Abstract
How far does the format of a book shape the interpretation of the text within? In this essay I want to explore an intriguing history of textual transformation and transmission surrounding the publication of one of Shakespeare’s most popular reading texts in the early seventeenth century, Lucrece. First published in 1594, Lucrece went through nine editions by 1655 and in this 50-year period the text and structure of the poem were reshaped for the reader: textual variants increasingly offered a more ‘polite’ reading of the poem; the poem was divided into chapters, with the editorial apparatus of chapter and marginal headings working to render unambiguous the ‘chaste’ interpretation of the poem; and Shakespeare, whose name was not mentioned on the title-page of Q1, became a central point of reference on the title-page of Q9 of 1655. The history of the later quartos of Lucrece raises the role of the editor, the representation of sexuality, the presentation of narrative and the canonization of both Shakespeare and English poetry for the seventeenth-century reading public.1
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Notes
Augustine, The City of God, Book I, ch. 18; trans. John Healey (1610), ed. Ernest Barker (London, 1957), p. 23. ‘The sanctity of the body is no more lost’, argued Augustine, ‘if the sanctity of mind remain (though the body be ravished), than it is kept, if the mind’s holiness be polluted, though the body itself be untouched’ (p. 22). Roland Mushat Frye argues that ‘Shakespeare would have had as easy access to [Augustine’s] writings as to those of any of the sixteenth-century writers …’ (Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine [London: Oxford University Press, 1963], p. 11). On Augustine’s criticism of Lucrece and the problematic definition of her rape and suicide, see Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations (Oxford, 1982), pp. 21–39; Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1989), pp. 3–4, 13, 39–47; Carolyn D. Williams, ‘“Silence, like a Lucrece knife”: Shakespeare and the Meanings of Rape’, Yearbook of English Studies, 23 (1993): 93–110; A. Robin Bowers, ‘Iconography and Rhetoric in Lucrece’, Shakespeare Survey 14 (1981): 1–21, esp. pp. 1–2; Laura Bromley, ‘Lucrece’s Re-creation’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 34:2 (Summer, 1983): 200–11, esp. pp. 200–1; Don Cameron Allen, ‘Some Observations on The Rape of Lucrece’, Shakespeare Survey 15 (1962): 89–98; Roy Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and its Christian Premises (Bloomington, 1969), pp. 3–41; and Annabel Patterson, Reading between the Lines (London, 1993), pp. 299 and 304.
The Rapes of Lucretia, pp. 21–39 and 45–6; Bromley, ‘Lucrece’s Re-Creation’, pp. 200–4; see also Bowers, ‘Iconography and Rhetoric in Lucrece’, p. 2; and Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems (London, 1987), p. 90. Augustine argues that Lucrece acted ‘as a Roman woman, excessively eager for honour… Such has not been the behaviour of Christian women’ (p. 30).
Robert Carew, trans., A World of Wonders (London, 1607), p. 101; cited by Allen, ‘Some Observations on “The Rape of Lucrece”’, p. 90.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1964), vol. III, p. 108. For Aretino see ‘La ultima giornata del Capriccio Aretino nella quale la nanna narra alla antonia la vita delled puttane’, Ragionamento della Nonna e della Antonia, in Opere di Pietro Aretino e di Anton Francesco Doni, ed. Carlo Cordie (Milan, 1976), vol. III, pp. 185–7. For Burton’s copy of Shakespeare’s Lucrece see Nichola K. Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton (Oxford, 1988), pp. 278 and 398.
The Rapes of Lucretia, pp. 40–1. A. Robin Bowers takes the opposite view, that ‘Shakespeare develops his legend to demonstrate Lucrece’s virtue which is forcibly and unwillingly violated by Tarquin’ (p. 3); Philippa Berry argues that the poem articulates ‘a new, feminine model of virtu’, in ‘Woman, Language and History in The Rape of Lucrece’, Shakespeare Survey 44 (1991): 33–9, esp. p. 38; Carolyn D. Williams concludes that Shakespeare’s Lucrece ‘is probably best understood as his representation of the archetypal rape victim, struggling to state her case in a way that will get her the fair hearing she desperately needs, but fears she never will obtain’, ‘Shakespeare and the meanings of rape’, p. 109. For other critical discussions of Shakespeare’s Lucrece, see Nancy Vickers, ‘“The blazon of sweet beauty’s best”: Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London, 1985), 95–115;
Coppelia Kahn, ‘The Rape in Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 53–7;
Annabel Patterson, Reading between the Lines (London, 1993), pp. 297–312.
Roger Chartier, ‘Laborers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader’, in Diacritics, 22 (summer 1992): 49–61, p. 50. See also
Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, 1991), p. 11: ‘Literary works do not know themselves and cannot be known, apart from their specific material modes of existence/resistance.’
Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville and London, 1993), p. 2. See also
Lawrence Lipking, ‘The Marginal Gloss’, Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 609–55;
William W. E. Slights, ‘“Marginall notes that spoile the text”: Scriptural annotation in the English Renaissance’, Huntington Library Quarterly 55:2 (1992): 255–78;
Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette. Reflections in Cultural History (London, 1990), pp. 177–9 and 182–5.
‘The Editor as Reader’, in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, eds. James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge, 1995), p. 112. See also Eugene R. Kintgen, ‘Reconstructing Elizabethan Reading’, Studies in English Literature, 30:1 (winter 1990), 1–18, esp. p. 13; and
Debra Belt, ‘The Poetics of Hostile Response, 1575–1610’, Criticism, 33 (1991): 419–59, esp. pp. 422–32.
Decisions about the size and format of printed books were generally the responsibility of the publisher, bookseller and/or the master-printer who had to cost the book, order the paper and fit the book’s production into the work pattern of the printing house; see for instance Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, 1974), p. 40; and
George Walton Williams, The Craft of Printing and the Publication of Shakespeare’s Works (London and Toronto, 1985), p. 53. Simon Caughi examines negotiations between printer and author in ‘The “setting foorth” of Harington’s Ariosto’, Studies in Bibliography, XXXVI (1983): 137–68; Adrian Weiss examines the process of textual production in ‘Shared printing, printer’s copy and the text(s) of Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres’ in Studies in Bibliography, XLV (1992): 71–104. Thomas Snodham was a printer in London active from 1603 to 1625 at St Botolph without Aldersgate. His extensive output was apparently dominated by religious texts, particularly sermons; among the few literary texts he printed were Seneca’s Tragedies in Latin (1624) and George Chapman’s The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1613); other works from his printing house include Thomas Elyot’s Book of the Governor and Serlio’s Five Books of Architecture (a prestigious folio production), current affairs and the songs of William Byrd and John Dowland; see McKerrow, Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers, 250–1; and E. Arber, A Transcript of the registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 (London: privately printed), vol. III, pp. 413 and 465.
Harry Farr, ‘Notes on Shakespeare’s Printers and Publishers’, The Library, 4th series, III:4 (March 1923): 225–60, p. 248; McKerrow, Dictionary, p. 151; see also Arber, Transcript of the Stationer’s Records, II. p. 648, III, p. 542, IV. 111–12 and 149. Jackson’s literary output included Ariosto’s A president for Satirists (1608), Greene’s Ghost Haunting Cunny Catchers (1602), Francis Davison’s Poemes or a Poeticall Rapsodye (1623), Arthur Saul’s The Famous Game of Chesse-play (1614) and Nicholas Breton’s Fantastiques (1626); non-fiction included Gervase Markham’s A Way to get Wealth (1623), F. N.’s The Husbandman’s Fruitfull Orchard (1608) and Robert Record’s The Ground of Arts: teaching the perfect worke and practise of arithmeticke… augmented by Mr John Dee (1623); religious texts included Dod and Clever’s A plaine and familiar expositione of the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of Proverbs (1608), Stephen Jerome’s Origen’s Repentance (1619) and Johann Gerhard’s A Christian mans weekes worke (1611); see also Arber, Transcript, III., p. 542 and IV, p. 149.
To the Reader, The English Hus-wife. This may well be the marketing strategy of an astute publisher; my point is simply that Jackson publicly involves himself in the publication of his volumes, addressing the reader directly. For other examples of the use of editorial apparatus in Jackson’s publications see Gervase Markham’s Cheape and Good Husbandry (Thomas Snodham for Roger Jackson, 1614), The English Hus-wife (John Beale for Roger Jackson, 1615), Markham’s Methode or Epitome (Thomas Snodham for Roger Jackson, 1616); Dodd and Cleaver’s A Plaine and familiar exposition of the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of the Proverbs of Solomon (R. B. for Roger Jackson, 1609) includes marginal headings and notes, but no contents page. Robert Greene’s Ghost Hunting Conie-Catchers (I. North for Roger Jackson, 1602) is rare among Jackson’s publications in employing the bare minimum of editorial apparatus.
Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY and London, 1995), p. 135. For Kerrigan see ‘The Editor as Reader’, p. 118.
Clayton (ed.), Sir John Suckling: The Non-Dramatic Works (Oxford, 1971), p. 228. The extract from Lucrece as it appears in Englands Parnassus (pp. 396–7) has no stanza divisions, but otherwise remains fairly close to the text of Q1, 11.386–413.
See Elias, The History of Manners. The Civilizing Process: Volume 1 (New York, 1978), esp pp. 164, 167–9, 182 and 189–90.
‘Astrea to Lysander’, prefixed to Seneca Unmasqued, or, More Reflections, trans. Aphra Behn (London, 1685), reprinted in Janet Todd, ed., The Pickering Masters: Works of Aphra Behn (London, 1993), vol. 4, pp. 5–6.
On the social currency of typefaces, see Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric, pp. 283–5, and D. F. McKenzie, ‘Typography and Meaning: The Case of Congreve’, in Wolfenbutteler Schriften zur Geschichte des Buchwessens, eds. G. Barber and B. Fabian (Hamburg, 1981): 81–125.
In Drayton’s volume corrections centre upon emendations to capitalization, italicization and spelling: for instance, ‘Bloud-thirsting Warre’ is amended in 1613 to ‘Blood-thirsting warre’ (The Barons Warres, from Poems, 1605, sig. B2 and 1613, sig. B2). On Nicholas Ling’s publication of Drayton, see Gerald D. Johnson, ‘Nicholas Ling, Publisher 1580–1607’, Studies in Bibliography, XXXVIII (1985), 203–16, pp. 204–5.
Cited by Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric, pp. 263–4; see also William A. Ringler, Jr., ‘The 1640 and 1653 Poems: By Francis Beaumont, Gent. and the canon of Beaumont’s nondramatic verse’, Studies in Bibliography 45 (1992): 120–40, p. 139.
See Marotti, pp. 259–62; and Paulina Kewes, ‘“Give me the social pocket-books…”: Humphrey Moseley’s Serial Publication of Octavo Play Collections’, Publishing History 38 (1995): 5–21, p. 6. See also
Peter Lindenbaum, ‘Milton’s Contract’, Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal, Vol. X, no. 2 (1992), p. 451; and
Warren Chernaik, ‘Books as Memorials: The Politics of Consolation’, The Yearbook of English Studies: Politics and Literature in England, 1558–1658, Vol. XXI (1991): 207–16.
I discuss the example of Frances Wolfreston as a woman reader of Shakespeare in ‘Reading the Shakespearean text in early modern England’, Critical Survey 7:3 (Winter 1995): 299–306, and ‘“Shakespeare creepes into the womens closets about bedtime”: Women Reading in a Room of their Own’, in Renaissance Configurations: Voices, Bodies, Spaces, ed. Gordon McMullen (forthcoming from Macmillan); see also Paul Morgan, ‘Frances Wolfreston and “Hor Bouks”: A Seventeenth-century Woman Book-Collector’, The Library, 6th series, XI:3 (September 1989), pp. 207 and 217.
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Roberts, S. (1997). Editing Sexuality, Narrative and Authorship: The Altered Texts of Shakespeare’s Lucrece. In: Brown, C.C., Marotti, A.F. (eds) Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25994-6_7
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