while ceding even more of the work of assembly to retailers and consumers.55 What Lerer calls an “impulse” had by the time of Spenser and Shakespeare become praxis. A writer or publisher in the Renaissance released their work into a culture of bibliographic contingency, where the reader had seemingly infinite choices for supplying context and meaning—for giving that work material form in a book.
And yet for much of modern textual history—especially after the industrialization of bookbinding in the nineteenth century (a genuine discontinuity, if not a Renaissance)56—a cultural preference for individual, modernlooking copies of major literary works has resulted in early printed artifacts being stripped of these material contexts. The objective is almost always bibliophilic preservation, necessary and noble in its way, but the effect has been to make Spenser and Shakespeare into our contemporaries, to separate them from their contemporaries in premodern reading and compiling culture. At its most extreme, these interventions can prevent us from accessing the history of a given text’s use or formation beyond that of the modern collector. Figure 3 displays a copy of King Lear from 1619 that was most likely extracted from an early multitext anthology.57 Each page has been cropped individually down to the margin and then inlayed or mounted in fresh, modern paper. No collation of the text can be taken, and no previous reader (or reading) can be perceived. Such a radical discrepancy in modes of text preservation and reading reflects an untold history of desired books and desired meaning. Poststructuralist theorists and historiographers from the later twentieth century have argued forcefully that archiving does not merely store what is written and said; it interprets, differentiates, and codifies discourse, and ultimately defines the limts of comprehensibility in the production of new discourse.58 The curatorial substructure of books in archives determines what we can say about them. In many cases, it conceals what has been said in and about the literatures of the past.
Renaissance books in today’s libraries are fundamentally divorced from their earliest readerly contexts, which established parameters for interpretation and regulated the textual field within which writers produced works. The first part of this study, “Readers,” begins to reconstruct these lost contexts in the compilations and collections that once populated library shelves. The second part, “Writers,” explores the ways in which these normative assemblages of text helped define compositional practices, and also the literary roles and subjectivities that were marketed to an emerging readership in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Because the available evidence in archives is unrepresentative (if it ever could have been representative), I cannot hope to provide a comprehensive or chronological account of compiling and collecting practices. Rather, Bound to Read examines the assembly and disassembly of early handpress-era texts at key cultural sites, showing how material arrangements and classification systems shaped Renaissance literature and how the organization of knowledge more generally exerts a farreaching influence over the making of literary texts.
Figure 3. Shakespeare’s King Lear, part of a 1619 series of plays, detached, cut out, and inlaid, page by page, while in possession of a modern collector. Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
The first chapter, “Special Collections: Book Curatorship and the Idea of Early Print in Libraries,” provides a historically elaborated counterpart to the set of issues raised in this introduction. Beginning with medieval compiling practices and their persistence into print, I chart the shift from a malleable early print textuality to the self-enclosed book of modernity through case studies drawn from two key archives: the eighteenth-century Cambridge University Library and the Renaissance library of Archbishop Matthew Parker, now at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The University Library preserves striking evidence of the modern development of curatorial processes in a superseded shelf list of special-collections materials called the AB catalog. The catalog, long forgotten in the library records, reveals that most of the early printed books in the designated AB class at Cambridge were formerly in composite arrangements but have since been disbound into single, modern units. The pattern, as I’ve been describing it, was common in institutional libraries, but rarely do traces survive that allow us to reconstruct a collection as it looked to its early users and to actually read early assemblages of text, as we can here. My second case study offers a candid look at a Renaissance library of similar proportions whose books remain in their original composite states. Matthew Parker’s habit of aggregating and patching together manuscripts recovered from the dissolution of the monasteries is well known to scholars of the Elizabethan period, but his vast collection of printed books has not been examined for evidence of the same curatorial activities. In his collection at Corpus Christi, I uncover configurations of text similar to those listed in the AB catalog, but ones that remain intact, with traceable provenances. I go on to demonstrate that Matthew Parker used these seemingly unwieldy assemblages of material in order to generate his own text, mining his anthologies for ideas for projects on theology and ecclesiastical history, which would eventually materialize in his printed works.
The second chapter of this study, “Making Shakespeare’s Books: Material Intertextuality from the Bindery to the Conservation Lab,” develops the historical account set out in Chapter 1 by examining early assemblages of high-prestige literary texts that are now encountered primarily in discrete and self-enclosed books. Scholars have long been interested in the apparent mutability of Shakespeare’s works in early print culture: how parts of Love’s Labour’s Lost were mixed with texts by other poets in William Jaggard’s printed anthology The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), or how John Benson’s 1640 Poems volume changed the order of the Sonnets (and at times, the gender of Shakespeare’s addressee), mixing his work with that of others. This chapter demonstrates that early readers also compiled Shakespearean works, creating multitext volumes to suit their tastes and uses. Surveying extant compilations—and focusing particularly on the changing contexts of Henry IV Part 1 and Lucrece—I show that the combinatory activities of publishers like Jaggard and Benson reflected a more general readerly desire for flexible, adaptable works in print. These works with each new assembly gave rise to different juxtapositions and different forms of canonicity, many of which are surprising to us today, a counterpoint to the organization of Shakespearean texts in modern editions. But as I go on to demonstrate, in modern archives most of these early compilations were disassembled, their texts rebound separately, eliminating the evidence of previous uses in favor of a Shakespearean text that looks modern. This chapter argues that such assembly practices play a role in generating meaning—that the frameworks for reading and interpreting Shakespeare emerge out of the productions of collectors and conservators who make Shakespeare’s books.
The first part of this study thus introduces a concept of “material intertextuality”—an intertextuality based on physical rather than purely discursive proximity—into Renaissance reading and reception history, excavating early compilations and assessing the interpretive implications of their varying logics of assembly. The second part investigates these methods of assembly from the standpoint of literary production, arguing that habits of compiling and customization were integral to Renaissance writing as well. Chapter 3, “Transformative Imitation: Composing the Lyric in Liber Lilliati and Watson’s Hekatompathia,” examines the work of a little-known Elizabethan choral musician named John Lilliat and a related—in fact, materially connected—printed sonnet collection from the 1580s. Lilliat, like many of his contemporaries in the Renaissance, channeled his social aspirations into poems of unrequited love using Petrarch and other writers as models. But Lilliat’s manuscript book, preserved at Oxford, physically incorporates his primary model into his text. Liber Lilliati, as he titled it, consists of fair-copy manuscript poetry written on leaves that had been added to a printed book, Thomas Watson’s sonnet sequence, The Hekatompathia. This assemblage of manuscript and print gives us a privileged look at the Renaissance compileras-writer at work: not only does Lilliat model his text after Watson’s;
