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The Idea of the Author in Elizabethan London
From: Cambridge University Press
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Colin Burrow |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 London in the 1580s and 1590s nurtured a literary culture of extraordinary achievement. William Shakespeare was only one among many distinguished dramatists and poets, whose ranks included Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and John Donne. In this extract from a contribution to The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500-1600 (available through Fathom), Colin Burrow, senior lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge, considers some of the reasons why writing flourished here as never before and why writers themselves began to emerge as public figures to be acknowledged and celebrated. |
 he most extraordinary literary phenomenon of the century was the sudden burst of literary activity in the 1580s and 1590s, when Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and Donne were all at work within a few miles of each other. There is inevitably a shortfall between any quasi-causal "explanation" of this kind of miracle and the phenomenon itself. But those writers were the beneficiaries of many things: an expansion of grammar schools had produced an increasingly eloquent, classically learned body of men from relatively humble backgrounds for whom public offices (as secretaries to noblemen or as minor civil servants) were in critically short supply. For men who could not get any other job which would enable them to make use of their training in eloquence, writing provided an opportunity to use their eloquence in a public forum. |
After about 1560 there also began a complex set of realignments in the ways in which poets, dramatists, and prose writers regarded their activity, and in the ways in which they were regarded by their readers. In 1562 Barnabe Googe's Eclogues were prefaced by a note from their author protesting that they had been smuggled into print without his knowledge. In 1573 George Gascoigne's Hundred Sundrie Flowres was preceded by an elaborate set of epistles which purport to describe how the printer had obtained the manuscript without the author's consent. These, however, were almost certainly composed by Gascoigne himself to give his printed work the cachet of a privately circulated manuscript. |
By 1590 attitudes toward print had changed significantly: poets who were not primarily courtiers frequently printed their works with signed epistles which revealed both their identity and their involvement in the process of printing (although courtiers such as Sir Walter Ralegh appear to have gone to great lengths to keep their work anonymous if it did sneak into print). Sir Philip Sidney, who died in 1586, did not print any of his literary works in his lifetime, but by 1595 all of his works had posthumously seen the light of print. The Defence of Poetrie (printed in 1595) presented poetry as occupying a distinctive logical category: it was not the bare summary of events offered by history, nor the indigestible abstractions of philosophy, but a hypothetical realm of events as they might be. But the simple fact that Sidney's works were printed, first illicitly and then with the collaboration of his sister Mary, did even more than his theoretical arguments to raise the social status of printed works. |
This is not to say that circulation of poems in manuscript to a small coterie of friends ceased in the 1590s: manuscript--often in multiple copies--continued to be a major method of publication until the latter part of the seventeenth century and beyond. The majority of the poems of John Donne circulated in manuscript alone until after his death, and readers would regularly transcribe works into their own manuscript compilations for the enjoyment of themselves and their friends. But by 1590, when Spenser printed The Faerie Queene with his name on the title page, an environment had emerged in which it was both possible and respectable to present oneself to the world as a professional author. And by 1598 the name of Shakespeare, rather than simply the name of the company which had performed his plays, was frequently appearing on the title pages of the printed versions of his plays. |
This foregrounding of the author was heightened by a tendency of much literary criticism in the later sixteenth century to create canons of named writers who had contributed to the growth of English language and literature, and to oppose these named figures--usually Chaucer, Wyatt, Surrey, Golding, Gascoigne, Sidney, Spenser--to unnamed poetasters and ballad-mongers. Sometimes, as in Francis Meres' catalogue of English writers in Palladis Tamia (1598), these lists are underwritten by ennobling parallels between the literature of London and that of Augustan Rome: as Meres put it "the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare" (G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols., Oxford University Press, 1904, vol. II, p.317). By the 1590s poetry could claim for its producers something of the cachet of laureateship. |
London as a literary center
These processes occurred above all in one place: London. And it is no exaggeration to say that without London the literary revolution of the 1580s and 1590s would not have occurred. The city's presses fed the center of the English book trade in the precincts of St. Paul's Cathedral, the hub of the social and religious activity of the capital. London also boasted the only purpose-made theatres in the country. The consumers of these media were drawn from a population which showed the highest levels of literacy in the nation, and which included the smart young men who attended the Inns of Court (the centers of legal training which were often called the country's third university). The city dominated more than 90 percent of the wool trade, which was the chief export industry in the period, and contained a massive body of wealthy and would-be wealthy hangers-on to the court and its attendant bureaucracies. But more than this, London, with its sprawling suburbs, its shady inns, and wandering back streets, was by the 1590s an imaginary locale of extraordinary energy. It was a place in which one could get caught by a debt-collector, lost without trace, robbed, raped, plague-struck, or very rich. |
London was governed by a tight and reciprocal collaboration between the Crown and the guilds, livery companies, merchants, and aldermen who had created most of the wealth of the city (Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds). Through the 1590s even these very effective forms of government were creaking under the weight of a population which had expanded from about 35,000 in 1500 to about 200,000 in 1600. In June 1602 there was the first vain attempt to curb the growth of the city by proclamation, since "such multitudes could hardly be governed by ordinary justice to serve God and obey her Majesty." (Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations, Volume III: The Later Tudors, 1588-1603, Yale University Press, 1969, p. 245). The growth continued unchecked, however, as men and a large number of women from the provinces thronged toward the center of work and wealth, the city which uniquely among European capitals was the center of both power and of mercantile activity. |
The rate of urban growth was matched in the 1590s by a phenomenal increase in the frequency with which new words entered the language, from about 50 new words per year in 1500 to about 350 in 1600 (Geoffrey Hughes, Words in Time: A Social History of the English Vocabulary, Basil Blackwell, 1988, pp. 101-03). Among anxious debates as to whether a "homespun" native English vocabulary was preferable to exotic words imported from Rome and Europe, the cosmopolitan London idiom became virtually institutionalized as that of literary English. As George Puttenham put it in his Arte of English Poesie (1589): "Ye shall therefore take the usual speech of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within 60 miles, and not much above" (Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. II, p. 150). |
Writing in London grew and mutated in the 1580s and 1590s as rapidly as the city itself. Ballads, chapbooks, accounts of robberies and hangings, all circulated in the same space (and often among the same readers) as writing which laid claim to august literary status. London writers read each others' works, imitated each others' styles, and tried eagerly to overgo each other, with the result that sonnet sequences, plays, epigrams, satires, and prose pamphlets had each year to differ from last year's model. Genres developed and died with an almost unhealthy rapidity. |
The rise and fall of the "epyllion"
A single genre, the erotic narrative poem (the "epyllion," or brief epic as it is sometimes called) illustrates the almost unhealthy vigor of generic development and transformation in the period. The genre effectively began with Thomas Lodge's Scylla's Metamorphosis (1589), but probably took off as a fashionable form with Marlowe's Hero and Leander. Marlowe's poem was not printed until 1598, but was almost certainly read in manuscript in the early 1590s by a young poet-playwright called William Shakespeare. Marlowe glancingly describes Hero's sleeves "bordered with a grove, / Where Venus in her naked glory strove / To please the careless and disdainful eyes / Of proud Adonis, that before her lies" in one of the densely inlaid pictorial images in which his poem and the genre abounds. Shakespeare may well have sought to expand and ornament this tiny detail into the first printed work to which his name was attached, Venus and Adonis, in 1593. |
By 1601 the sheer smartness of those who had attempted the genre had all but worked it out: Francis Beaumont's Salmacis and Hermaphroditus takes the key features of the earlier exemplars of the genre, their gender-bending delight in polymorphous sexuality, their unstoppably digressive narrative form, to a point of excess which it is all but impossible to overgo, and, exhausted, the form dropped from the fashionable repertoire. London in the 1580s and 1590s generated a giddily accelerated literary history, fueled by competition, by the desire to earn and to win patronage, and by the desire to pass into the magic circle of named, canonical writers. |
This overheated atmosphere generated many of the anxieties that make authors present their writings as "literary," as a special form of discourse over which they have rights of ownership and control. Some key elements in the vocabulary with which to assert literary ownership emerge in this period: the word "plagiary" first enters the language in Joseph Hall's satires (he has the ghost of Petrarch claiming his own from "a plagiary sonnet-wright" in Virgidemiarum 4.2); John Donne's satire 2 vents its spleen against those "who (beggarly) doth chaw [chew] / Others' wits' fruits." Anxieties about the theft and misinterpretation of poems run through Ben Jonson's Poetaster (1601), and surface in many of his earlier works. Jonson responds to these anxieties by shaping a physically and dramatically substantial character of "the Author" for himself in several of his plays, a character who argues about the interpretation of his texts and the critical principles on which they rest. |
The fear that printed words could disperse among a multitude of readers, be misinterpreted, stolen, or simply used as wrapping or lavatory paper has a profound effect on the way in which writers in the 1590s present their own personae: their efforts to be lords and owners of their work are partly the consequences of recognizing the actual vulnerability and ephemerality of their words. Donne, Jonson, and Shakespeare are all writers whose literary careers and literary personae developed in the overheated atmosphere of late Elizabethan London, in which they fought for survival; and without London, that sprawling monster on the threshold of the court, the majority of the writing for which the sixteenth century is remembered would never have been produced. |
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