic, sometimes sympathetic, revolutionary forces. In turn, Watt seeks to demonstrate the multiplicity of motives, modes, and methods for the proliferation of print and Protestantism.
• Watt plays fast and loose with some established figures relating the survival rates of ephemera.
• Sententiae: 
• "[O]nly some 250 [16th C. broadsides] exist in black-letter copies... A comparison of the Registers with the surviving [ballads] shows that approximately 65% were recorded... Assuming 65% registration, and allowing for a constant output during the years for which there is no Stationers' Register (1550-7 and 1571-6), this figure represents probably 3,000 distinct ballads in the second half of the sixteenth century." (42)
• "The consolidation of copyrights to the popular ballad titles was accompanied by a new emphasis on what we would now call 'marketing strategy'. The most striking change was the institution of woodcut pictures as a standard feature.... Only one fifth of surviving sixteenth-century religious ballads are illustrated. Taking sixteenth-century collections as a whole... , no more than roughly one quarter have some kind of woodcut decoration. In the seventeenth century, the proportion of ballads with woodcuts was completely reversed. For the period 1600-40, more than five-sixths of extant religious ballads are illustrated." (78-9)
• "The fact that reading required some education as a prerequisite could be used as an argument for allowing religious illustration in print. When Archbishop Laud was charged with permitting bibles with superstitious pictures to be sold, he claimed that 'they were not to be sold to all comers, because they may be abused, and become evil; and yet might be sold to learned and discreet men, who might turn them to good.' This was a neat reversal of the view held a century earlier that pictures were 'laymen's books' especially for the unlearned and illiterate." (160)
• "How did [publishers and craftsmen] respond to restrictions in the range of acceptable images? ... one response was the use of biblical figures which were not associated with cults of devotion: generally, a shift from saints, and the central characters fo the Gospels, to Old Testament figures... A second reaction of publishers and craftsmen was to sidestep direct depictions of the most sacred by developing allegorical or emblematic themes instead... A final response to the problems surrounding religious imagery was simply avoidance." (161-162)
• "The 'ballad partners' may have avoided religious themes in their large poster-size prints, but the woodcuts they used on their ballads tell quite a different story, testifying to a continued demand for religious images." (167)
• "On the right of [Christus natus est] is the 'exlanation' of the so-called conceits: the Latin comic-strip speech bubbles. This is very much a down-market version of the emblem, where the viewer is not expected to decipher the meaning fo the animal symbols on his own, and is helpfully given a translation of the simple Latin." (176)
• "Murray Roston has commented that in biblical drama there was from the mid-sixteenth century 'a gradual move down the ladder of sanctity.' First the depiction fo central figures from the Gospels was considered irreverent, then slowly the Old Testament became sacrosanct too. The playwrights moved a rung down to the Apocrypha, and finally to the histories of Josephus." (185)
• "The Elizabethan homily against idolatry made a careful distinction between narrative pictures and static icons: 'And a process of a story, painted with the gestures and actions of many persons, and commonly the sum of the story written withal, hath another use in it, than one dumb idol or image standing by itself.'" (185)
• "Godet's Paris connection helps us to estimate the price fo his woodcuts. We have a 1598 inventory of the rue Montorgueuil woodcut designers, Denis de Mathoniere. The uniformity of style throughout these woodcuts means that we can extrapolate Godet's probably prices from this inventory, De Mathoniere's woodcut prints were valued in bulk at about 0.17d. Even with a retail mark-up of four times that amount, they would still be under 1d. each; 4d. for a series of six." (188)
• "It may be that despite their reasonable price, prints at 2d. were not as good value for humbler households as sturdier decorations like painted cloths, which would better survive the ravages of smoke from the hearth (as well as serving the practical purpose of insulation)." (189)
• "A 42-sheet series of biblical scenes would not have been affordable to the same wide audience who bought ballads. However, it may have had a greater impact if it was used by other craftsmen as a pattern book. At all levels of skill, the major source copied by painters was the printed picture. Prints were the standard medium for passing visual information and artistic themes across geographical distances. The influence of devotional woodcuts has often been used to explain the late fifteenth century 'decline' of wall painting into a style of stiff figures and harsh black outlines." (191-2)
• "With the strong black lines and stunted figures [of 'A pleasant new ballad of Tobias'], the effect of these [broadside ballad] woodcuts is not unlike that of the painted series at the White Swan." (210)
• "[T]he beginning of the seventeenth century was also a time when emblem books and emblematic engraved title-pages were gaining [sic] in popularity: the old iconographic tradition in a new form. Like the arts of memory, the emblem books built up concepts from sets of related images, and gave the sense of vision a central role in the acquisition of moral and spiritual knowledge. In the broadside tables we are not witnesing the word ousting the pictorial symbol, but rather a co-existence and tension between the two." (244)
• "The ballad publishershad access to a network of chapmen; at what point did they begin to distribute chapbooks along this network as well?" (272)
• "Even to write of Protestantism and print as 'forces' is misleading: we need to see them not as coherent and unchanging entities... but as inseperable from andconstantly modified by the cultural contexts in which they are found. ... Quarter sessions, assize and church records document local conflicts over sexual morality, ale-selling and sabbath-day festivities. However, this bias in the sources can lead us to ignore areas of culture where these conflicts were either resolved or unarticulated. In some media, such as the narrative 'stories' for walls, Bible-centered Protestantism and traditional visual piety found common ground." (325)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Persuasive. But Watt has a tendency to use established prices and figures as a starting point for speculation--specualtion that, in turn, is used as evidence towards conclusions.
• Synthesis: Obviously, Evenden and Freeman object to Watt's perspective on prices. Link to post.
  Watt's economic-sociological approach does not address the actual form of the ballad, that is, narrative lyric. While Dubrow's articulation of the lyric may be a helpful compliment, I believe that Challenges of Orpheus understates the lyric as a mode (associating character with technique) rather than as a form (a disposition towards linguistic fundamentals, namely: order, duration, and frequency). But with this knowledge, it's provocative to imagine the two texts in conference. Watt contributes to the early modern English understanding of ballad--what it meant, to whom--and Dubrow contributes to the function of lyric.
• Application: I'm most interested in applying the early modern English understanding of narrative image. A printed gesture, according to the Homily against the Peril of Idolatry, invokes the narrative mode (to borrow from Alpers). Furthermore, the narrative image is a mode--in this understanding--as opposed to a form.

What is Pastoral? by Paul Alpers

CITATION: Alpers, Paul J. What Is Pastoral? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Print.
Understanding

• Question: What is Pastoral?
• Answer: A mode of relation between a speaker and the world, specifically, nobility supported by a pathetic environment.
• Method: Alpers avoids beginning with a definition. Alpers leads with the representative anecdote of Rene Rapin's Dissertatio dei Carmn Pastorati, then develops his idea of mode (as opposed to content-based genre). Alpers develops common connections made through pastoral conventions, signifying an argument for a common human experience. Alpers spends the second half of the book exploring speakers who share the shepherd's mode without being shepherds.
• Assumptions: Alpers acknowledges that the modern pastoral breaks from the classical tradition and the Renaissance, but he argues that the modern perspective towards convention--modernity, emphasizing innovation--can still maintain the convention in its antithesis.
• Sententiae: "[T]he pastoral speaker emerges when formal pastoral, based on Virgilian eclogues, is amalgaated with epic and drama." (223)

Overstanding

• Assessment: A clever approach to a trans-historical definition of genre (or mode, rather). Though the "representative anecdote" is ultimately bewildering, it frontloads a convenient historicism to hedge against ahistorical universalities.
• Synthesis: Alpers takes a more traditional approach than Dubrow's work on the Lyric. Unlike Challenges of Orpheus, What is Pastoral? ultimately accedes to definition, possibly because Alpers wants to think more expansively across time. Unlike Dubrow, Alpers  attempts to think across millennia.
• Application: Alpers' main innovation is a theory of pastoral mode that can be easily transported across time periods. The Renaissance, however, still maintains a clear pastoral tradition. Therefore, Alpers' work is best thought of as exemplary methodology. In my own work, I can look to Alpers for an analogy for defining image-text in the Renaissance without importing the overstated semiotic definitions.

Master F.J. by George Gascoigne

PRIMARY SOURCE: The Adventures of Master F.J. (pub. 1573)
Context

• Publication: In the Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), the narrator "G.T." of "The Storie of Ferdinando Ieronimi" is an older man who relates the misadventures of "F.J." This edition is framed by there introductory letters: one from the Printer, one from "H.W." (who relayed the manuscript), and one from G.T. G.T. confirms that the poems have been inserted into the narrative in the correct arrangement. Gascoigne himself claims only to have been the translator for the poem by Bartello. Printed by Henry Bynneman and Henry Middleton for Richard Smith. EEBO link.
  In the 1575 edition, the three letters are replaced by letters from Gascoigne. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars are interested in Master F.J. both as a proto-novel and as a narrative.
• Why I'm reading it: The counter-canon.

Content

• Form: Mixed: mostly prose fiction, some romantic poetry.
• Genre: Tale of seduction, epistolary novel, or alternately, "Italian riding tale."
• Conceit: G.T. relates the narrative at first as an avowedly reliable narrator, interjecting with frequency to tag information. G.T. later evaluates the composition of the enclosed poetry. F.J. courts Elynor, a Dame in an Italian court, through poetry. Their romance is facilitated by the Lady Fraunces. One night, F.J. encounters Elynor naked in a gallery near her chamber. At the climax, F.J. becomes jealous of Elynor's paramour the secretary, F.J. violently rapes Elynor. G.T. betrays his reliability with his obsessive interest with the physical description of this and other sexual scenes. Elynor's husband returns, and F.J. mocks him with verses about his cuckoldry.
• Other notes: How does a rhetorical approach to narrative theory handle the mixed formal elements of this text? The answer returns to the purpose of Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, whatever that might be.

(NB: written with articles.)
Scambly Schott, Penelope. "The Narrative Stance in "The Adventures of Master F.J.": George Gascoigne as Critic of His Own Poems." Renaissance Quarterly 29.3 (1976): 369-77. Web. 9 Feb. 2013.

Waters, Gregory. "'Worthles Enterprise': A Study of the Narrator in Gascoigne's 'The Adventures of Master F.J.'" Journal of Narrative Technique 7.2 (1977): 116-127. Web. 9 Feb. 2013.

"L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" by John Milton

PRIMARY SOURCE: "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" (comp. 1632, pub. 1646)
Context

• Publication: Composed around the time that Milton completed his MA at Cambridge, July 1632.  In 1646. Printed by Ruth Raworth for Humphrey Moseley. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars are interested in the parallel constructions of both poems, in Milton's reconfiguration of the classics, and in the thought of early Milton.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, the pastoral.

Content

• Form: 
• "L'Allegro." Mixed: first alternating trimeter and pentameter couplets; mostly tetrameter couplets.
• "Il Penseroso." Mixed: first alternating trimeter and pentameter couplets; mostly tetrameter couplets.
• Genre:
• "L'Allegro." Pastoral (alacritous).
• "Il Penseroso." Pastoral (pensive).
• Conceit:
• "L'Allegro." A cheerful man invokes Mirth against Melancholy, a creature regarded as madness. The speaker follows Mirth ("sweet Liberty") as one of her followers. He observes a lark rising, a hunt, and a cock crowing. He observes the country people at work, animals, and shepherds. This observation is entirely speculative, since he observes so many things in one place. The day turns into a rustic holiday characterized by country tales and ale. The cheerful man imagines a tournament at a castled village, a wedding feast, and a performance of comedies by Jonson and Shakespeare. He calls for soft music that would awake Orpheus, and vows to follow Mirth if she can provide that.
• "Il Penseroso." A man walks alone at evening in pensive melancholy. He welcomes the goddess Melancholy, who is both black and bright as a constellation, since she is the daughter of Vesta. We also invites Peace and Quiet, though they are interrupted by a nightingale's song. The speaker would prefer silent walks under the moonlight through the land or by the shore. He takes inspiration and transport from ancient Greek and recent tragedy. The morning comes in clouds and showers. The speaker considers retiring to a cloister and submitting to the music of an organ. He wishes to be a prophetic figure in his study of beauty, and vows to follow Melancholy if she can provide that.
• Other notes: 
• Both poems follow a similar structure. Both speakers begin with a parodic invocation, respond to birdsong, journey abroad, respond to music, and vow to follow their muse.
• There's something in the Neoplatonic response to organ music that connects "Il Penseroso" to "Upon Appleton House," though that may just be the figure of the nightingale.
• Quoted and illustrated by Blake--

"There let Hymen oft appear
In Saffron Robe with Taper clear
With Mask & Antique Pageantry
Such sights as Youthful Poets dream
On Summers Eve by haunted Stream
Then lo the well trod Stage anon
If Johnsons learned Sock be on
Or Sweetest Shakespeare Fancys Child
Warble his native wood notes wild"

(NB: written with notes.)

The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare

PRIMARY SOURCE: The Winter's Tale (prod. 1609-1611, pub. 1623)
Context

• Publication: First produced in 1609. Published in collections: 1623 and 1632. Categorized with "comedies" in the Folio; same as The Tempest. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars are interested in the early romantic sensibilities of this play: the disruption of Aristotelian unity, the importance of magical intervention, and the plot of coincidences. Scholars are also interested in Shakespeare's modifications of Roland Greene's Pandosto, namely the addition of Paulina and the redemption of Leontes. Consequently, scholars have viewed Winter's Tale as a Christocentric play, newly structured around death, penitence, and resurrection. The passage from Winter to spring roughly matches the Lenten period, though the diptych may also signify a naturalist passage between seasons and ages. Mamilla is also of interest, as Shakespeare augmented his role and named him after the mammary--a sign of the kingdom contingent upon the mother's sustenance.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, formalism, the pastoral, statues, ballads.

Content

• Form: Mixed verse. Five acts.
• Genre: Romance, tragicomedy, comedy (Folio attribution). 
• Conceit: Polixenes (King of Bohemia) visits his boyhood friend, Leontes (King of Sicilia). When Polixenes tries to leave, Leontes sends his wife, Hermione to persuade him to stay. Unlike his normal response, Bohemia yields to Hermione. Leontes concludes that Polixenes has cuckholded him. Leontes doubts the legitimacy of his son, Mamillus, and orders the counselor Camillo to poison Polixenes  Camillo resists, but agrees to poison Polixenes on the condition that Leontes should trust and reconcile with Hermione. Polixenes asks Camillo about Leontes s change in spirit, and Camillo reveals the plot. Together, they flee for Bohemia. Leontes learns that they have fled and suspects more than ever that Polixenes is the father of Hermione's current pregnancy. Against his servants' protests, Leontes publicly accuses Hermione and orders her to be imprisoned. In prison, Hermione births Paulina. She takes Paulina to the Leontes, but Leontes orders Antigonus to abandon the baby on the shore. Leontes orders a messengers to the Oracle at Delphi to confirm Hermione's guilt, but they return with a scroll stating that Hermione is innocent, Leontes is a tyrant, and that he will live without an heir until that which is lost is found. Leontes ignores that and rails against Hermione. Suddenly, a servant tells him that Mamillus died overnight of anxiety for Hermione. Hermione swoons and dies in her chambers. Leontes realizes that the oracle was right, and vows penance.
  Antigonus takes Paulina to the shore, but lays a bag of gold with her, alongside instructions to call the baby Perdita (from his dream). Antigonus is killed by a bear, and his ship and crew are wrecked by a storm. A shepherd sees all of this, and finds Perdita.
  Time itself appears and explains the passage of 16 years. While the grown shepherdess Perdita allures Prince Florizel, heir to Bohemia, Leontes grieves alone in the palace. Polixenes and Camillo follow Florizel to a sheep-shearing festival, all in disguise. Polixenes recognizes the noble bearing of Perdita when she dances with Florizel, but forbids Florizel's marriage. Florizel plans to elope with Perdita. Camillo advises them to go to Sicilia as a goodwill ambassador from Bohemia, and so supplies them with letters of introduction. Camillo wants Polixenes to pursue them into Sicilia, so Camillo can retutrn home. The shepherd-father tells Polixenes how he found Perdita, but he is captured by Autolycus and taken away to Sicilia.
  Florizel and Perdita arrive in Sicilia, pursued by Polixenes and Camillo. The shepherd hears of Leontes' lost daughter, and describes Perdita's origin. Leontes is reunited with Perdita/Paulina, and Polixenes blesses her marriage to Florizel. Still, Leontes mourns Hermione.
  Paulina visits a statue of Hermione in Leontes' memorial chapel. All gather to view the statue, hear soft music, and marvel at the statue. The statue is in fact Hermione, who lived in the wilderness awaiting news of Paulina. The family is united, as are the friends. All celebrate the marriage of Florizel and Perdita.
• Other notes: Autolycus' ballad-selling is an interesting moment of economic ambiguity. The character is a masterless man, but he bases the authority of his ballads on the testimony of judges. Also, the shepherds buy these "true" tunes on the strength of the signed testimonies of other common people. The ballad market is represented as a self-sustaining system of myths, maintained by a con man's textual claim to authority.
  The statue scene is more fascinating. This seems like Renaissance move to secularize the power of the Resurrection, rather than represent it, because Hermione is (a) a transgressive female in Christ's role, and (b) not otherwise endowed with any sanctified qualities of Christ.
• Mneumonic: Pol(ixenes) Her(mione) Le(ontes) Mam(illus) Cam(illo) Ant(igonus) Pau(lina) Per(dita) Flo(rizel) Aut(olycus)
• Politicians and hermits, leaders and mamillists come anticipating polity, perish flourishing autonymy.

(NB: written with notes.)
Atchity, Kenneth John. "The Winter’S Tale." Masterplots, Fourth Edition(2010): 1-4. Literary Reference Center. Web. 6 Feb. 2013.

Shakespeare, William, Stephen J. Greenblatt, and Andrew Gurr. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Print.