Critical Survey

The history of reading in early modern England is elusive and teasing – offering glimpses of readers but rarely a detailed view of how they read; posing more questions than answers. In part this is because the history of reading is still a relatively new field of enquiry, and our knowledge of reading practices in the period is slowly accruing piece by piece. In the last two decades especially, the history of books and reading has undergone a transformation: reading practices have increasingly been located in terms of their cultural specificity; particular readers, reading acts, and libraries in early modern England have been brought to light; the material histories of books and the ‘sociology of texts’ have inspired new directions in bibliography, while research into manuscript culture has revealed specific readers and annotators at work.1 As Robert Darnton suggests, the history of books and reading is not so much a field of study as ‘a tropical rain forest. The explorer can hardly make his way across it’, criss-crossing tracks between academic disciplines and different caches of evidence.2 Sources relating to readers, reading acts, and reading practices in early modern England are vast and disparate, scattered across a myriad of genres, fields, and disciplines – from fiction to the documents of social history; from written texts to physical artefacts; from the literary to the non-literary; from print to manuscript. The sheer range and inconclusivity of much of this material demands that we make careful distinctions between sources for a history of reading, and confront the methodological challenges they pose. This special issue on Reading in Early Modern England stems out of a Shakespeare Association of America seminar in 1999 on the topic.3 In this short essay I do not attempt to provide an introduction to the history of reading in early modern England, but instead to voice issues raised by the seminar in relation to three key areas: women’s reading, social differentiation, and textual transmission.

Addressing the question, ‘Am I saved?’, the diary of Margaret Hoby is primarily an exercise in the Puritan discipline of selfexamination, a pre-condition for ‘assurance’ or certain knowledge of election. Covering the years 1599–1605, Hoby’s entries represent a life saturated by print – the reading of Scripture and contemporary devotional authors, as well as of copying reading material into her commonplace and testament books. Hoby’s religious discipline was not unusual for devout women of the gentry class, whose piety came to resemble ‘a kind of self-imposed career’. As Diane Willen has aptly noted for Protestant women, ‘Denied the status of the Puritan divine, women might seek the greater status of Puritan saint’. There is a sense in which Margaret Hoby, as well as other Reformation women, may have found in private religious exercises a focus upon the states of their souls which in fact freed them momentarily from gender roles. Yet Reformation women incorporated their religious experiences into lives which were inevitably affected by gender.

Locating evidence of early modern women’s reading habits is notoriously difficult. Beyond passing allusions in popular ephemera, brief prefaces and stylised dedications, there is little concrete information about how and why reading by women was conducted in the period. Conventional sources of evidence – such as marginalia (written comments or signatures penned in books and pamphlets) or library inventories – are scanty. Women do not tend to inscribe themselves in the margins, and those who catalogue their books are small in number. Even then, as Heidi Brayman Hackel has argued, because an unstable and uneasy relationship obtains between textual consumption and reading practice, records of book ownership cannot always be closely tied to the reading act. The dictates of conduct literature manuals, and the appeals and addresses contained in ballads and broadsheets, offer clues about assumptions relating to gendered modes of consumption, yet they tell us little about the ‘material reality’ of what women actually read (as opposed to what they were supposed to read). In such circumstances, autobiography (diaries, memoirs, letters and conversion narratives), might seem a privileged place to look for evidence of reading habits.

The letter was the single most widely used property in Tudor-Stuart plays. In that memorable stage direction from The Spanish Tragedy, the letter is an instrumental device in the plot. It provides Hieronimo, the central protagonist of the revenge tragedy, with targets for revenge by identifying his son’s killers by name. However, the letter also is a sign for the interior state of mind of its writer, the beautiful Bel-imperia, in issuing a call for reprisal. It is a materialisation of what immaterial passions ultimately drive the action: desire, loss, and rage. Red ink. Blood signifies the authenticity of the words on the page. They come, literally, from Bel-imperia’s heart. And yet, the macabre medium of the message brings Hieronimo to see in it fatal implications for himself. ‘Hieronimo, beware’, he says to himself, ‘thou art betrayed, / And to entrap thy life this train is laid’. (Indeed, in another revenge tragedy, Bussy D’Ambois, an adulterous wife is forced at knifepoint to lay a snare for her lover with that very deception of a letter inscribed in her blood). This single moment in Thomas Kyd’s tragedy, Hieronimo’s reception of Bel-imperia’s ‘bloody writ’, captures the complex of attitudes that governed the circulation of letters as stage properties.

Richard Johnson, sometime apprentice and later producer of a baker’s dozen of very popular works of prose and verse, would today be dismissed as a hack. That he was noticed at all in his day and since then, however, suggests that his work has an important place in the record of how, and why, reading became not only a leisure-time activity of a late Elizabethan and Jacobean citizenry, but also both a marker and maker of an emerging English bourgeois self-consciousness. His Most Famous History of the Seven Champions of Christendom (Part 1: STC 14677; Part 2: STC 14678), a prose romance of epic proportions regarding the exploits of St George, with token attention to the other six, was one of the more popular works of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.

In 1658, in the waning days of the Commonwealth – a time when much manuscript erotic English verse from the period 1600–1640 was coming into print for the first time – a pamphlet entitled The Crafty Whore, or The Misery and Iniquity of the Bawdyhouses Laid Open, was printed in London and ‘sould by Henry Marsh at the Princes Armes at the Lower end of Chancery Lane, nere the Inner Temple Gate, in Fleetestreet’. The pamphlet, which consists largely of a dialogue between ‘two subtle bawds’ named Antonia and Thais, was written anonymously by a male author who refers to himself only as ‘your Countryman’. As we shall see, though the text had never appeared in English before, it is indeed an old book with a freshly painted face.

In the 1730s a group of women known as the Shakespeare Ladies’ Club promoted performances of Shakespeare’s plays and supported the creation of the Shakespeare monument in Westminster Abbey. The Shakespeare Ladies’ Club (SLC) has been accorded a footnote in the reception history of Shakespeare, but no one has yet taken account of their importance for women’s participation in the intellectual and cultural life of eighteenth-century London. By tracing the dynamics of this group, we may increase our understanding of women’s reading habits, their effect on the theatrical repertoire, and their role in the public life of clubs and philanthropic endeavours. The convergence of several factors made the SLC possible; this article contextualises the SLC within the literary and cultural life of the eighteenth century, and examines the importance of the SLC in the life and work of one member, Elizabeth Boyd.

The Introduction to this issue of Critical Survey by Sasha Roberts acutely and rigorously defines how the essays gathered here contribute towards the history of reading practices in Early Modern England. My aim in this Afterword is to underline in what ways the six articles in this edition enable us to penetrate deeper into the encounter between textual criticism and cultural history, or (in other words) between literature and history.

The Several Places at Kempley The Silent Witness RENNIE PARKER

High and Dry CHRISTOPHER PILLING

Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama: Criticism, History, and Performance 1594–1998 edited by S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (London: Routledge, 1998) ISBN 0–415–16443–5 paperback £14.99, ISBN 0–415–16442–7 hardback £45.00

Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading by Mary Jacobus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) ISBN 0–19–818434–4 hardback £25.00

Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography by Loraine Fletcher (London: Macmillan, 1998) ISBN 0333678451 hardback £47.50

Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space Edited by Scott Brewster, Virginia Crossman, Fiona Becket and David Alderson (London: Routledge, 1999) ISBN 0 415 18958 6 paperback £14.99

Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Aspirations Thomas Cartelli (London: Routledge, 1999) ISBN 0–415–19134–3 hardback £50.00, 0–415–19498–9 paperback £15.99

Notes on contributors