to writing at a moment of irresolution about the boundaries and order of books—a moment in which, unlike today, there were few standard practices for assembling, preserving, and facilitating access to published works in collections. Their intellectual products were accordingly marked by contingency and the potential for change, visible at the level of presentation. As any student of early printed material knows, one of the most common ways for a publisher to market a work in the period was to claim on its title page that it had been “enlarged” or “augmented,” “annexed” to another text, or otherwise reconfigured. In contrast to modern conceptions of the book, a lack of fixity was normal and desirable.
That the writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries wrote for and within this model of a comparatively malleable, mutable book is evident in the surface structure of works by many canonical figures. Michel de Montaigne famously enlarged his Essais by writing new material—and copying borrowed quotations—directly in the blank spaces of his printed book; the title pages of each successive edition promised a text “augmentée,” or “reveu & augmentée” [revised and augmented], a project that continued after the author’s death.19 Thomas Middleton and George Chapman are two of the many Renaissance poets in England who enlarged the writings of others to form works of “continuation”: Middleton added episodes to Shakespeare’s Lucrece in his complaint poem The Ghost of Lucrece (1600); and Chapman brought to conclusion Christopher Marlowe’s unfinished long poem, Hero and Leander (1598), with the expanded Hero and Leander: begun by Christopher Marloe; and finished by George Chapman (1600) and, later, the further expanded (and now composite) Hero and Leander: begunne by Christopher Marloe … whereunto Is added the first booke of Lucan translated line for line by the same author, also issued in 1600.20 Philip Sidney’s works provide many well-known examples of continuation and composite annexation. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, his popular prose romance, ended in mid-sentence, as if inviting other writers to append, and was expanded four times in print and countless times in manuscript over the course of the next century.21 Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella, was first printed in 1591, and then again that same year in an expanded quarto “to the end of which are added, sundry other rare Sonnets of diuers Noble men and Gentlemen,” the title page advertised. In 1599, these two already composite books were combined, Astrophel and Stella added to the end of the Arcadia. And by 1629, the contents of this volume had become too heterogeneous and collaborative to list fully in the encumbered title: The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight. Now the seuenth time published, with some new Additions. With the supplement of a Defect in the third part of this History, by Sir W. A. Knight. Whereunto is now added a sixth Booke, by R. B. of Lincolnes Inne.
Augmentations, continuations, additions, supplements. Like the bound volumes that accommodated them, printed works of literature in early handpress culture were frequently the outward products of some order of compiling. But beneath these surface indicators on title pages, we know too that text collecting and assembly were important catalysts for discursive production and even creativity. The malleability of books—figurative rather than physical—lies at the heart of what literary scholars have long identified as the essentially imitative nature of Renaissance writing: the appropriation and manipulation of existing models, primarily from antiquity, and the assertion of writerly roles through or against one’s source.22 Notions deriving from antiquity of imitatio and copia dominated ideas about literary production from the earliest moments of writing instruction in humanist schools. As Mary Thomas Crane has shown in a now-classic study, students in Renaissance classrooms “were encouraged to view all literature as a system of interchangeable fragments and to view the process of composition as centered on intertextuality.”23 Pedagogical tools, such as commonplace books, trained poets to collect sayings and sententiae from others’ works to be assembled again into new works.24 This technique of textual reconfiguration, which Crane termed “gathering and framing,”25 is most observable in the aphoristic verse of the mid-sixteenth century, but has been shown in diverse ways to have shaped later narrative works as well. Linda Woodbridge, writing on the ubiquity of plot borrowing and rearrangement in Renaissance drama, has described the period’s default compositional processes with a quilting metaphor: patchwork. Shakespeare’s England, she explains, was “an aggregator’s world,” where literary producers depended on a ready supply of prefabricated parts of stories or verse in circulation. Collecting and redeploying material from others’ texts to compose their own, “Renaissance writers typically do not just retell a tale … they join several tales together to form a novella, an epic, or a play.”26
But despite this shared emphasis on compiling and text assembly in the rhetoric of literary production, scholars of the period think about and interpret writing as if it takes place only in the world of ideas, not in embodied practice.27 While our metaphors are insistently material, in other words, we imagine this particular, habitual intertextuality in Renaissance letters unfolding discursively. The literary producers and archival products examined in the chapters that follow demonstrate that, on the contrary, the Renaissance inclination to “gather” and “patch” was a more physical, ingrained thing than our assumptions about practice have allowed. The readers and writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries did not simply think of their books as aggregations of text; they physically aggregated, resituated, and customized them. Out of necessity and desire, they assembled volumes into unique configurations and built new works out of old ones. Models of literary production in the period were to a perhaps surprising degree predicated on the possibility that a text could be taken up and joined to something else. The bifurcation between ideas and material practice—between making works and making books—is, like the modern collectors’ binding, a later imposition.
“Compiling,” in fact, was production, strictly speaking, in the semantics of Renaissance literary activities. In early usage, the verb “to compile” could mean “to compose,” to produce an “original work.”28 It was in this nowlimited sense synonymous with writing. John Palsgrave’s 1530 translation dictionary defines “compiling” explicitly as authorship: “[to] make a boke as an auctor dothe.”29 Another early dictionary, John Bullokar’s An English Expositor, which passed through twenty editions between 1616 and 1775, lists the definition, “Compile. To make, frame or set together,” where “frame,” as recent scholarship has shown, also has a potentially structural meaning.30 The term was applied in this way to many varieties of text in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Here are a few examples: William Caxton in his 1490 Aeneid lists Virgil as the text’s compiler;31 “E.K.” introduces Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender by explaining that Spenser “compiled these xii. Aeglogues;”32 the Latin textbook A short introduction of grammar (1567) describes itself as being “compiled and set forth” by its author, William Lily;33 the title page to the 1561 Works of Chaucer advertises the attached “The Siege of Thebes” as “compiled by Ihon Lidgate”; Thomas Lupton’s morality play All for Money appears in a 1578 quarto “Compiled by T. Lupton”;34 John Skelton, the sixteenth-century laureate, was named as compiler in nine books of verse printed and reprinted between 1554 and 1563;35 Thomas Watson refers to his compositional practice as “compiling” twice in the running commentary to his 1582 book of sonnets, The Hekatompathia;36 and the cover of Gervase Markham’s domestic manual The English Husbandman (1613) makes the (only now) seemingly paradoxical announcement that it is “A worke neuer written before by any author: and now newly compiled.”37 To compile, according to this vocabulary, was to create.
The field-specific claim of this study then is twofold. It will argue first that books in early print culture were relatively open-ended and to a great extent bound (in both senses) by the desires of readers, and second that the attendant practices of compiling and collecting came to have an important structural impact on the production of Renaissance literature. In analyses of selected works by William Shakespeare, Thomas Watson, Michel de Montaigne, Edmund Spenser, and others in the chapters that follow, I contend that the unsettled conventions
