of writing and written discourse are set in part by the shifting ways in which texts are ordered, assembled, and made available in collections. The relationship is vividly evoked in our own moment of cultural change, in which new technologies of the book have fractured old ways of thinking about and producing works in print.39 Recently, scholars of the early handpress era have also begun to rethink long-held conceptions of the book and its physical boundaries. Sherman and others working in the history of reading have carried out inquiries into “book use” (and abuse) in the Renaissance, revealing that early readers intervened in the content and structure of printed volumes by annotating and even cutting and pasting.40 Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, in their survey of actors’ parts, have shown that the material conditions of meaning-making in Renaissance drama challenge “Romantic-cum-Victorian notions of … an organically whole text,”41 which only anachronistically apply to Shakespeare’s plays. Bound to Read contributes to these emerging conversations on both the consumption and production ends of Renaissance culture, and to the ongoing revisionism in the history of printing itself. The last two decades have witnessed a decisive turn in scholars’ understanding of the Gutenberg press and its historical effects, from earlier assessments of a print revolution that stabilized or “fixed” texts in the Renaissance to a more nuanced account of deliberate, uneven change and uncertainty in the period.42 In literary criticism, new perspectives on print history have gone hand in hand with a renewed evaluation of manuscript culture and its persistence—indeed, growth—in the early handpress era.43 Scholars have come to consider a variety of literary activities, including reading itself, as instrumental forms of production.44 But only very recently, and in part because of today’s digital tools and database technologies,45 have we gained exposure to the complicated range of literary materials that were available to Renaissance readers and writers. As Andrew Pettegree has observed in the field’s most recent major contribution, histories of print and the book have “tended to concentrate on the most eye-catching achievements of the new art,”46 neglecting the unbound and uncollected texts, the uncataloged or unexhibited items in archives, the imperfect and composite volumes like Blomefylde’s that tell a different story of literate culture in the Renaissance.
This issue of access points to the broader methodological claim of this study: that book-collecting practices—from early modern compiling to modern library curatorship and conservation—have deep and largely unacknowledged interpretative effects, both in literary criticism and in perceptions of literary history and periodization. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in its well-studied early printed form, is emblematic of this point. In every known instance in rare-book collections today, the quarto copies of Hamlet that survive from Shakespeare’s lifetime are preserved and accessed individually in hardcover bindings. But during Shakespeare’s lifetime, these arrangements would have been impossible luxuries—virtually impracticable by ordinary convention. Hamlet quartos were by all accounts cheap booklets; they were bound into collections with similarly sized cheap booklets (if they were bound at all) and kept out of serious institutional libraries such as the Bodleian at Oxford University.47 The gravity and aura of an individually bound, read, and interpreted Hamlet today is thus to a great extent a function of modern bookcollecting practices. Each preserved copy is at base a relatively undistinguished early printed book that was transformed—through conservational rebinding, cataloging, and revaluation according to the economics of the book trade—into a distinguished Renaissance masterwork. The material contexts and organizing categories that for early readers informed the text’s status and range of potential meanings have been replaced by a modern, circumscribed idea of what Hamlet should be. This contrast exemplifies what is meant by the indeterminate third term of my subtitle, “the Making of Renaissance Literature.” Bound to Read examines both literary production—writers and printers making meaning—in the period customarily referred to as the Renaissance and, crucially, the production of a category of Renaissance literature in library and collecting procedures customarily considered outside the domain of literary-critical interpretation.
In finding meaning in practices of text assembly and organization, the analyses in this study stretch across field lines to embrace and build on scholarly convictions about collecting as cultural production. Such convictions form the basis of library and bookbinding history, two fields of knowledge that until recently have remained underutilized by scholars of Renaissance literature.48 The importance of collecting has also informed recent literary scholarship of the Middle Ages, a field too easily cordoned off by our default categories of “Renaissance” and “early modern.”49 Alexandra Gillespie, writing on late medieval quartos of Chaucer’s and Lydgate’s works, has called attention to the fact that the earliest printed texts in today’s rare-book archives are “for the most part, slim, bound in morocco or Russian leather …, washed and cropped and generally presented as the ideal thing for a nineteenth-century gentleman.”50 Underneath this artificially modernized surface, Gillespie and Seth Lerer have independently shown, lies a robust culture of anthology building in which the compiling habits and fluid canons familiar to us from the medieval manuscript miscellany continued to guide the production of Middle English literature in early print.51 The continuity of compiling and collecting practices is a theme that emerges decisively in this study, helping to fill a conspicuous gap in existing literary-historical research. Scholarship on anthologies and print Sammelbände stops with the Middle English texts from the 1520s examined in Gillespie’s and Lerer’s studies, and resumes only in the allied but fundamentally different realm of collected literary anthologies from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.52 Bound to Read demonstrates that this gap in chronology originates in the long processes of archival selection that give us gilt-edged, luxury quarto copies of Hamlet: the rebinding, cataloging, and other curatorial routines that seem objective and peripheral to literary-historical scholarship but which enforce the perception of a historical break—an English Renaissance—at the level of the rare book.
What Lerer calls the medieval “anthologistic impulse”53 is very much in evidence in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, where book owners continued to compile in a system of production and distribution that effectively required it. As Gillespie has noted, the press may have wrested books from a slower, more careful system of medieval compilation, “but it supplied them to the same sort of readers.” “After printing, as other choices—about script, size and decoration of a book—were completely or increasingly circumscribed, the patrons of bookshops might still buy a book unbound and decide what to do with it next.”54 It could be said that instead of “fixing” or stabilizing once-malleable texts as was previously thought, printing multiplied the possibilities for text assembly, accelerating and diversifying habits of the book that nourished a more continuous, developing early vernacular textual culture. In fact, we find that the movement from the latemedieval printers to established Renaissance Stationers’ Company is one of more control to less control over binding structures: from publisherwholesalers, such as Caxton and Richard Pynson, who issued part-editions ready bound, to the increasingly specialized tradesmen of the 1580s and 1590s, who focused on printing and financing 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