Tottel's Songes and Sonettes in Context

Stephen Hamrick, Stephen Hamrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317009726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Though printer Richard Tottel's Songes and Sonettes (1557) remains the most influential poetic collection printed in the sixteenth century, the compiliation has long been ignored or misundertood by scholars of early modern English culture. Embracing a broad range of critical and historical perspectives, the eight essays within this volume offer the first sustained analysis of the many ways that consumers read and understood Songes and Sonettes as an anthology over the course of the early modern period. Copied by a monarch, set to music, sung, carried overseas, studied, appropriated, rejected, edited by consumers, transferred to manuscript, and gifted by Shakespeare, this muti-author verse anthology of 280 poems transformed sixteenth-century English language and culture. With at least eleven printings before the end of Elizabeth I's reign, Tottel's ground-breaking text greatly influenced the poetic publications that followed, including individual and multi-author miscellanies. Contributors to this essay collection explore how, in addition to offering a radically new kind of English verse, 'Tottel's Miscellany' engaged politics, friendship, religion, sexuality, gender, morality and commerce in complex-and at times, contradictory-ways.

Chapter 1
Printing History and Editorial Design in the Elizabethan Version of Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes

Paul A. Marquis

Some verse anthologies in the English Renaissance were popular but most were not; those that were, were often reprinted; those that were not, were seldom reprinted more than once. Before they were reprinted, popular anthologies were revised, or enlarged, as the Short Title Catalogue says; poems were added, some omitted, and sequences were generally rearranged according to author, verse form, and topoi. Enlargements expanded the focus of self-reflective personae lamenting the agonies of love to include verses linked figuratively and analogically to contemporary issues. The popular anthology acquired status not only because it spoke to the age in which it was produced, but because it transcended its own temporal particularity to address larger human concerns. The revised version of Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes (1557) is the prototype of this English genre. It is the first surviving example of a verse anthology in English whose vocal resonance is emulated by later editors, authors, and publishers, at least until Donne’s Songes and Sonets (1633). Whatever we think of Tottel’s work in the context of Marian England, however, his position on reformed protestants, his curious nostalgia for Henry VIII’s England, his distaste for the Edwardian Somersets, and his nonpartisan nationalism can better be understood if we address the primary question of how to read his anthology of 280 poems.

The popularity of Tottel’s compilation is evident. It was reprinted twice in 1557, once between 1557 and 1559, twice in 1559, twice in 1565, and once each in 1567, 1574, 1585, and 1587. George Puttenham alludes to it in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), praising it as a source for lyrics worthy of emulation by Elizabethan poets.1 Slender, in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor (1597–1598), regards it affectionately as a primer of love poems (1.2.165–6). Its reputation as both a source book of poetic forms and a primer for the language of love indicates the range of its appeal. There is more than a slim chance, however, that both Puttenham and Slender were not referring to the first edition of Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes but a reprinting of the second edition which had been enlarged and redesigned during the summer of 1557. Q1 was published on 5 June 1557; Q2, Anr. Ed., w. omissions and additions, as the STC indicates, was published on 31 July 1557.

A careful analysis of Q2 reveals a more sustained editorial attention than what is present in Q1 and in any other edition after Q3. By the time Tottel died in 1593, Songes and Sonettes had gone through 11 printings. Until recently, the text available to modern readers has been Hyder E. Rollins’s two-volume edition of Tottel’s Miscellany 1557–1587, published in 1928–1929, reprinted in 1965, and the Scolar (1966) and Menston (1970) editions, both facsimiles of Q1. Rollins identifies the work as a “miscellany” and that is what he compiles: appended to his copy text of Q1 are the poems included in Q2 out of the order they were provided in that edition, accompanied by a second volume which includes a bibliographical description of the contents of each reprint until 1586, including lists of variants. What Tottel published in 1557, however, were anthologies, selections of the choicest verses available to him at the time, arranged and sequenced in a particular order. Q2 is distinctly different from Q1, and perhaps more anthologic, one might say, because even more organized than Q1; hundreds of substantive changes in diction and prosody are included in the eight weeks separating the two versions: 30 poems by Grimald are omitted; 39 new poems added to the Uncertain Auctours section; and an entirely new arrangement given to the lyrics in Q2 as a whole. As all subsequent editions in the sixteenth century follow the arrangement of Q2, this is the version of Songes and Sonettes known to most Elizabethans.2 That Tottel would redesign Q1 is understandable, given the impression left by that version and his penchant for producing coherent texts evidenced in his other publications. He would have understood that a more carefully impressed text, ordered and arranged in a significant manner, would influence the success of Q2.

Tottel’s interest in textual design is evident throughout his career. In fact, his success as a printer of law books was facilitated by his ability to produce work of high quality in a market burdened by degrees of competence and neglect, especially in the printing of law books. Before Tottel acquired his monopoly in 1553, students and lawyers had to contend with books poorly printed and inadequately translated, if at all, from Latin and French, where legal statutes and precedents were barely comprehensible. Tottel produced clear translations and lucid explanations of legal issues which were appreciated by a growing clientele. Along with his close ties to reputable London lawyers and judges, these improvements helped secure his monopoly to print texts of common law for seven years.3 Similarly, when Mary Tudor ascended the throne, and reformist printers were exiled, imprisoned, or silenced, Tottel stepped in to fill the gap, redesigning and reprinting books that had been published earlier by reformist printers, such as Lydgate’s translation of Boccaccio’s The Fall of Princes (1555, 1556) and Hawes’s The Pastime of Pleasure (1555). His keen awareness of the fickle state of religion and politics also led him to print Smith’s A Bouclier of the Catholic Fayth (1554), dedicated to Mary I, and the Works of Sir Thomas More (1557). As a man of business, Tottel’s response to the religious extremes of radical Protestants and conservative Catholics was more moderate than partisan. By 1557 he was one of the most important printers in London, employing four apprentices and likely possessing three presses. That year he published nine law books, as well as Thomas Tusser’s A Hundreth Good Points of Husbandry; at least two editions of Songes and Sonettes; books 2 and 4 of Surrey’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid; Thomas More’s Works, in 1458 folio leaves; as well as Rastell’s Correccion of all the Statutes, in 550 folio leaves. In 1557, Richard Tottel was on top of his game as a printer and publisher of culturally significant texts. He could afford to redesign Q1 soon after its release, especially if he thought, as I argue, that Q2 could be much more impressive, not only prosodically, but politically and ethically as well.

How the poems in Songes and Sonettes came into Tottel’s possession remains a mystery, but given the range of possible manuscript sources, even the simplest scenario is complex. Derived from as many as 29 manuscripts, the variety of possible sources attests to the extraordinary cultural reach of Tottel’s project. The selection of available verses would have involved what Sir Philip Sidney calls an “idea or forconceit” of the anthology as a whole.4 Tottel’s motives were as much educative and altruistic, spurred by a sense of nationalism, rather than merely by self-interest or monetary gain. The preface “To the reder” emphasizes his desire to produce a text that would “exhort the unlearned, by reding to learne to bee more skilful,” and his wish to publish verses that had been “heretofore envied” or kept hidden by “the ungentle horders up of such treasure.” He hoped that the “several graces in sundry good Englishe writers” would “purge … swinelike grossenesse” and ignorance from the common reader and enhance the “profit and pleasure” of the English tongue. His commitment to publish a book that would improve language skills and contribute to national pride is carried out with Promethean zeal: even as he scorns the hoarders and ridicules the “unlearned,” the anthology is popular at the book stalls. The ethical basis of Tottel’s project is clear, as he identifies an injustice inflicted on the less fortunate who had been deprived of a crucial educative tool by those reluctant to share the obvious advantages of reading verse.

As he acquires manuscript copies of the poems, the editor sets about strengthening their prosodic line, with especial attention given to the works of Surrey and Wyatt. Verses were arranged according to author, lyric genre, iambic stress, line length, and topoi.5 Most were new to the reader: only 7 of the 280 poems in Q2 had been in print before 1557.6 In the Surrey section, versions of 27 poems are found in four manuscripts, not one of which is a direct source.7 Tottel obviously valued Surrey’s “honorable stile,” as he calls it in his preface, identifying his name on the title page and devoting the first section to works that might otherwise have been lost to posterity. Surrey’s translation of Book 4 of the Aeneid appeared in 1554, though Tottel chose to print it along with Book 2 in a separate volume published 21 June 1557 (STC 24798). A similar concern with composition and design is apparent in his presentation of Wyatt’s work. Of the 154 poems attributed to Wyatt in the sixteenth century, only 96 are included in Tottel’s compilation,8 selected from manuscripts and commonplace-books.9 As with Surrey’s poems, the editor avoids those already printed. Thus, Wyatt’s paraphrase of the seven Penitential Psalms published in Certain Psalms (1549) is not included. His secular poems are printed, however, including translations of Petrarch’s sonnets and canzone, experiments with the rondeaux of Jean Marot, the strambotti, ballades, and epigrams of Serafino d’Aquilano, and the epistolary satires of Luigi Alamanni.

Of the 134 poems by Uncertain Auctours in Q2, 40 have possible sources in verse manuscripts.10 The Arundel Harington MS has versions of 21 poems, while other manuscripts possess a range from 1 to 5 poems. There is little to go on in terms of authorship. It may be that Tottel was not concerned about the “other” poets; as long as he possessed the poems, he was free to publish them.11 Even when authorship was known, Tottel was not interested in providing details, as in Q2’s poem 207 which had been printed with variations in earlier editions of Chaucer by Pynson and Thynne. Finally, the sources for Nicholas Grimald’s poems are presently unlocated, though John Bale lists 31 works by Grimald in Index Britanniae Scriptorum. Two of these works could have contained poems found in Q1. Congratulatorium carmen contains 150 poems celebrating the release of Somerset from prison, and though one may assume that not all were on the subject of Somerset, certainly those in Tottel’s Q1 (but omitted in Q2) addressed to the Mistresses Seymour, the daughters of Somerset, could have been from this text. Bale also lists Grimald’s Carmina et Epigrammata, from which some of the poems in the Tottel editions may have had their source. Since Index Britanniae was published in 1556, Bale does not list the 40 poems published in Q1, but there is a good chance that most were selected from these lost texts. The point here is that Tottel was carrying out his intentions as announced in the preface to the anthology. In an attempt to prove that English verse could rival that of Latin and Italian, he improved the iambic lines in many unpublished poems and arranged them in such a way as to enhance the educative import of the text as a whole.

Reading Verse Anthologies

Tottel had more poems to choose from than he included in Songes and Sonettes. Why he published certain poems and not others is a “mystery” that might be explained by how these poems fit into the overall design of the text.12 The form of the printed book lends itself to sequential design; one page follows another, allowing formal and rhetorical links to synthesize each poem and provide a context in its relation to poems that precede and succeed it. This formal arrangement is at least as old as the classical period when the purpose of verse anthologies was both educative and aesthetic. As vehicles for cultural commentary, the Latin compilations of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, Statius, and Martial, whose works were studied in English grammar schools as part of the humanist revival in the early sixteenth century, are echoed in Tudor verse anthologies.13 Elaine Fantham argues that in the classical period anthologies were read as commentaries on the changing historical and cultural landscape of the Roman community. Words were the “chief political weapon” in lyric compilations and as such, hidden layers of meaning are discovered in close readings. “Infinite varieties of arrangements” emerge between “individual poems separated from each other” that draw upon “the pleasures of comparison and contrast, expectations and surprise.”14

The emphasis on close reading as a hermeneutic strategy for understanding anthologies is also found in the work of Italian humanists who were influenced by classical authors in the construction of texts and whose commentaries explore the particular demands of the genre. Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494) insists that those wishing to understand his Miscellanea (1474) must read it closely, for its diversity of topics is based on a policy of “fastidii expultrix,” a loathing to expel or reject anything topical.15 The virtues of this new genre, Poliziano contends, lie in its structural logic, the illumination of which must be provided by critical commentary. A classical example of this form is found in the intricate designs of Statius’ Sylvae (1480–1481) for which Poliziano provides a commentary based on meticulous attention to textual detail, which is, he argues, the only way readers will understand the complexity of the man, his verse anthology, and the culture from which it arises and to which it speaks.16 Similarly, Julius Scaliger (1484–1558) observes that Martial’s compilation of Epigrams achieves coherence in its use of topoi on language, politics, and culture, which are structured asymmetrically as part of an aesthetic that accommodates allusive commentary on disparate events in private and public life.17 What Tudor authors and editors learn from Italian commentaries on classical anthologies is that the complexity of poetic arrangement defines the way anthologies should be read.

By the mid sixteenth century, the anthologic genre in Europe is well established.18 Theodore Beza’s Poemata (1548), a compilation of lyric genres, including sylvae, elegies, epitaphs, and epigrammata, is the likely source for most of Grimald’s revised translations of poems which provides closure to Tottel’s Q2. At least two members of the French Pléiade, Pierre Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay, published collections of lyrics in the early 1550s. In England, evidence of the genre is found in the verse clusters, prosodic variety, and allusive political references in fragmented versions...