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'Bound up in One Small Poesie': Material Intertextuality and the Early

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'Bound up in One Small Poesie': Material Intertextuality and the Early ‘Bound up in one small poesie’: Material Intertextuality and the Early Modern Poetic Collection (1557-1601) Craig Farrell PhD University of York English January 2017 2 Abstract This thesis explores the essentially composite nature of early modern printed books, and how the material configurations of individual volumes were used for a variety of literary ends. It contends that modern scholarship on early modern printed poetry has focused on individual texts, and has largely overlooked the tendency of books in this period to gather more than one major text in a single volume. This thesis aims to recover the creative design exercised by the poets, editors, and publishers who selected and arranged multiple works in one book. It argues that texts presented in a shared material context present readers with the opportunity to read between the poems (thematically, formally, narratively, etc.), and describes this phenomenon as ‘material intertextuality’. By reading early modern collections of poetry in this way, it proposes specific new readings of a number of canonical authors – George Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Samuel Daniel – as well as providing a methodology for reading other writers in this period. Reading the text within the context of the book has a number of ramifications for the study of early modern literature more generally, including recovering an early modern structural and organisational imagination, challenging canonical boundaries (by attending to the multiple authorship of many texts), revitalising the study of ‘minor’ works by major literary figures, and informing editorial practice in modern editions of these texts. 3 Contents Abstract 2 Contents 3 Acknowledgements 4 Author’s Declaration 5 Introduction 6 Chapter 1. ‘[I]n some good order’: Songes and Sonettes, George Gascoigne, and the Editing of Poetry in Print 30 Chapter 2. Astrophel and Stella and the Textual Identities of Sir Philip Sidney 78 Chapter 3. ‘In mirrours more than one’: Edmund Spenser and the Collection as Form 114 Chapter 4. Samuel Daniel and the Poetics of Evolving Material Context 161 Conclusion 203 Appendices Appendix A: Spenser’s Publications, 1569-1611 212 Appendix B: Structures of Delia, 1592-1601 215 Appendix C: Daniel’s Publications and Contents, 1591-1601 216 Bibliography Manuscript Primary Sources 218 Printed Primary Sources 218 Printed Secondary Sources 225 4 Acknowledgements This thesis has been many years and many crises in the making; that it exists at all is largely due to the unwavering support I’ve received from colleagues, friends, and family. My first thanks go to Victoria, George, and Patricia Chadfield, without whose financial support and personal encouragement my studies could not have even have begun. Their belief in my ability despite many difficult circumstances has meant a great deal to me and has left a deep impression on my work. My supervisors, Bill Sherman and Helen Smith, have demonstrated superhuman levels of patience and compassion. Their intellectual generosity has shaped my studies over the last few years, and I can think of no better scholars to have learned from during my time at York. I have also been lucky enough to benefit from discussions with Kevin Killeen and Claire Canavan, both of whom have provided sage advice at key moments. Emma Kennedy has seen this thesis grow almost from start to finish, and the many debts I owe her (intellectual, personal, emotional) are too many to list here. It is extremely unlikely that this thesis would ever have been completed without her unflinching support, and my gratitude extends far beyond what it is possible to express here in a few sentences. Finally, both my parents, Elizabeth and John, and my siblings, Paul and Karen, have borne this project and its circumambulatory journey with good grace and good humour. They have made a difficult process easier in many ways, and I owe them many thanks for the million small kindnesses they have shown in the last few years. I have been saved from many embarrassing errors by those listed above; all remaining oversights are mine. 5 Author’s Declaration I declare that this thesis is a presentation of original work. This work has not previously been presented for an award at this, or any other, University. All sources are acknowledged as references. 6 Introduction In 1560, John Day published Sermons of John Calvin, upon the song that Ezechias made after he had been sicke. This short octavo volume is entirely typical of a mid- sixteenth-century publication: overtly religious, a translation from a continental text, and composed by an anonymous writer who signed his or her name only as ‘A.L.’ in the dedicatory epistle. A reader who had not thoroughly examined the text they had purchased may have been surprised to find that the final section of the book appeared to be an entirely different work. Immediately following Calvin’s sermons, they would have encountered a long verse preface, and a sequence of twenty-one sonnets. This material was not mentioned on the title page, where its inclusion could be explained as a motivation for potential buyers. The presence of these poems is addressed only by a short note on the makeshift title page to the sequence, which explains that it had been included in the volume ‘not as a parcell of maister Calvines worke, but for that it well agreeth with the same argument’ (2A1r) The text in question is A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, now ascribed to Anne Locke and acknowledged to be one of the most important works of poetry of the mid-sixteenth-century, providing an example of the sonnet sequence several decades before the form’s more celebrated examples.1 Despite the scholarly attention now given to this particular work, its original printed context tends to be mentioned only in passing, and the interaction of Locke’s and Calvin’s texts is rarely examined in detail.2 Yet Locke’s poetry clearly has a relationship with the rest of the book in which it was originally published. As well as sharing a Reformist outlook, the two works are both elaborations on, and interpretations of, biblical texts. In particular, both texts deal with ‘literary’ passages in the Bible: Calvin’s sermons explore the 1 Locke’s authorship is generally assumed, but Rosalind Smith has provided a nuanced discussion of the complexities of this attribution in Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560- 1621: The Politics of Absence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 2 The best exception to this rule (and most substantial study into the sources and theology of Locke’s work) is June Waudby, Text and Context: A Re-evaluation of Anne Locke’s Meditation (PhD Thesis, University of Hull, 2006). For a general overview of recent scholarship on the sequence, see Robert C. Evans and Jeff Moody, ‘The Religious Sonnets of Anne Vaughan Lock: An Overview of Scholarship, 1989–1999,’ Ben Jonson Journal 22, no. 2 (2015): 269-281 and the essays collected in Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, Volume 3: Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Amelia Lanyer, ed. Micheline White (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 7 ‘song’ from Isiah 38:9 and Locke’s poems are an extended amplification of Psalm 51. It may be for these reasons as much as their shared theological perspective that the sonnets were described as ‘agreeing’ with the rest of the volume. At the same time, as noted above, Locke’s sequence is not mentioned on the title page, nor is it referred to in any of the other paratextual materials. While this pairing is present in both surviving copies, the printing signatures are not continuous, indicating that Locke’s poem may have been a last-minute addition rather than one carefully planned in advance. This thesis addresses the questions raised by a volume like Calvin’s Sermons. What are we to make of the choice to sell these two works together? Was the decision prompted by ‘literary’ intentions, economic motives, or a combination of both? What part did the author, editor, publisher, or printer have in these decisions, individually or in cooperation with any other agent(s)? What should be our approach to editing this book and its constituent texts? Most importantly, what readings become available if we consider these works in their original material context, rather than as two distinct and unrelated units? In order to explore these questions, and argue for their interpretive ramifications for the study of early modern literature, I examine four important authors whose works appear as ‘collections’ of one form or another: George Gascoigne, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Samuel Daniel. I will also trace developments within the publication of poetry in the sixteenth- century, moving from Richard Tottel’s Songes and sonettes in 1557 to the explosion of literary texts in the 1590s, suggesting that this decade witnessed a major shift in the way that poetry was written, published, and read. The history of the book and early modern literature The central premise of this thesis is that early modern printed texts were frequently produced and encountered as part of larger, aggregate structures composed of discrete works in a shared material context. That is to say, many of the texts now read and analysed as isolated textual units were encountered by their contemporary readers alongside one or more other works within an individual book. While important work by Alexandra Gillespie and Jeffrey Todd Knight (discussed below) has demonstrated the prominence of this gathering from the perspective of readers, I 8 will argue that these practises were adapted by authors and stationers as the print trade developed throughout the sixteenth century. The interpretive interplay between all of the texts of a book is what I label ‘material intertextuality’.
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