Early Modern Prose Fiction

The Cultural Politics of Reading

Naomi Conn Liebler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134245109
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Emphasizing the significance of early modern prose fiction as a hybrid genre that absorbed cultural, ideological and historical strands of the age, this fascinating study brings together an outstanding cast of critics including: Sheila T. Cavanaugh, Stephen Guy-Bray, Mary Ellen Lamb, Joan Pong Linton, Steve Mentz, Constance C. Relihan, Goran V. Stanivukovic with an afterword from Arthur Kinney.

Each of the essays in this collection considers the reciprocal relation of early modern prose fiction to class distinctions, examining factors such as:

• the impact of prose fiction on the social, political and economic fabric of early modern England
• the way in which a growing emphasis on literacy allowed for increased class mobility and newly flexible notions of class
• how the popularity of reading and the subsequent demand for books led to the production and marketing of books as an industry
• complications for critics of prose fiction, as it began to be considered an inferior and trivial art form.

Early modern prose fiction had a huge impact on the social and economic fabric of the time, creating a new culture of reading and writing for pleasure which became accessible to those previously excluded from such activities, resulting in a significant challenge to existing class structures.

1 Introduction: the cultural politics of reading

Naomi Conn Liebler

The written word can dispense with trumpets; reverence for the written word as such may allow all trumpets to be spurned. Cognitive and moral egalitarianism is made feasible . . . . Semantic content acquires a life of its own.

(Gellner 1988: 72)

Important work has been done in recent years, much of it by the contributors to this volume, to bring specific early modern prose works and their authors and readers to wider critical attention, and to formulate (or re-formulate) the critical and historical context in which those works should now be understood. It is time to bring together those separate strands of critical consideration. This collectionof new essays addresses early modern prose fiction in terms of its reciprocal relation (1) to class distinctions among readers and authors and their attendant complications for critics of these materials,(2) to the development of the genre of romance fiction in particular (narratological, structural, and thematic), and (3) to the ways in which these growing shelf-lists of popular reading material permanently altered the social map of English readership as well as the book trade. As Goran Stanivukovic observes, the strikingly high number of printings and re-printings of prose fiction texts in the Renaissance suggests not only the popularity of the genre but also the relative speed with which such literary texts were produced and sold profitably. Narratives of women’s property, protocols of courtship, eroticism, devoted love, tempered masculinity, travel, and petty crime captured the cultural preoccupations of a nascent middle class interestedin stabilizing marriage and the household, expanding property, and questing for profit. Prose fiction was a hybrid genre that absorbed not just cultural, ideological, and historical strands of the age, but also modes of writing of other literary kinds (travel, conduct literature, ethics, philosophy) and made them available to a wider reading audience of middling classes.¹ Further, because of their marketability and portability among all classes of literate citizens, we reconsider the ways in which developing forms of romance fiction (chivalric and others) contributed to an emerging sense of ‘‘national identity’’ and nationalism.

Like the start of any revolution, the history of ‘‘the coming of the book’’ remains the subject of a long-rehearsed and well-known debate (Febvre and Martin 1984: 9–13). Febvre rejected the term ‘‘revolution’’ in favor of the less sensational term ‘‘changes’’ (1984:9) wrought by ‘‘the book’’ on a variety of social and political fronts. Nonetheless, when we consider the extent of changes in reciprocal social, economic, and political relations between and among English classes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the impact of books on classes of citizens in early modern England who could, with reading, become irrepressible instead of repressed, ‘‘revolution’’seems to be the apt term. That all of this occurred throughout Europe in a space of some 100–150 years—Febvre accepted 1450 as the starting point for the circulation of documents made with movable type (1984: 9)—qualifies the ‘‘changes’’ as revolutionary. As Stephen Orgel recently put it, ‘‘The print revolution . . . was in fact a reading revolution, a revolution not of technology but of dissemination and reception . . . . The innovation is in readers, not publishers: the agent of change is not the press but its audience’’ (2002: 282–3; see also Wright 1935: 81; Spufford 1982: 131). For Benedict Anderson, following on from the work of Febvre and Martin,

in the 40-odd years between the publication of the Gutenberg Bible and the close of the fifteenth century, more than 20,000,000 printed volumes were produced in Europe. Between 1500 and 1600, the number manufactured had reached between 150,000,000 and 200,000,000. . . . In a rather special sense, the book was the first modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity.(1991: 33–4)

By the sixteenth century, ‘‘books were readily available to anyone who could read’’ (Febvre and Martin 1984: 262), and print-capitalism ‘‘made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways’’ (Anderson 1991: 36).

As anyone working today in literacy programs can affirm, access to the written—thence to the printed—word springs important personal and cultural alterations. Reading can empower and enfranchise the otherwise invisible or marginalized; it transmits meaning, in Ernest Gellner’s terms, ‘‘without speaker or listener,’’ and offers ‘‘content rather than context’’ (1988: 72). It ‘‘makes possible at once public and private identity’’; it is ‘‘the rite of entry into the social. . . [and] is traditionally held to be the qualification for citizenship’’ (Sharpe and Zwicker 2003: 1, 26). What Walter Benjamin mourned in ‘‘the decline of storytelling’’ is specifically implicated in this development: ‘‘The storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself’’ (1968: 86). By definition, so too has the reader of that novel, Benjamin continues, ‘‘more so than any other reader’’ (1968: 100), often to that reader’s—at least imaginative—liberation. The most obvious difference between listening to a storyteller and reading a book is that the latter activity protects by privacy whatever thought, response, fantasy, approval, or disapproval arises from the exposure. As a distinctly private activity, reading inspires reconsiderations of one’s boundaries: economic, social, physical, geographic, or political. Even while ‘‘the community of listeners disappears’’ (Benjamin 1968: 91), a community of readers emerges to redefine and reconfigure what is meant by ‘‘community.’’ In that redefinition, Benjamin’s isolated reader is ‘‘ready to make it completely his own . . . ’’ (1968: 100). Ownership is the key to understanding the social and political difference reading makes.

We need to ask who was reading, and what were they reading? Studies such as those by Lori Humphrey Newcomb (2002) and the collection recently edited by Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (2002)² have done much to advance our understanding of specific tastes in reading, practices in annotating, and book collecting. But because many of the titles they discuss were primarily owned by elite readers, or were large and expensive tomes such as Bibles or Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy —‘‘important’’ books owned by ‘‘important’’ people—they cannot tell us much about the reading practices of ordinary citizens whose books—the term ‘‘libraries’’ is hyperbolic and probably anachronistic for this population—were neither catalogued nor preserved.

Although we lack sufficient empirical evidence (of the sort afforded by saved collections and catalogues) for access to the reading pleasuresof grocers, craftsmen, housemaids, apprentices, middle-level merchants, and the like, it would be wrong to assume that we can know nothing of them. Prefaces and dedications indicate the readers to whom authors hoped to appeal. Printing, publishing, and vending rights for what today would be called ‘‘mass-market’’ books further contribute to that narrative of readership, especially in instances when relatively cheap books proved popular enough to have been reprinted or reissued in successive quarto editions over a relatively brief period of time. Much depends, of course, on what constitutes a ‘‘record’’ and what counts as ‘‘evidence.’’ To tweak Foucault’s now much-abused line—‘‘What matter who’s speaking?’’ (1977: 138)—we might well ask, without his irony: what matter who’s buying, who’s reading, who’s spreading the word and pumping up sales? Perhaps more importantly, we should also ask why. What did ordinary folks find appealing enough to warrant spending hard-earned pennies on works of prose fiction? What did those romances, adventure tales, pastorals, picaresque novels say to their readers? How did they embrace working-class purchasers³ and welcome them into the community of literate citizens who could, and did, read for pleasure, for enlightenment, or just—like today’s readers—to brighten the time passed between waking, working, and sleeping?

The rise of reading is inextricable from developing ideas of permeablesocial and economic boundaries, of discrete concepts of subjectivity and the possibilities of enfranchisement. Addressing the question of Elizabethan ‘‘canonicity,’’ Laura Caroline Stevenson observesthat

Since literature offers a structure that enables men [sic] to reflect upon a variety of problems, works that attain popularity presumablydo so because they offer many readers a way of sorting out their ideas on subjects of common interest . . . . Conversely, works that appeal to ‘‘fit audience, though few’’ attain little popularity because they do not offer insights to a wide audience . . . .

(1984: 1)

Reading—especially reading for pleasure—became the means by which people in a range of classes and communities discovered, fashioned, knew, and imagined not only ‘‘themselves’’ but also the relation of those selves to a nearly infinite world of other selves both real and invented. ‘‘A transformation from reading as exegesis to reading as sensibility’’ (Sharpe and Zwicker 2003: 12) occurred for men and women, apprentices and squires, the full range of sundry folk who had increasing access to texts of their own choosing. Such access grew exponentially with the book trade, which responded to growing demand with an equally expanding supply. When we remember that paper was the most expensive and least renewable resource in the manufacture of books and pamphlets (ink was cheap and movable type was recyclable), the explosive supply of printed matter is an astonishing index to the power of market forces. Reading for pleasure made books into commodities and readers into consumers.

Peter Blayney once estimated conservatively that between 1591 and 1610

the printers of England manufactured an average of more than 300 surviving titles a year, plus numerous ballads, chapbooks, and other ephemera that have been lost . . . . If we assume an average edition size of 500 copies—which many textual critics would suggest is too low—the total annual production was about 175,000 printed objects. Including imported and second-hand books, the booksellers of England must therefore have been selling between 200,000 and a quarter of a million items a year—probably at least half of them in London itself.

(1991)

David Harris Sacks expands that estimate to ‘‘between perhaps a quarter of a million to a million individually printed items produced each year,’’ and adds that such numbers ‘‘imposed significant problemsin the management of inventories as well as the distribution of finished products from year to year’’ (2002: 155), problems still recognizable for publishers and book sellers today.⁴ Estimates of London’s population for those years offer similar numbers—some 200,000 by 1600 and 375,000 by 1650 (Griffiths and Jenner 2000: 2; also Sacks 2002: 154)—which suggests that at least one printed item could have been sold to every person in the city.⁵ If we assume that not every adult citizen bought printed matter, adjusted distribution figures suggest multiple purchases by many of those adults who did.⁶ Those purchasers, of whom most if not all were also the readers of what they purchased, formed what today would be called ‘‘targeted markets, market sectors and market share . . . such language, for all its anachronistic qualities, quite properly describes both the conditionsand perceptions of the early modern book trade’’ (Sharpe and Zwicker 2003: 8). Those new markets reflected various tastes in readingmatter and created new literary fashions, which in turn created markets for and increased production of such genres as romance, travel narrative, trickster and cony-catching tales, among others. One inevitable result of these variegated kinds of texts was a responsive alterationin what Sharpe and Zwicker, borrowing from literary theory, call ‘‘interpretive communities’’ or ‘‘reading communities’’ (2003: ew voices spoke to new listeners who ‘‘heard’’ with their eyes and made meaning from their independent receptions of printed words.

The proliferation of available reading matter in London bookstalls both created and was fed by a new and widespread literacy, and thus was instrumental in altering the stratified social and political structures of the period both in England and on the continent. Like the history of the drama in this period, the development of a reading class among those previously excluded (women and working classes in particular) significantly challenged the preservation of class structures. But unlike the case of drama of the time, resistance to this inexorable growth of popular reading matter never resulted in a parliamentary act to close down bookshops; as Paul Salzman observes, ‘‘despite its strength as a literary form flexible enough to cater for a very wide range of readers, prose fiction sparked off very little critical debate or theorizing during the 150 years’’ from 1558 to 1700 in England (1985: 342; but cf. Quint 1993: 179–80 [on romance in particular], 321). Instead, a critical stratification occurred (and persisted well into the twentieth century) that relegated prose fiction and its readers to a diminished status that trivialized and denigrated both the matter and its purchasers. Simultaneously, that same matter and those same purchasers swelled both the shelf lists and the profits of the book trade and led, arguably, to changes in social and political modes: crossing normative boundaries of social organization, the availability of quarto- and octavo-formatted books produced a growth in literacy as well as a profound growth in the business of book production and book selling. Non-elite authors and readers grew in numbers, and as Newcomb (2002) and Heidi Brayman Hackel (2005) have argued, efforts to contain (by the stratification noted above) the social impact of this new readership were neither as widespread nor as successful as we have been led to believe.

Andrew Hadfield argues persuasively for locating contemporary political discourse as coded allegorical material within a wide range of prose fictions of the period (1998: 135). More intriguing than simply the fact of such covert political enterprises, however, are the reasons for it: ‘‘given the precarious career prospects for young men who did not inherit land or possess independent wealth, it is by no means self-evident that all wrote literary texts because they were bent on pursuing a literary career’’ (Hadfield 1998: 136). Some, such as Edmund Spenser, Geoffrey Fenton, William Baldwin, John Lyly, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Lodge used fiction-writing as a platform to curry favor with one or another courtly faction; ‘‘it would be surprising if none of these . . . writers had chosen to consider political questions in their fictions, given their knowledge of and close involvement in contemporarypolitics’’ (1998: 137). More recently, and taking account of Hadfield’s work among many others, Philip Schwyzer observes the current critical understanding ‘‘that England, like all nations, was not there to be ‘discovered,’ but had rather to be invented or constructed—even ‘written’ ’’ (2004: 3). For Schwyzer, what is ‘‘written,’’or ‘‘discovered,’’ or ‘‘constructed’’ is not ‘‘England’’ but Britain (2004: 3), despite this pointed observation:

In the sixteenth century, there were many people of all ranks and stations willing to kill or die for their religion, for their traditional lord, for customary rights, or for pay—few if any were willing to make similar sacrifices for an imagined transhistorical community, be it nominated England, Wales, or Britain. Sentiments that could be termed ‘‘nationalist’’ seem to have been largely confined to a small, economically and politically dominant sector of society.

(2004: 9)⁷

However we wish to understand the various investigations and/or critiques of ‘‘England’’ and its citizenry—and the essays in this collection will understand them from a variety of perspectives—our aggregate inquiry here aims to locate in early modern English prose fiction a social, political, and economic intersection where various sectors, classes, and estates gathered in the marketplace of ideas and entertainments.

No less troublesome than the question of ‘‘nation’’ are those of social and economic class, which are not always the same thing. Readers of all stations, occupations, incomes, and expenditures increasinglyduring the period gained access to a great variety of printed matter. Lending libraries of course had not yet been invented, but lending, or at least sharing, purchasers are not difficult to imagine. Domestic servants could read the expensive bound books laid aside by their employers;⁸ apprentices similarly could read the pages brought home by their masters, and of course workers were known to spend fractions of their own wages on romances, chapbooks, posies of poesy, and the like. Ballads, broadsides, pamphlets, newsbooks, and other cheap matter were available at market and festival fairs and from itinerant peddlers across all the social and economic borders of English life. Information and entertainment were contagious, and uncontainable. The act of reading has politicalimplications whenever it enfolds readers in a world larger than themselves, larger than the household or community or even the state in which they reside, work, live. Reading for pleasure is likewisepolitical, for the reasons identified in attempts to discredit and sometimes to suppress fanciful imaginative forms such as romances. As Michael Schoenfeldt observes in a summation of Hobbes’ diatribeagainst reading in Leviathan —Hobbes compared the spread of historical and political reading to that of rabies—‘‘Books, then, stir in the body politic the same kinds of unhealthy passions they generate in the individual reader’’ (2003: 229). By ‘‘distracting’’ readers from more serious occupations like work or worship, they disturbed orderly systems of stratification and otherwise regulated behaviors. Leisure itself was seen as subversive, or at least potentiallydisruptive to the orderly household, shop, farm, and thus, by extension, polis. Even when the apprentice or the domestic servant remained seated, book rather than implement of service in hand, the adventures in which they participated imaginatively as they read the romance, the picaresque adventure, the cony or the trickster tale, suggested alternative, if unreal and unrealizable, lives. The fixed destiny of walking contentedly in one’s vocation was less unquestionable, more tenuous, especially given the social fluidity of positions of servitude: temporary service was ‘‘a matter of law and custom . . . . [All] unmarried men and women below gentle status and not in apprenticeship or domestic service were expected to lend their labor to service in husbandry . . . [and] most young people left their families to work in other households’’ (Newcomb 2002: 220–1). Fictionsof adventurous lives arguably posited imaginary parallels to actual transgressions; at the other end of the scale of social practice, reading for self-improvement, through conduct books or discourses on fashion—what today would be called self-help books—provided models of kinder, gentler communities, for ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: The cultural politics of reading
• 2 Day labor: Thomas Nashe and the practice of prose in early modern England
• 3 How to turn prose into literature: the case of Thomas Nashe
• 4 Fishwives’ tales: narrative agency, female subjectivity, and telling tales out of school
• 5 English Renaissance romances as conduct books for young men
• 6 Mildred, beloved of the devil, and the dangers of excessive consumption in Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession
• 7 ‘‘What ish my nation?’’: Lady Mary Wroth’s interrogations of personal and national identity
• 8 Bully St. George: Richard Johnson’s Seven Champions of Christendom and the creation of the bourgeois national hero
• 9 Counterfeiting sovereignty, mocking mastery: trickster poetics and the critique of romance in Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller
• 10 Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Related titles from Routledge
• Related titles from Routledge
• Related titles from Routledge
• Related titles from Routledge