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The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England
In the Theatrum chemicum Britannicum (1652), Elias Ashmole interprets John Gower as Geoffrey Chaucer’s alchemical mentor. This paper argues that Ashmole’s reading of Gower as an alchemical master and adept connects to Gower’s literary tradition as well as the alchemical tradition of the seventeenth century. Further clues to Ashmole’s reading can be linked to his sixteenth-century literary sources, which depict Gower as Chaucer’s literary mentor. This paper also considers Gower’s depiction of alchemy in Book IV of the Confessio amantis, particularly how Ashmole was drawn to its moral role, while also drawing upon Thomas Norton’s depiction of the moral alchemist in the Ordinall of Alchemy and Book V of the Confessio amantis. The resulting insights reveal the ways in which Gower’s alchemy was received by early modern readers in literary and alchemical traditions as well as the impact of his alchemical afterlife in the early modern period.
As a biographer, I have participated in the genre's construction of “strangely simplified and summarised” subjects, created from certain “estimated and cherished things,” to use Henry James's phrases (1984, 516). Here, I explore the significance of gender to this process. Biography (we are told) survives, indeed flourishes, by confidently delivering certain “estimated and cherished things,” to a reader desirous for anecdote, story, completeness, and inwardness. Feminist and post‐structuralist critics have interrogated these supposedly timeless models, but the life writing associated with women and that associated with the “gargantuan, supercanonical monolith” John Milton (Marcus 1996, 225) seem resistant to these interrogations. This chapter explores some of the reasons why, considering, for example, the fault lines within the feminist and post‐structuralist project and the commercial imperatives of the publication market. Various similarities and contrasts are explored, concluding with an analysis of the relationship between writer, subject, and reader. Often, in women's life writing, identification is sought, perhaps implicitly, between the (female) subject and reader, with the biographer gaining authority from being positioned outside this transaction. Miltonists enact more of an alliance between author and subject, a logic of identification strong enough to displace academic skepticism about life writing itself.
Even as writers during the English Renaissance typically shared responsibility for the production of their texts—financially, legally, and practically—a new kind of poetic authorship emerged that emphasized individual writers’ identities. This chapter shows how poetic texts came to foreground authors’ presence and authenticity as a way of overcoming the potentially depersonalizing effects of a printed text's widespread distribution. Beginning with an overview of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authorial conventions and practices, the chapter then turns to the ways in which the expanding marketplace of print focused on name recognition. As writers and printers responded to and adapted conventions associated with manuscript circulation, they began to forge a modern concept of authorship, which led, in turn, to new scribal habits and the new economic and legal status afforded early modern poets.
This essay discusses the stakes for Isaac Walton of casting his biographies of John Donne and George Herbert in hagiographic form. For him, the stakes are high politically, but not narrowly so in our modern sense of the term “political.” For Walton, and arguably throughout Christian history including its secular afterlife, hagiography has been a site of complex personal, religious, political, affective, and rhetorical investment. That investment is apparent in Walton's Lives (1640–1675), and, despite many subsequent critical reservations about Walton's procedures, Walton's text has conditioned the reception of Donne and Herbert in poetic and cultural history. Walton's presents his two subjects as exemplifying two contrasting “types” of sanctity, both of which, however, he seeks to accommodate within an ideal English Church conformity. While hagiography is often thought of as a medieval form with ancient antecedents, Walton deploys the genre powerfully and even polemically in an increasingly skeptical seventeenth century.
In 1641, Thomas Beedome’s first and only book, Poems Divine, and Humane , was published posthumously. Considering this volume of poetry in the context of a proliferation of poetry publishing in mid-seventeenth century England and accepting the idea that early modern paratexts provided an ideal site for the renegotiation and manifestation of authorship, I argue that throughout the front matter of Beedome’s book, the largest part of which is taken up by commendatory poetry, a concept of the author, not only as singular creator, but also as proprietor of his work, is created. This essay shows how the writers of the commendatory verses try to single out Beedome by almost obsessively labelling him as a worthy author, comparing him favourably with classical and contemporary poets, and affirming the proprietary relationship between Beedome and his poems.
This collection of articles is concerned with the intersection of medieval film studies and adaptation theory. Both fields, medieval film studies and adaptation studies, are among the most rapidly expanding subdisciplines of an interdisciplinary mix within the humanities: of film studies, literary studies, cultural studies, history, musicology, art history, theater studies, to name only a few. Within the last six to seven years the number of publications in both fields has exploded, as has the sophistication of their approaches,1 and it is high time to assess the kinds of questions, problems, and issues that link both fields in order to gauge ways in which advances in one may be put to productive use in the other.
Despite Lucrece’s iconic status as an exemplary chaste wife, her innocence was not universally acknowledged. Throughout the sixty-year period in which Shakespeare’s Lucrece was originally in print (1594–1655) Lucrece was a disputed figure, on the one hand, proposed as a normative model of female virtue, and on the other, admonished for her failings as a dissembling, vain and cowardly woman; a woman who never needed to commit suicide unless she had something to hide. Shakespeare’s Lucrece was written within and revels in this sense of dispute: Lucrece ‘Holds disputation’ with herself (1101) as she veers from self-doubt about her ‘trespass’ (1070) to shaky resolution in her ‘pure mind’ (1704), and the poem proceeds as a series of debates between the Roman soldiers, Tarquin and his conscience, Tarquin and Lucrece, Lucrece and her self-doubt, Lucrece and her kinsmen, and finally between Lucrece’s kinsmen as they stand over her dead body. While Shakespeare’s poem presents a sympathetic portrayal of the raped Lucrece as ‘this true wife’ (1841), the doubts it raises over the ethics of suicide do not lie still. Even in the final lines of the poem Lucrece’s kinsmen insist that her reasons for commiting suicide — ‘How may this forced stain be wiped from me?’ (1701) — are unfounded: ‘With this they all at once began to say, / Her body’s stain her mind untainted clears’ (1709–10).
This article proposes a performative model of authorship, based on the historical alternation between predominantly 'weak' and 'strong' author concepts and related practices of writing, publication and reading. Based on this model, we give a brief overview of the historical development of such author concepts in English literature from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. We argue for a more holistic approach to authorship within a cultural topography, comprising social contexts, technological and media factors, and other cultural developments, such as the distinction between privacy and the public sphere.
Invention and Imitation, Art and ValuesCoteriesPoets, Patrons, and PublicationReferences and Further Reading
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