Thomas Dekker and the Culture of Pamphleteering in Early Modern London

Anna Bayman

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317010500
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism

Thomas Dekker (c.1572-1632) was a prolific playwright and pamphleteer chiefly remembered for his vivid and witty portrayals of everyday London life. This book uses Dekker's prose pamphlets (published between 1613 and 1628) as a way in to a crucial and relatively neglected period of the history of pamphleteering. Under James I, after the aggressive Elizabethan exploitation of the new media, pamphleteers carved out a discursive space in which claims about truth and authority could be deconstructed. Avoiding the dangerous polemic employed by the Marprelate pamphleteers, they utilised playful, deliberately ambiguous language that drew readers' attention to their own literary devices and games. Dekker shows pamphlets to be unstable and roguish, and the nakedly commercial imperatives of the book trade to be central to the world of Jacobean cheap print, as he introduces us to a world in which overlapping and competing discourses jostled for position in London's streets, markets and pulpits. Contributing to the history of print and to the history of Jacobean London, this book also provides an appraisal of the often misunderstood prose works of an author who deserves more attention, especially from historians, than he has so far received. Critics are slowly becoming aware that Dekker was not the straightforward, simple hack writer of so many accounts; his works are complex and richly reward study in their own right as well as in the context of his more famous predecessors and contemporaries. As such this book will further contribute to a post-revisionist historiography of political consciousness and print cultures under the early Stuarts, as well as illuminate the career of a neglected writer.

Chapter 1
The Pamphlets in London

Dekker returned time and again in his prose work to questions about the stability of meaning and the reliability, or more often fluidity, of the ways in which people represented themselves – in writing, in their speech and appearance, through their actions – to others. The nature of the pamphlet itself – the ways in which a pamphlet was written, produced, distributed, read, re-read – made it an ideal site in which to examine those questions. They also made it an object of ambivalent, sometimes conflicting, emotions for early modern readers, both (and often at once) celebrated and considered troubling. Later chapters will show that such ambivalent emotions became a hallmark of Dekker’s prose writing, on subjects ranging from the early modern city and its foibles to the war on the continent; here, it will be shown how deeply rooted they were within the processes of making and reading pamphlets.

Dekker’s pamphlets are shot through with a profound sensitivity to the circumstances of pamphlet production and circulation. His sense of what his works might have meant to his readers, and how they might have acted upon those readers, was grounded in his consciousness of the processes through which they passed, from investment to consumption. This consciousness engaged with his understanding of the cultural and economic environment provided by the early modern capital: Dekker emphasised the London origins of his pamphlets, and in turn suggested that London could be particularly effectively represented in print. He inherited his alertness to print culture from the Elizabethan pamphleteers, especially Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene. But there is no doubt that Dekker’s texts, and his London, were Jacobean. Dekker was peculiarly able to draw heavily on earlier material while producing pamphlets that were quite unmistakably rooted in his own time and place. The way in which he represented and interrogated the book trade was central to this achievement, and suggests how fascinating the world of commercial print was to its authors and readers, not least because of its relative novelty.

By the time Dekker started writing pamphlets in 1603, pamphleteering was already construed, in the literary imagination, as a distinctive form of print publication. Contemporary comment held pamphlets to be ‘idle’ and ‘trifling’, and belittled their literary achievements by describing them in terms which corresponded with their small size. Joad Raymond notes that the meaning of the word ‘pamphlet’ ‘coalesced’ in the 1580s, and traces in the legal as well as the literary record the association of pamphleteering with scurrility.¹ The commission that investigated printing privileges in the 1580s grouped together ‘pamflettes, trifles and vaine small toies’ in expressing (to the Stationers’ Company) their fear that, without the proper use of royal privileges granting exclusive printing rights, this kind of trivial material would exclude beneficial and serious works from the presses.² Pamphleteers and publishers themselves employed this language to describe their work, in a variant on the literary convention of the humility of the author representing himself and his work as inadequate. The preface to Humphrey Gilbert’s A Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia (1576) commented that ‘it is but a Pamphlet and no large discourse, and therefore the more to be borne withal: since the faults (if any be) shall be the fewer because the volume is not great’.³ The second imprint of Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Divell described the work as a ‘meer toy’, and the author as ‘playing the dolt in print’; Peter Woodhouse called his pamphlet The Flea (1605) ‘this Toy’, and ‘a shadow of a shadow’, dedicating it to the ‘brainlesse multitude’.⁴ The Defence of Conny Catching (1592) by ‘Cuthbert Cunny-Catcher’ dismissed the idea that the ‘scholler’ Robert Greene would engage in an enterprise as trivial as writing rogue pamphlets (such as this one): ‘Such triviall trinkets and threedbare trash, had better seemed T.D. whose braines beaten to the yarking up of Ballades, might more lawfully have glaunst at the quaint conceites of conny-catching and crosse-biting.’⁵ Greene may in fact have been the author of The Defence of Conny Catching: this is a knowing piece of in-joking, aimed most of all at the community of writers and printers who would know that Greene was a prolific writer of cony-catching pamphlets, as well as at the readers familiar enough with popular printed literature to be able to recognise the likelihood of Greene’s hand in this and in his other cony-catching works, and to be able to speculate about the identity of T.D. (it was probably intended to be Thomas Deloney; Dekker might also have been a candidate, although he did not write ballads). Nashe used the same word as Greene to describe the act of producing cheap print in Strange Newes (1592), in which he claimed about Greene – reminding us of the speed associated with pamphlet production – that ‘In a night & a day would he have Yarkt up a Pamphlet as well as in seaven yeare’.⁶ In Mamillia (1583), Greene had mocked the tendency of pamphlet writers to trivialise their works: ‘they cal their bookes vanities, shadowes, imperfect paterns, more meete for the Pedler then the Printer, toyes, trifles, trash, trinkets.’⁷

Dekker happily played on the tendencies of his predecessors and contemporaries to represent pamphleteering as, at best, trivial and idle. Their anxieties about the content of cheap print were supplemented by the fear that putting things into print left too much open to the interpretation of an unreliable readership, and that the processes involved in print production rendered texts unreliable. The publication of printed books rested on an array of people and processes, from the commission or purchase of the manuscript, though writing, compositing, printing, proofing, collating, and stitching, to marketing.⁸ The stability, or otherwise, of the texts rested on the stability of these multiple activities, and as Adrian Johns has demonstrated, the printing practices of the early modern trade did not permit assumptions of fixity.⁹ However, although the instabilities engendered by the production and circulation of print worried many commentators, they too were exploited rather than suppressed by Dekker. He made a virtue of the changed circumstances of literary production and patronage, of the growing and increasingly unknowable readership, and consequent fluidity in the meanings attached to his work; and the economic and cultural benefits of pamphleteering to which he points may be precisely located in the London of James I’s early years on the English throne.

Writing and Printing Pamphlets

At the time Dekker was writing, all of the presses that legitimately printed pamphlets were in London, and so too were the bookshops of the publishers who usually funded the print runs. Dekker and his contemporaries painted vivid pictures of the London book trade, which was clustered around St Paul’s and the Royal Exchange. In Dekker’s The Dead Tearme, Paul’s Steeple laments ‘I verily believe that I am the Tower of Babell newly to be builded up, but presently despaire of ever beeing finished, because there is in me such a confusion of languages’; the writer John Earle, bishop of Salisbury, called Paul’s Walk ‘the great Exchange of all discourse’.¹⁰ Contemporaries were well aware of the instabilities that were a consequence of printing processes, and the practices of the book market sought to accommodate that instability. Buyers and readers judged books according to their perceptions of the credit of the text; authors and stationers therefore sought to raise the credibility of their books.¹¹ Johns argues that credit was bound up with perceptions of textual stability, showing that the Stationers attempted to suppress the instability which was associated with print production. Johns’s conclusion that texts with no fixity were perceived to be of little or no use, however, holds much more true for the scientific works that are his focus than for pamphlets. The transparent fluidity of cheap print contributed not just to the disdain and concern with which many commentators affected to view pamphlets, but also to their capacity for distinctive approaches towards discursive practice. Furthermore, the ease with which pamphlet texts could be recycled and reshaped – an important factor contributing to their lack of fixity – formed the basis of their particular economic advantages, which the stationers were more than capable of exploiting.

In the first place, textual instability lay in the distribution of authorship across a number of people.¹² The most prominent of these in the first edition of a pamphlet were the writer (or writers) and the publisher. Publishers, whose influence derived from their financial investment, in many cases seem to have had the guiding hand in short books. Their authority was formalised in the legal recognition of the publisher, to whom the work was assigned in the Stationers’ Register, as the ‘owner’ of the text (although both publishers and writers were held culpable for textual content, indicating the complexity of concepts of authorship in this period of the history of the printed book).¹³

Some pamphlets explicitly acknowledged the influence of ‘authors’ other than their principal writers. The motif of publishing without permission, or in the writer’s absence, was something of a commonplace across a range of literary forms, and was used in the printed pamphlets not least to help to distance the text and the author(s) from the dubious act of pamphleteering. The first edition of Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Divell (1592) was prefixed by an epistle from the printer (Richard Jhones) that explained that it was being published ‘in the Authours absence’.¹⁴ Subsequent editions of Pierce Penilesse, printed by Abel Jeffes for John Busbie in 1592 and 1593, and by Thomas Creede for Nicholas Ling in 1595, began with a ‘private epistle of the Author to the Printer’, according to which the first edition had been unfinished, uncorrected, and not known to Nashe himself. Robert Greene’s introduction to Thomas Lodge’s Euphues Shadow, the Battaile of the Senses (1592) tells us that the work was published while Lodge was at sea, and that Lodge ‘by his last letters gave straight charge, that I should not only have the care for his sake of the impression thereof but also in his absence to bestowe it on some man of Honor’.¹⁵ The publisher George Gascoigne explained that he alone was responsible for the publication of Gilbert’s A Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia, excusing his indulgence with the littleness of the work.¹⁶ The editing to which Greene and Gascoigne admitted was the model for a series of pamphlets, published through the 1590s, supposed to have been written by Robert Greene, who died in September 1592 (these pamphlets are discussed in more detail below). Their authors claimed simply to have prepared for print Greene’s own papers, and more than one offered an overtly fictional account of the delivery of the manuscript by Greene’s ghost.¹⁷ A pamphlet of 1595, Maroccus Extaticus, admitted that the repackaging of older stories was a form of theft, the authors claiming that they had to ‘stand like a couple of eaves-dropping knaves, and steale awaie a discourse betwixt Banks and his bay horse … which in our conscience we must confesse is a kinde of coosning’. The deception does not end there; the authors’ theft of the story is ‘such a matter as if we should have gone into a cooks shop in Fleet Lane, and with the smell of roast meat filled our bellies, not emptying our purses, a flat robberie’. Not only is the story stolen, but it is also devoid of real nourishment.¹⁸

In addition to writers and publishers, there were other influences on a first edition. Mistakes in the processes of composition,...