Resurrecting the manuscript? Framing late-Elizabethan sonnet sequences (original) (raw)

Abstract

According to Arthur F. Marotti, in 16th-century England, “people perceived [lyrics] as ephemeral artifacts, rather than as enduring literary monuments to be preserved in print.” Such a statement might seem surprising to readers who are more accustomed to seeing the sonnet, for instance, as a “moment’s monument”. But it could also surprise anyone who might have consulted original editions of late-Elizabethan printed sonnet sequences which, despite their small size, allowed for a certain form of monumentality. This paper will examine the changes that occurred in the edition of Elizabethan sonnet sequences. It will take into account lyric collections published in England from Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) to the late 1590s, with a focus on page layouts. Close analyses of the use of space, blanks and ornament in these collections lead one to qualify the idea that the imitation of manuscripts progressively gave way to the production of specifically editorial forms. But the main assumption to be questioned here is that the shift in editorial practices necessarily corresponded to a move from occasional (and thereby social) poems to literary ones. Clearly, the isolation and encasement of the poem on the page—which can be mostly observed in the sonnet sequences of the 1590s—conveyed a certain amount of autonomy to each piece of poetry. Such material and visual autonomy, however, can be explained by multiple factors, including the influence of contemporary editorial forms such as the emblem book. Perhaps more interestingly, it could be suggested that the new arrangement of the printed material in late Elizabethan sequences aimed to offer the reader—especially if he/she did not belong to certain aristocratic circles—to experience the material sensations of reading an occasional poem passed on to them in a prestigious social circle. This would be consistent with the idea that the printed sonnet was designed to be read in multiple ways, either as part of a sequence or in isolation from the other poems, in which case the collection could also work as an already compiled commonplace book ready to be used for any occasion that might have required it. The new editorial framing of the poems therefore favoured a discontinuous reading of the sequences for distinctively social uses.

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