Salzman, Paul. Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon, 1825–1915. Early Modern Culture in History Series, eds. Cedric C. Brown and Andrew Hadfield. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. ix+ 167 + 10 figures. $ 99.99 cloth.
Murphy, Peter. The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem: Reading and Remembering Thomas Wyatt. Square One Series, ed. Paul A. Kottman. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2019. Pp. xvii + 246 + 50 illustrations. $ 28.00 paper.
Kingsley-Smith, Jane. The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. ix + 297 + 7 illustrations. $ 99.99 cloth.
Shakespeare could be surprisingly conventional in his sonnets. The poet John Berryman, in one of his many magnificent critical essays, went so far as to call them tiresome, particularly in their claims to immortality. In the well-known Sonnet 55, for instance, the poet opens with an image so familiar that the scholar Stephen Booth claims in his critical edition that it is neither possible nor necessary to speculate on whether Shakespeare drew firsthand from its original classical sources, or simply knew it from its frequent repetition:
Not marble nor the gilded monumentsOf princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme,But you shall shine more bright in these contentsThan unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time
But Sonnet 55 also communicates some surprises in its own right. Just as any undergraduate might observe that the poem is about its own immortality, by the same measure it is about the frailty of monuments, the sad fate that awaits even the most solid structures we have known how to design. In these respects, the poem might inspire thoughtful dialogue about what it means for a poem to outlive its author, to survive into a world that the author could not possibly have imagined, and to speak to readers who for their part encounter it as strangers. And so the conversation might continue, but unless somebody were to point it out, that same poem also refuses to acknowledge the fact that for the vast majority of poems, this prospect of survival simply does not hold. Quite the contrary, most poems fall into obscurity, read by very few, and then for purposes the authors never had in mind. Modern scholars might take an interest in Barnabe Barnes or Bartholomew Griffin, perhaps in reference to the vogue for sonnets during the 1590s, casually overlooking the fact that whatever they wrote, they did not write objects for research or study. But only handful of Barnes’s or Griffin’s sonnets continue to appear in prominent anthologies, and what can be said about the authorship of Diella, other than that stylistic features strongly favor Richard Linche as the identity of R.L.? What of the countless writers whom Booth finds it unnecessary to identify as possible sources for Shakespeare? Meanwhile, how should we account for the ones that do happen to survive? Do they in fact represent the “best,” whether of their age, their genres, even their authors? Do other factors intervene, including the decisions, made usually (but not always) by editors and publishers, to favor certain texts over others? What role does chance play? Indeed, when we consider the peculiar circumstances, which cause some poems to escape that lapse into obscurity so many other poems go through as a matter of course, our discoveries may prove as wonderful as Shakespeare’s most striking lines.
Several recent studies address questions of how certain poems manage to endure past their immediate audiences, and in turn, how their continued appeal shapes the way readers reimagine the past. In The Long Public Life of a Short Public Poem, Peter Murphy describes the transmission history, or “survival,” of “They Flee from Me,” a single poem of twenty-one lines by Sir Thomas Wyatt. He traces its course, from its earliest and nearly anonymous appearance in private manuscripts to its reappearance in anthologies (beginning with Richard Tottel’s famous Songs and Sonnettes), to its gradual study as an artifact in antiquarian research, to its recurring attention in so many essays of literary criticism and analysis—the “Song of the Professor,” as Murphy describes it. Jane Kingsley-Smith’s book, The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets might initially seem lofty in its ambitions when placed next to Murphy’s study of a single poem; all the more so in that hers represents the first book-length study of what we now think of as Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Indeed, part of Kingsley-Smith’s argument is to address the multiple collections, and substantial re-arrangements, even adulterations, which began to appear before Thomas Thorpe’s edition of 1609. In ways that resemble Murphy’s survey, Kingsley-Smith addresses their survival as poems, including lengthy periods when they were read sporadically, with little consensus about which few really stand out as first-rate. Many critical responses often tell us as much about the mind of the critic as they do of the poems they review, but all critical responses tell us something about the poems available to read in the first place. In Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon, Paul Salzman surveys the men and women who produced the editions, both groundbreaking anthologies and comprehensive collections of individual poets and playwrights, without which the writers we associate with early modern English literature might not have remained visible. Salzman’s book is as much a tribute as it is a survey, arguing that the editors he touches on are worthy of far more scholarly attention than they have received.
These new publications join a growing number of reception studies, including several recent works which address, variously, individual writers, texts, even literary periods, in an effort to account for their status as preeminent literary figures. One thinks, for instance, of several titles that address “the making” or “the invention” of individual writers like Shakespeare or Jane Austen, the national poet, Stratford-Upon-Avon, the English canon, the English literary past, or anthologies like Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which help establish that English literary past. Even the striking term “afterlife” in Kingsley-Smith’s title has an antecedent in Michael Dobson and Nicola Watson’s magnificent study of Queen Elizabeth. As such, the studies under review here share many of the assumptions we might expect to find in reception studies, beginning with the assumption that none of our assumptions, whether about who we read or how we read them, are intrinsically grounded in the works themselves. Of course, this is a truism, in one sense. The American writer Washington Irving, for instance, once wrote a dazzling anecdote on the mutability of literature, which took for granted that writers pass in and out of obscurity, that books formerly preeminent eventually become inaccessible, and (for those familiar with the story) the ones that do still speak to us tend to carry on in decidedly fantastical terms. In other more important senses, however, these variations in reception speak to several fundamental issues, which range from the principles of aesthetic judgment to concepts of lineage (literary and hereditary alike), or the design and method of education. The very idea of a national poet joins the literary text with issues of nationalism, of imperialism and colonialism, and balance of power politics. Many good studies remind us that editions of books that strike us as highly adulterated may at one point have been one of the main versions in which a given author was read; or that now discredited critical interpretations are in fact built on what were once considered perfectly sound principles. Even questions of how we forget come into play. Part of what distinguishes the studies under review here is their attention to the ways that certain poems resist oblivion, as though writing—or writing about—literature were itself a hazardous battle against entropy.
Such a battle takes many forms, including the battle of professors of literature against the various forces that seem relentlessly to push against them. Paul Salzman notes in his preface, most of the research and writing he did for Editors Construct the English Renaissance took place after being made redundant by his university. Who can say what emotions lie behind that opening statement, so matter of fact in its phrasing, but it ought to put readers in a position of deep admiration, especially readers already familiar with Salzman for his work on early modern women writers, or his renowned Oxford World Classics anthologies of Elizabethan and of seventeenth century prose fiction. Salzman himself admires the relatively few individuals, who roughly span a period of two generations, who in the course of their careers—many of them were clergymen—put together what came to be known as early modern literature. If plays by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe are familiar to readers today, to say nothing of those by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, John Marston, or the prose writings of Robert Greene, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Dekker, or the poetry of Nicholas Breton, Aphra Behn, even the hundreds of women whose writings today still call for recovery, this is in large part thanks to the tireless efforts of individuals like Alexander Dyce, James Halliwell and Henrietta Phillips, Alexander Grosart, F.J. Furnivall, Horace Howard Furness, Arthur Henry Bullen, R.B. McKerrow, W.W. Greg, who in their various activities managed to produce multi-volume collections, edited and supplemented with additional volumes of research and criticism. The very abundance of names is telling in itself. As Salzman argues, the editors of the nineteenth century developed an expansive canon. They also established a canon that tended to prioritize writers as individuals, a feature which may now seem misleading as modern scholars have become more attentive to collaborative authorship. Perhaps most important, their editions established a sort of permanence. If there is a sense in which these editors have fallen into relative neglect, if not outright disregard, especially as digital collections like the Early English Books Online catalog have come to dominate the field, it is also the case that their editions made it possible for so many subsequent generations of readers, Salzman included, to take interest. On the other hand, if modern scholars may find fault with some of the editorial decisions they made, especially as editors have grown increasingly attentive to the material contingencies of the texts they take up, Salzman sets out to defend an editorial tradition that is richer, and more heterogeneous, than perhaps modern scholars have tended to recognize. In writing about them, Salzman asks his readers to appreciate the surprisingly extensive range of how they went about their business.
For Salzman, appreciation often comes down to describing these various collections for what they contain. He is sparing on biographical information, including the factors that motivated these select men and women to take up an interest in editing often forgotten collections of plays, poems, stories, pamphlets, even jest books—that became the Renaissance canon. He is somewhat more concerned with examining their various principles as editors. Those principles are made apparent through meticulous descriptive accounts of their projects, including their editorial decisions, textual apparatuses and other commentary, layout and design, even on occasion their marketing strategies. Their very choices of projects can be revealing. In some instances, definite critical objectives are in play, such as an effort to rescue certain individual writers, or even entire classes of writers, from misrepresentation, if not undeserving neglect. At other times, writers seem to be selected precisely for their obscurity, almost as though they were occasions for editors to show off their erudition. (The effect is amplified as editors increasingly turn to non-literary texts as contextualizing devices.) Salzman certainly marvels at the indefatigable work habits that these early editors cultivated, along with the imposing volume of scholarship they produced. Were these people giants from an age long past, or did they massively underestimate what their projects entailed? But while their efforts certainly invite marvel, it remains the task of readers to take measure of just what they accomplished, particularly in shaping subsequent conceptualizations of early modern literature.
These accomplishments are anything but clear. Alexander Dyce’s five volume 1840 edition of Middleton serves as a useful test case, since Salzman notes it as the only complete collection of the plays until the magnificent Oxford edition took its place in 2007. This can be taken as a sign of many things. Dyce’s work certainly stands out for its durability, and it staggers the imagination that one individual could produce what later took the contributions of some seventy-five scholars working internationally over a period of several years. But it might just as well suggest Middleton’s relative obscurity, a figure whose pleasures may appeal rather more to editors than to readers. Indeed, Salzman invites comparison with Taylor’s own extensive textual history, since among other things, Taylor holds Dyce’s edition almost single-handedly responsible for Middleton’s mixed critical reception among nineteenth-century readers. That state of affairs in turn allows Taylor to recognize A.H. Bullen’s eight volume edition of 1886, not simply as a reprint of Dyce’s edition with minor modifications, but a distinct critical assessment of Middleton’s literary merits. (At the risk of caviling, Salzman might have mentioned this edition as well, though he does discuss Bullen at great length throughout.) Middleton’s decidedly uneven reception also seems to correspond with Salzman’s prevailing interests in the shaping of critical tastes, including general concerns about a higher education system that prioritizes Shakespeare at the expense of nearly all his contemporaries. In an approach that tends to favor descriptions of content, and of the methods that editors used to produce them, Salzman generally leaves it to readers to determine how they fare as editions.
Salzman himself seems to hold back in at least some of his judgments. He tends to describe individual editors or texts as interesting, and he is clear in explaining what makes them interesting. He is careful not to evaluate their scholarship according to any single abstract standard. He is particularly cautious about teleological approaches, as though the chronological sequence of editions were tending toward the fulfillment of some predetermined end point. In instances when an individual takes on a project that seems scientific in its method, Salzman qualifies his description with scare quotes, or with conditional phrases along the lines of “one might possibly say.” But neither are new editions completely spontaneous expressions of current ideology and fashion. They are meant to be compelling representations, whether as ideal reconstructions of what the text is supposed to be, faithful representations of the ways that the text has actually appeared in its transmission, or any other definite principle. Meanwhile, if it is indeed “far from the case” that a given scholarly edition improves upon the shortcomings of its predecessors, then we are entitled to wonder what exactly it does accomplish. If, for instance, no given edition can be taken as an intrinsically reliable reconstruction of what its author originally meant to write, it remains critical to know what exactly given editing and corresponding scholarship puts readers in a position to recognize about the texts they reproduce.
For all the consequences of their efforts, including the continued scholarly interest in the Renaissance canon, Salzman does not expressly address why a Renaissance canon became something editors felt compelled to construct. By contrast, Peter Murphy makes no prejudgments about the value of “They Flee from Me.” In focusing his attention on a single poem, he does make a strong case for individual poems, in favor of Poetry. The more we think of Poetry as a class of writing, the more likely we are to lose sight of poems as individual objects that exist and circulate within a world of individual readers. But Murphy also recognizes the fragility of these objects, and in many ways his book is an extended meditation on the miracle that any poem manages to survive. Wyatt’s lyric was first recorded in the highly unstable medium of private manuscripts, which tended to be kept as family heirlooms. Subsequent holders of these manuscripts added records of their own, including math problems and doodles. There is nothing to indicate that the owners regarded the poem as anything other than one more entry, which took up space on a page. Indeed, as Murphy stresses, the poem could not have readers for the unsettling reason that any hypothetical reader would not have had any idea what they were supposed to notice about it. By the time Richard Tottel selected it for his collection of Songes and Sonettes, the poem served to illustrate a bygone age. More than two hundred years would pass before Bishop Percy recovered it as a specimen for his Reliques, and then nearly another two hundred more before it became one of the “Poems for Study” in Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry. Meanwhile, although many poems helped establish Wyatt’s reputation as a poet, there is little to suggest that “They Flee From Me” was destined to be appreciated as one of Wyatt’s finest, to say nothing of one of the finest lyric poems in the English language. The poem is as much a record of its own improbable survival through recurring rediscovery, as of a gentlemen’s complaints about ever-changing fashions and “newfangleness.”
Each rediscovery is also a transformation, which remakes the poem into a new object. How the poem is recorded goes hand in hand with broader issues concerning the significance of information, including how we organize it, how we assign it value, and importantly, how we share it. One of the most prominent features of The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem is the attention to physical appearance as a significant attribute. To that end, Murphy includes some fifty images, which reproduce the poem’s several printings throughout various collections. The content changes from one printing to the next; the last line goes through many alterations, which dramatically rework the narrator’s tone. But the look of the poem on its page also matters. The shape of the letters matters, as does the ink that produces them. Notes in the margins matter, whether scribbles or scholarly annotations. So too do the identifying markers, which indicate whether the poem is regarded as an item in an anthology, an artifact for a museum, or an exercise for college undergraduates. Murphy pushes hard the idea that each new instance of its printing amounts to a radically distinct entity, which takes us farther from whatever Wyatt had in mind when he first decided to set words to paper. Among the book’s many striking stylistic features, Murphy uses the term “variation” in only a handful of instances; though terms like “error” or “mistake” recur throughout. Some readers might object that the poem remains mostly the same, or that the coterie milieu for which Wyatt wrote permitted variation as a matter of course, but given Murphy’s interests in the technologies of preservation, it should matter that each new printing further distances its readers from the object that it purports to record. Every instance of its printing is an appeal to a continuously fleeing past, whose features we can only imagine. The poem may well be a struggle against entropy, but as Murphy also suggests, it may contribute to that same entropy in the very struggle against it. Much the same might be said about the history of how the poem has been preserved, so much of which undoubtedly is transformed, or simply lost, in Murphy’s own meticulous efforts to record it. But if error is the inevitable result of the struggle, it may also be the finest justification for undertaking it.
Given its intense focus, The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem prompts questions about replication. Exactly how many poems could go through similar treatments? Would they reveal similar patterns about the way poems tend to be preserved, if not manipulated, or would each individual poem reveal its own distinct microcosms of readers and problems? Barbara Kingsley-Smith takes up one clearly distinct approach in The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, inasmuch as “Shakespeare’s Sonnets” refers alternately to the collection itself, and to the 154 individual poems of which it is comprised. In considering both, Kingsley-Smith charts a course between two common misperceptions, both that the poems have been universally admired since they first appeared in Thomas Thorpe’s 1609 edition, and conversely that they languished in relative obscurity before Malone “rescued” them. The most effective response to these misjudgments is to review, in a sort of case study, the many ways in which the poems actually have circulated, whether in print, through allusions, or among readers.
This approach allows Kingsley-Smith to make significant reevaluations, of the collection as well as of select poems, often to surprising effect. Frances Meres’s flattering remarks about Shakespeare’s “sugared sonnets,” now quoted in nearly every textbook edition of Shakespeare’s writings, was at one time a single paragraph, deeply buried within a book that had only limited readership. Alternatively, Kingsley-Smith can be sympathetic to otherwise discredited editions. John Benson’s 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems, which Gary Taylor’s Inventing Shakespeare dismisses in less than five words, receives extensive attention as a notable engagement, which reshaped the poems to suit the tastes of Caroline fashion. She is particularly sharp at observing instances in which individual poems register in other literary texts, such as Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of his Humor or Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania. In a sort of case history, she points out significant fluctuations among what readers have favored. (Sonnet 18, for instance, was relatively unknown until it appeared in Palgrave’s Anthology.) Although the sonnets seem to disappear during much of the eighteenth century, she makes a strong case that several readers must have continued to read at least half a dozen, which carried over from editions of previous centuries. Malone also comes under heavy scrutiny, as both a landmark figure and as the individual perhaps most responsible for the most common misperceptions about the poems.
In her consideration of Malone, Kingsley-Smith joins with several critics who cast doubt on certain conventions that date back to his commentary. These include his imposition of a narrative, in a sequence of two parts, which recounts the narrator’s preoccupations with a young man and a woman. Malone also treated the poems as though they included traces of biographical elements, a surprising innovation, which both inspired new interest and took that interest in directions that Shakespeare almost certainly would not have recognized. What distinguishes Kingsley-Smith’s approach, in part, is her interest in how Malone’s fabrications allowed subsequent readers to engage with the poems. Roughly half of the book conducts an historical survey, which spans from the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, to pivotal figures in the transition to modernism, such as Oscar Wilde or Virginia Woolf, to more contemporary poets and critics, including figures like Timo Müller or Haryette Mullen, who have begun to interrogate the poems for their apparent preoccupations with skin complexion and race. As one would expect from a survey this inclusive, Kingsley-Smith touches on several major themes throughout; there is plenty for readers to pick and choose according to their individual preferences; and somehow, one is left wishing for more. While The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets does represent the first full monograph on the Sonnet’s reception (Kingsley-Smith, Introduction), a single monograph cannot cover everything. Readers’ responses presumably will vary according to their interests. In many respects, the book reads as an invitation for readers to explore further.
A single example will have to suffice. In her review of “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” Kingsley-Smith gives priority to Wilde’s consideration of the sonnets’ interests in one Willie Hughes, a supposed boy actor who performed in Shakespeare’s company. In some ways, Wilde’s piece—itself a hybrid of fiction and criticism—develops an aperçu, first advanced by Malone and his circle, into a comprehensive theory. The blatantly homoerotic interpretation finds its redress in several subsequent readings throughout the early twentieth century, which laid new emphasis in a figure who came to be known as “the dark lady.” But Wilde’s “Portrait” importantly is a study of actors. Professionally, the actor’s great talent is to assume all forms, and in doing so, to reveal an underlying secret regarding the essence of beauty. The actor also represents a coming together of the writer’s words, and the individual body with its particular movements and its own voice, which no amount of documentation can ever fully record. As much as poems like the Sonnets call attention to their own durability, they also call upon their readers to be mindful of those voices no longer available. The fact that any poems can make such a demand, however, is by no means guaranteed. How the few that do find their ways to readers is a question well-worthy of the careful attention that readers like Salzman, Murphy, and Kingsley-Smith give it in their own wonderful studies.
Works Cited
Berryman, John. Berryman’s Shakespeare: Essays, Letters, and Other Writings by John Berryman. Ed. John Haffenden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
Middleton, Thomas. Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works. Ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, with Mac D.P. Jackson, John Jowett, Valerie Wayne, and Adrian Weiss. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007.
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Ed. Stephen Booth. New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 1977.
Taylor, Gary. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.