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Reluctant Virgins: the Stigma of Print Revisited Colby Quarterly Volume 26 Issue 2 June Article 3 June 1990 Reluctant Virgins: The Stigma of Print Revisited Daniel Traister Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq Recommended Citation Colby Quarterly, Volume 26, no.2, June 1990, p.75-86 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Colby Quarterly by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Colby. Traister: Reluctant Virgins: The Stigma of Print Revisited Reluctant Virgins: The Stigma of Print Revisited by DANIEL TRAISTER N 1614 John Donne wrote to his friend Sir Henry Goodyere to tell hinl ("but I so softly, that I am loath to hear my self: and so softly, that ifthat good Lady [Lucy, Countess of Bedford" with whom Goodyere was visiting at the time] were in the room, with you and this Letter" she might not hear''') '-that I am brought to a necessitie of printing nlY Poems." This I mean to do forthwith: not for much publique view. but at mine own cost. a few Copies. I apprehend some incongruities in the resolution: and I know what I shall suffer from many interpretations: but I am at an end. ofmuch considering that: and. if I were as startling in that kinde, as ever I was. yet in this particular. I am under an unescapable necessity. as I shall let you perceive. when I see you. I Donne sounds as though he is about to undergo an exceptionally unpleasant experience. One of the "reluctant virgins" of my title, he represents himself as brought kicking and screaming" not to bed, but to the press. By his lights, he was to prove lucky. In the end, his chastity was preserved. Not until after his body had been laid to rest, wearing its famous shroud" were his literary remains violated by the rough impression of the printer's black ink. Donne's response to the prospect of having his poetry printed is ill uminated by J. W. Saunders' article, '-The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry.'''2 This essay appeared some thirty-nine years ago; it remains a This essay is dedicated to the memory ofEdwardNorman Dukes (Wichita, Kansas, 1942-Cambridge, Massachu­ setts, 1982). One of Mark Benbow's students at Colby in the early 1960s, Norman Dukes received his doctorate at Columbia University where, under the direction ofPaul Oskar Kristeller, he studied the history of Renaissance philosophy. A Fulbright award took him to Padua and Venice for work on his dissertation. Historian, philosopher, poet, and editor, Norman Dukes would have been a valued contributor to thisfestschrift, although that is not the only reason why he is missed. This paper was originally read at the 23rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, in May of 1988. I am grateful to Professor Martha Driver of Pace University whose invitation gave me the opportunity to work out these ideas in their initial form. It was presented again at the Columbia University Shakespeare Seminar (September 1988), at Columbia University's School of Library Service (July 1989), at the Renaissance Forum, City University of New York (October 1989), and at the Third Annual Pennsylvania Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, "The Book and the Idea of the Book," at the University of Pennsylvania (October 1989); comments and responses at each presentation have assisted me, and I am grateful to my auditors for them. Specific assistance from Professor Terry Belanger (Columbia University), Dr. Rudolf Hirsch (University of Pennsylvania Libraries), and Dr. Sandra Sider (The Hispanic Society of America) is acknowledged elsewhere, but lowe all of them thanks for their attention to the essay as a whole. 1. Letters to Severall Persons ofHonour (London: Printedby1. Flesher, for Richard Marriott, 1651), pp. 196-97 (sigs. 2C2v~2C3r). lowe this reference to Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1986), pp. ix~x. 2. Essays in Criticism, 1 (1951), 139~4. See also Saunders' "From Manuscript to Print: A Note on the Circulation ofPoetic MSS. in the Sixteenth Century,"Proceedings ofthe LeedsPhilosophicalandLiterarySociety, Literary & Historical Section, 6, pt. 8 (May 1951), 507~28; The Profession ofEnglish Letters (London: Routledge 75 Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1990 1 Colby Quarterly, Vol. 26, Iss. 2 [1990], Art. 3 76 COLBY QUARTERLY small classic. The passage of time has failed to diminish its significance, while subsequent scholarship has made the issues it raises and its conclusions increas­ ingly worth consideration by scholars in several fields. Both the new historians who investigate the social and political functions of English literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the equally new historians who inves­ tigate the impact on Western culture ofprinting from movable type, study issues directly related to those Saunders considered. His footnotes, in fact, contain the seeds of important articles and books that, years after his work appeared, were to elaborate points that Saunders had tossed off almost casually in a few sentences. Some of the literary new historians and their historiographical sources especially have made significant use ofhis work. 3 Other studies, however, among them some that have proved extremely influen­ tial written by book historians, have ignored Saunders, and not to the advantage of the subject they were attempting to advance. Yet his essay is particularly important for historians ofprinting and its impact. It should unsettle views that have come, like a juggernaut, to dominate recent approaches to early printing history. These views see the development ofprinting from movable type as itself a juggernaut, quickly "revolutionizing" the ways in which knowledge was disseminated in early modem Europe.4 The criteria by which we now understand the impact of the shift from manuscript to print in the early modem period can be quickly enumerated. By comparison with texts which existed only in unique or few manuscript copies, printed texts, clearly more numerous, were more widely disseminated and thus able to be read in greaterprofusion. Amenable to standardization and correction, they offered inducements to rationalized organization of data through such "obvious" devices as exactly repeated page nunlbers and tables ofcontents, and also through alphabetized indices, dictionaries, atlases, and so forth. On the one hand, the existence ofmultiple, dispersed copies oftexts and, on the other hand, the freeing of their contents from the substantive corruptions through repeated recopying to which manuscripts were forever subject, togethermadepossiblethe preservation ofknowledge, new and old, in a manner hitherto impossible.5 These characteristics Alvin B. Kernan has conveniently labelled "multiplicity," "sys­ tematization," and "fixity."6 Their self-evident value explains why print tri­ umphedoverthe manuscriptbook. They also explain why printingfrom movable and Kegan Paul, 1964); and his revision of Phoebe Sheavyn, The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1967). Observation of the reluctance of Elizabethan poets to print their work is, ofcourse, not original with Saunders; Saintsbury, among others, is also aware ofthis tendency years before him. Saunders is, however, the first writer ofwhom I am aware to develop the observation and seek an explanation for it. 3. See, for example, Saunders, "Stigma," n. 2, p. 141, and compare it, e.g., to Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind ofthe Elizabethan Younger Generation (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1966), or to ArthurF. Marotti," 'Love Is Not Love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order," ELH, 49 (1982), 396-428. 4. See, most notably, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an AgentofChange: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979). 5. It is not my intention to review Eisenstein here; but see my review (from which I have taken some of the wording in the present text) in Printing History, 4 (1982), 71-73. See also the review by Paul Needham in Fine Print, 6, no. 1 (January 1980), 23-25, 32-35. 6. Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), p. 54. https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol26/iss2/3 2 Traister: Reluctant Virgins: The Stigma of Print Revisited DANIEL TRAISTER 77 type appears to have had the rapidity of impact it did. But Saunders' work provides evidence of an important exception to their sway. Saunders' major point may be summarized very simply. "A great deal of Tudor poetry," he writes, "never passed beyond the manuscript stage, and ... even where it did ultimately reach print, the manuscript was generally considered the normal medium of publication."7 In developing this point, Saunders distin­ guishes "Court poets" from "professional poets." The former, who were "Gen­ tlemen," "shunned print": Once [their] poetry had circulated within the manuscript audience, its job was done, and little attempt was made by its writers to preserve it or keep track of it.s In contrast, "professionals," whom Saunders calls "the poorfellows that lived by poetry, directly or indirectly," were dependent upon printed as opposed to manuscript circulation of their work: Outside the theatre it was the printers who provided these poets with the best opportunity to capitalize their poetic genius. Though the pecuniary rewards were in themselves meagre and hazardous, and though few writers could expect any regular
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