The English Renaissance in Context: Looking at Older Books

The History of the Book

Books from the 16th and 17th centuries are both quite similar to and different from books today. The similarities include such things as use of the Codex format, general layouts, use of title pages, etc.

The codex book has been around for a long time. Its roots go back to the age of Cicero, though it only comes into more general use with the spread of Christianity throughout the later Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries CE. Since then, the codex book has undergone a long and gradual evolution during which time the book, its properties, and characteristics became firmly embedded in Western consciousness.

Roughly speaking, the general layout of the page that we use today came into existence in the 13th century, with the rise of the universities and the creation of books for study. It is possible, for example, to look at a page in a medieval manuscript and experience a general orientation to it, even if you cannot actually read the text.

The evolution of the book, we emphasize, was slow. Such conventions as , title pages, foot or endnotes, tables of contents, indices, et alia are by and large relatively recent additions. We take these features for granted; but prior to the age of Gutenberg, they are hard to find.

University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 1 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: Looking at Older Books

Renaissance books can certainly look very different from books today. They exhibit a variety and diversity that have long since been standardized and homogenized. can seem strange and difficult to read; is inconsistent (i.. no spellcheck); and basic information such as author and title can change in unexpected ways. For many people, trying to read a 16th or 17th century book in whatever language they are fluent is a daunting, disorienting process.

Yes, Renaissance books are different, and because they are they can be rich sources of historical documentation that illuminate the text they transmit. They help root us in the period; they suggest the time and the place; they give us a feel for a historical moment we would not experience using a modern book.

What we will do here is introduce you in a general way to the world of early printed books around the time of Shakespeare.

University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 2 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: Looking at Older Books

Title Pages

Consider the following three title pages.

? What types of information do they give you?

? What do they not tell you?

? What purposes might they have served?

Modern title pages are integral parts of the book today. They provide a more or less codified array of information that permits the identification of a copy of a text.

Now look again at these three examples from the early 17th century. We know these works as Henry , King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet. However, these pages provide much longer, exaggerated titles. The author is sometimes given top billing (Lear), sometimes less prominence (Romeo), or is simply omitted altogether (Henry V). Performance or audience-specific information (“new and improved version”) are provided.

University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 3 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: Looking at Older Books

An illustration known as a printer’ device appears in all three. This device is an emblem with a motto expressing some tag or pithy adage that would have been familiar to most readers of the day.

The printer’s device was a sort of logo or calling card. It expressed his identity as a printer. Finally, it tells us when and where the book was printed. It also tells us who the “publisher” was: Nathaniel Butter, “.P.”, and John Smethwicke. In the latter case it tells us where we can, in fact, buy the book. But why? And why is “T.P.” reluctant to divulge his name?

Keep in mind that “publishers” in a modern sense did not exist at the time. It was the bookseller who provided the capital to produce the book. And thus, one might have to go to a specific shop to get a specific title. Sometimes printers were also booksellers and hence publishers. In the beginning, this was the case. Over time, an increasingly segmented division of labor separated printing from bookselling and book retailing from book publishing.

So what are these title pages? Are they perhaps really the printer/bookseller’s advertisements for books? They certainly seem to take pains to “advertise” the merits of the book, and they are more consistent about displaying their own logo than the name of the author.

In fact, title pages are typically the creation of the printer/bookseller, and have little or nothing to do with the author. Their function is to attract customers by calling attention both to the virtues of the work and the solidity and reputation of the printer through his device.

University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 4 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: Looking at Older Books

Pages & Their Contents

Here is an opening from the second quarto of King Lear.

What do you notice? To begin with, there are no page numbers. At the bottom right of each page are catchwords (But at left, Kent at right), which anticipate the first word of the next page. Why? Catchwords were not important for the reader, but for the binder. They allowed the binder to ensure that he had correctly assembled all of the leaves; in other words, that they pages of the book were in their proper sequence.

On the bottom center of the right page is a letter ( in this example), usually with a number. In this particular case, the letter designates the beginning of a new gathering or signature. A printed book is essentially a set of conjoined gatherings or signatures. These gatherings are made by folding the large sheet of paper that the printer uses to make the leaves and pages of a book. The most common paper size for press printing in this period, called foolscap, was between 40.5 and 44.5 cm long and between 31 and 33.5 cm wide. That’s about 16 to 17.5 long and 12 to 13 inches wide.

The more the sheet is folded, the small the size of the book. The book’s content influences its format: large volumes are expensive, weighty, commanding presences; small volumes, cheaper, portable, and unimposing. Thus, a single fold will yield a folio, two folds a quarto, three folds an octavo, and so forth. Since there are typically no page

University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 5 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: Looking at Older Books

numbers, it is common practice to refer to individual pages by their place in the signature.

Thus in this quarto, there will be four leaves and eight pages per signature.

A single leaf contains a recto side and a verso side. The recto side is the right side of the opening; the verso, the left side.

What can complicate matters slightly is that signature markings, when they are given, are only found on the recto side of a leaf –and moreover, only on as many pages as necessary. Quartos tend to have signatures on the first and second rectos, and not on the third or fourth, because the action of folding the printed page forces those latter signatures into order automatically. So this opening (previous page) displays signatures F4v and G1r. While G1r is evident, F4v is implied: although no label appears on the left side of the opening, the nature of quarto printing dictates that the page before G1r has to be F4v.

University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 6 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: Looking at Older Books

Illustrations, by Ruth Samson Luborsky

More than 5,000 pictures and diagrams were printed as parts of Elizabethan books. The great majority were woodcuts printed with the texts, though a few were engravings printed separately and inserted in the book. What follows are eight examples showing how images appeared in various places in books and the different roles they played.

This frontispiece (the verso of the title page) shows an image of the author. Thomas Becon's collection of prayers and meditations helped establish a Protestant alternative to Catholic traditions of liturgical prayer. Becon's portrait, first printed on the frontispiece to the first edition of 1588 [STC 1744], was reused as a frontispiece to twenty other editions and copied in yet another edition. The reproduction is taken from the fifth edition of 1563.

This frontispiece represents the dedicatee of the book. Queen Elizabeth's portrait as the mover of the heavenly spheres appears as a frontispiece to the Sphaera civitatis (1588) by John Case. It faces a page with a Latin poem in her honor hailing her as "Tu Virgo, regina potens, tu Mobile Primum Elisabetha."

University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 7 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: Looking at Older Books

This frontispiece represents the subject of the book. On this title page is an image printed as an advertisement for the book (like one on a book jacket today). Later in the same book, the reader would see the same image repeated in the pertinent part of the text. The busts of British rulers from Edward I to Henry V appear on the frontispiece to Thomas Walsingham's Historia breuis (1544), which chronicles their reigns.

On this frontispiece is an image printed as an advertisement for the book (like one on a book jacket today). Later in the same book, the reader would see the same image repeated in the pertinent part of the text.. Most often images are found printed on the same page as the text they illustrate. Announcing the subject of a geometry manual, the image of a geometrical square is printed on the title page and reprinted in the pertinent chapter with explanatory text in the Pantometria (1571). The illustration here is taken from the second edition of 1591.

University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 8 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: Looking at Older Books

This powerful image is one of many illustrations of martyrs in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments. It is illustrative of the unhappy text it accompanies. Popularly called "The Book of Martyrs," Foxe's Actes is second only to the Bible as the most widely consulted book in Elizabethan England. The first edition appeared in 1563. The illustration here is taken from the fourth edition of 1596.

After his arrival from in 1590, Vincentio Saviolo became the most influential and controversial teacher fencing in England. His on the use of the rapier and his popularity upset earlier fencing masters who relied on the short sword. Printed in the pertinent passage of the book, the image is one of six demonstrating a fencing stance in Vincentio Saviolo his practise (1595).

University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 9 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: Looking at Older Books

This finely engraved and highly detailed map is one of the most authoritative and technically advanced maps of its time. It has been identified with Shakespeare's "new map, with the augmentation of the Indies" (Twelfth Night III.ii.76-77). It is inserted as a foldout before Book 1 in the second edition of Richard Hakluyt's The principall navigations (1598-1600).

However, images do not always "illustrate," in our modern sense. Instead they are used to signal new parts of a text, or even as bookends, enclosing the text. With its 211 woodcuts, the first and only illustrated edition of Holinshed's Chronicles (1577) is the most heavily illustrated secular book in the Elizabethan period. Busts of rulers function as chapter heads signaling an account of a new reign.

University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 10 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: Looking at Older Books

Type, Spelling, and

Early Renaissance texts were printed in several different kinds of typefaces: the most common were “Gothic” or “Black-Letter,” roman or italic. When the printing press was invented, the “Black-Letter” or “Gothic” was designed to imitate the features of medieval handwriting styles, in an effort to make a printed book look like a manuscript.

D.. Greetham writes of the difference between gothic and :

One of the paradoxes of the history of (and its vocabulary) is that roman type (which is not of Roman origin, but was first cut in Strassburg) looks to the 20th century eye much more modern than does gothic, which these days is largely reserved for the incipits of legal documents and the mastheads of pretentious newspapers. In the 15th century, of course, gothic (which was not given this clearly derogatory name until the humanists Valla and Vasari decided that it stood as a corrupting and embarrassing barrier between their own times and the standards of the classical age) was the most dominant contemporary script and therefore, as we have seen, the logical choice for the first typefaces for the age of printing. To the humanists, gothic was a reminder of the very recent past and of the tenuous hold of the new esthetic and cultural standards on the present; therefore, the roman typeface (like its offshoot italic), was seen as a manifesto of the moderns (perhaps even the avant-garde), who again paradoxically, liked to think of the new script and type as “,” thereby emphasizing its continuum with the Roman past.

--from “Textual Scholarship: An Introduction”. (New York: Garland, 1992), p. 228.

In England roman type was introduced by Richard Pynson in 1518 and by Wynken de Worde in 1524. Within the English Renaissance in Context you will find a guide to reading some of the tricky letters of both the gothic and the roman typefaces.

This black-letter alphabet illustrates some of the difficulties encountered when reading black-letter or gothic type. The slightly alien shape of many of the letters (, g, ), the multiple versions of letter (, s), and the unfamiliar symbols and contractions all work to defamilarize the words of a given black-letter text.

University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 11 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: Looking at Older Books

The Long S

As a general rule, in early modern texts the long s was used by the printer when the “s” was employed either within the middle of a word, or as the first letter. The short s was normally reserved for the ends of words.

Superscripts

This strange item is actually a contraction for the word “the.” The presence of a letter in superscript is a form of printer’s shorthand indicating that one or more letters have been left out of a given word (generally to save valuable space).

For instance, this symbol is a contraction for the word “with,” the superscript “t” indicating that the letters “i” and “” have been left out.

In this instance, however, the “e” does not float above a “” but a “y” that is acting as a “thorn graph”. The thorn graph, a y-shaped letter which is pronounced as we pronounce “” is a holdover from . Rather than reproduce the thorn graph exactly, printers frequently simply used the letter y to indicate the “th” sound.

University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 12 - Furness Shakespeare Collection The English Renaissance in Context: Looking at Older Books

I and

Contrary to popular opinion, the letter “j” did exist in the lower case of most early modern . It was used extremely infrequently, however, and was usually reserved for the combination “” (or “ji” often a ), a combination found in both words and numerals. In almost all other instances, the letter i did the work of both modern letters.

U and V

Similarly, in early modern orthography the letters “v” and “u” were differentiated according to their position in the word rather than their pronunciation. The letter v was used to represent both sounds when used initially in a word while the letter u signified both medially.

As you can see from these sample alphabets below, the roman and italic types have survived into the modern period, and are, therefore, easy on the modern eye. Although most of the letters should be familiar, there are a few that remain alien—particularly, the long s.

University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 13 - Furness Shakespeare Collection