The Elizabethan Top Ten

Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England

Emma Smith, Andy Kesson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317034445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Engaging with histories of the book and of reading, as well as with studies of material culture, this volume explores 'popularity' in early modern English writings. Is 'popular' best described as a theoretical or an empirical category in this period? How can we account for the gap between modern canonicity and early modern print popularity? How might we weight the evidence of popularity from citations, serial editions, print runs, reworkings, or extant copies? Is something that sells a lot always popular, even where the readership for print is only a small proportion of the population, or does popular need to carry something of its etymological sense of the public, the people? Four initial chapters sketch out the conceptual and evidential issues, while the second part of the book consists of ten short chapters-a 'hit parade'- in which eminent scholars take a genre or a single exemplar - play, romance, sermon, or almanac, among other categories-as a means to articulate more general issues. Throughout, the aim is to unpack and interrogate assumptions about the popular, and to decentre canonical narratives about, for example, the sermons of Donne or Andrewes over Smith, or the plays of Shakespeare over Mucedorus. Revisiting Elizabethan literary culture through the lenses of popularity, this collection allows us to view the subject from an unfamiliar angle-in which almanacs are more popular than sonnets and proclamations more numerous than plays, and in which authors familiar to us are displaced by names now often forgotten.

PART 1
Methodologies

Chapter 1
What Is Print Popularity? A Map of the Elizabethan Book Trade1

Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser

The study of popular culture has long been a central aspect of early modern studies, but the definition of popularity has remained contested. As Roger Chartier has argued, the search for ‘popular culture’ may rest on a number of false premises:

first, that it is possible to establish exclusive relationships between specific cultural forms and particular social groups; second, that the various cultures existing in a given society are sufficiently pure, homogeneous and distinct to permit them to be characterized uniformly and unequivocally; and third, that the category of ‘the people’ or ‘the popular’ has sufficient coherence and stability to define a distinct social identity that can be used to organize cultural differences in past ages according to the simple opposition of populaire versus savant.2

These difficulties, of course, should not and have not prevented historians and cultural critics from seeking more subtle methods of reconstructing the popular cultures of early modern England (often now imagined in the plural). From the beginnings of this field in the work of German Romantic historians like Johann Gottfried von Herder, much of the culture of ‘the people’ has been imagined to be oral, communal, and ritualistic.3 But the printed book has also played an important role, especially in more recent revisionist studies. These approaches attempt to link the cultural meaning of the word popular with its economic meaning of success in the book trade, turning to mass consumption as a guide to popular culture. The difficulty of articulating these two ideas of the popular has often been noted. Most important, since literacy was weighted towards the upper social strata, ‘there is no straight equation between “popularity” in numerical terms and print for the “popular” classes’.4 This evidence must therefore be handled carefully, but scholars have nonetheless been eager to assess the relative popularity – that is, economic performance – of different kinds of books in early modern England, because the circulation of print remains one of our best avenues of investigation in this field.5

We are primarily interested here in this economic sense of popularity. While our findings may well prove useful to studies of popular culture, directly connecting the two understandings of the popular is beyond our scope here.6 Furthermore, there are a host of reasons to be interested in the economic popularity of different categories of books beyond its use as a possible index to the culture of ‘the people’, however we might define that ambiguous term. But assessing print popularity presents nearly as many difficulties as the study of popular culture, and it similarly needs to be understood as multiple rather than singular. In this essay, we begin by outlining some of these difficulties and suggesting how we can account for if not entirely resolve them. We then provide the most detailed analysis to date of the various kinds of books offered for sale in early modern bookshops and of their relative proportions in the marketplace of print. Finally, combining this information with other key statistical measurements of the economic success or failure of books, we present a ‘map’ of the Elizabethan book trade, a guide to the different kinds of print popularity that structured the retail trade. This map, we believe, is fundamental to assessing the popularity of any early modern English book.

***

In scholarly studies of ‘popular’ books, the sheer number that were printed often does important rhetorical work. Tessa Watt’s Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640, for instance, begins by invoking the massive number of ballads produced in the Elizabethan period: ‘There were roughly 3,000 distinct ballads published in the second half of the sixteenth century’, and as a result the ‘total number of copies would reach between 3 and 4 million’.7 In her study of the popularity of almanacs, Lauren Kassell estimates that ‘at least 160 almanac makers produced 600 works before 1600’, and Simon Schaffer adds that this number of titles means that ‘hundreds of thousands’ of copies ‘were sold in the sixteenth century and millions in the seventeenth’.8 In his bibliography of coranto newsbooks, Folke Dahl suggests that around 400,000 copies of at least 400 editions of these pamphlets were printed in England from 1620 to 1642.9 Ian Green counts up to 800 catechisms and other catechetical works published in England from 1530 to 1740, either independently or as part of other works, and estimates that somewhere between a quarter of a million and three-quarters of a million copies of The ABC with the catachisme alone were printed by the early 1640s.10 Gerald Hammond calculates that ‘over half a million copies [of the Geneva Bible] were sold in the sixteenth century, a figure high enough in proportion to the total population to put into question our assumptions about Elizabethan literacy levels’.11 Richard Greaves argues that ‘sermons were popular’ because ‘about 1,200 different Elizabethan sermons still exist in print’.12 In her groundbreaking study of ‘popular fiction and its readership in seventeenth-century England’, Margaret Spufford found enough printed sheets of chapbooks listed in the probate inventory of a single stationer to produce at a minimum 50,000 books, and at a maximum 190,000.13

We can see one of the problems immediately. When scholars cite numbers, they often differ widely on the question of just how many books are needed to add up to ‘popularity’. Hence for one scholar, 400 or 600 or 800 editions may indicate a large number, while another points to edition totals in the thousands, and still others emphasize total copies in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions. Part of the issue here is the slide from number of editions to number of copies. Multiplying a given number of editions by the 1,000 or 1,250 copies imagined to be typical of early modern press runs will often produce a large number: ‘a crooked Figure may / Attest in little place a Million’, and 800 editions will suffice to generate a million copies if multiplied by estimated press runs like these.14 But we lack enough studies of various kinds of books to know how such a number might compare to others. Nor do we know the actual press runs for the vast majority of editions, and estimates that miss the true (but unknown) figure in even a minor way will produce huge differences when multiplied by the total number of editions. We are on surer ground with numbers of extant editions, but here, too, simply citing this number in isolation can be misleading: since the corpus of extant books listed in the Short-Title Catalogue (STC) is large, with over 33,000 editions of nearly 20,000 titles, it will be possible to cite an impressive-sounding number for virtually any sufficiently broad category of book, especially when that number is decontextualized from the total universe of books circulating in the period.15

In order to provide this crucial context, therefore, we have categorized every entry in the STC, so that the number of editions of any particular type of book can be compared to various others. As we did so, however, another important caveat that we had considered on a theoretical level became abundantly clear in practice: categorizing books is an inherently critical exercise. Judgment inevitably plays a large role, and no two scholars will categorize every book exactly the same way. How one categorizes will obviously have a significant effect on one’s sense of the composition of the book trade. For instance, if one is interested in a broad topic or theme rather than in particularly well-defined formats, such as broadsides, or in types of books as they were marketed within the trade itself, one can find that topic virtually anywhere. Trying to determine the popularity of books about, say, aristocratic life or trade or women by counting the number of editions that treat these subjects will almost inevitably yield different results from counting editions of genres like almanacs or prose romances. Sermons, ballads, playbooks, law books, and husbandry manuals – to name just a few – could touch on a wide range of subjects, and yet these genres of books were typically advertised differently on their title pages, featured different descriptive terms to appeal to potential customers, and, as we will show, occupied different areas of the ‘map’ of the early modern book trade. Attempting to account for all topics treated in every book would yield a useful subject index of the STC, but it would undermine the entire point of categorizing books by their genres, since the overlap between topics and genres would be enormous. It is all the more important, therefore, to let early modern publishers themselves guide these critical decisions. In categorizing the STC, our governing principle has been, as much as possible, to allow the material forms given to the books by early modern stationers themselves to determine their classifications. Indications of genre on the title page and other signs of early modern categorizing – such as inclusion in a patent that covered an entire class of books – therefore always carry great weight and are often determinative, although by no means mechanistically so. We have used our own judgment throughout – there is no alternative.

Merely counting the total number of editions of different kinds of books, however, is never sufficient for assessing their economic popularity. Most important, again, is the relevant context for these numbers. Unless we know how they compare to the total number of books published in the entire trade, it will remain obscure whether these figures point towards popularity or unpopularity, economic success or the lack thereof. What we need to know, therefore, is the market share of the various categories of books. Market share represents a category of books as a percentage of all the editions in the retail trade; it is derived by dividing the total number of editions in that category by the overall number of editions in the trade. Since the denominator in this calculation has generally been unknown, and since previous efforts at categorizing each item in the STC have been limited to a small set of years or a single year, scholars have not been able to calculate market share.16 Now that we have categorized the entire STC, we can provide the market share of all of our categories of books, not merely for the Elizabethan period or the STC period as a whole, but also within any number of date ranges. Not only did the book trade as a whole expand during the Elizabethan period – the number of publications more than tripled between 1559 and 1602 – but its composition varied.17 We should therefore be attuned to changes in the popularity of different kinds of books over time.

Turning from raw numbers to market share addresses many of the problems that have bedeviled studies of economic popularity, but others remain. Since we do not know the press runs of most editions, compiling a modern-style ‘bestseller list’ will never be possible for the early modern period. The best we can generally do is to compare the market shares of different categories by number of editions, not number of copies. And even with editions, the evidence is incomplete: we can usually only guess at how many editions of different kinds of books have been completely lost.18 We can be fairly confident, however, that these ‘loss rates’ disproportionately affected the shortest items, such as ballads and other broadsides, and those books that were subject to particularly heavy and destructive use, such as schoolbooks.

Both ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Towards a Definition of Print Popularity
• Part 1 Methodologies
• Part 2 The Elizabethan Top Ten
• Bibliography
• Index