English Poets in Print: Advertising Authorship from Caxton to Berthe.
- Author/Editor
- Boffey, Julia.
- Title
- English Poets in Print: Advertising Authorship from Caxton to Berthe.
- Published
- Boffey, Julia. "English Poets in Print: Advertising Authorship from Caxton to Berthelette." In Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed BookFas. Publications of the John Gower Society, no. 14. Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2020. Pp. 219-30.
- Review
- Boffey sets out to situate Thomas Berthelette's 1532 "Confessio Amantis" in the "landscape of authorial promotion" (221) of early English printing, concentrating especially on the paratextual materials of the printing of English poetry. She surveys the "options" available "to an early printer who wanted to foreground an author as a distinctive presence" (222)--title pages, prefatory material, woodcuts--observing, however, that in the "design of books containing the works of English poets . . . these practices were employed somewhat sporadically" (223), especially in cases of "substantial, well-known works" by Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, which printers felt, perhaps, "needed no introduction" because these venerable works "evidently had a reputation of their own in which authorship was somehow rolled up without needing to be explicit" (224). By the 1520s, however, "living" poets "were beginning to be treated rather differently" (224-25), with works by Skelton, for example, being "'branded'" (Boffey's emphasis) "with variations on a generic scholar woodcut," and the names of other writers featuring much more prominently. Analogous "interesting billing" (225) of authorship accompanies early sixteenth-century printings of works by Stephen Hawes, Alexander Barclay, and William Neville, Boffey tells us, as she exemplifies these practices and the "interest in authorship and agency discernible" (in Barclay and Robert Copland), an interest that "appears to have been part of a more general concern with textual matters, a concern evident in Berthelette's prefatory discussion" in his CA (227). Boffey comments on the little-discussed "Castell of Pleasure" by William Neville, printed by both Henry Pepwell (1518) and Wynken de Worde (1530), focusing on the frame to the dream vision in which there is a dialogue between "Thauctour" and "lymprimeur," who is identified in the frame as Robert Copwell--"intermittently a printer himself [who] also translated and edited a number of works for other printers." The dialogue pertains to "the topic of literary composition" (226), as Boffey puts it, and to the need for the author to defend his work as a gentle pastime. These and other detailed analyses enable Boffey to argue that attention to texts and authors in "large-scale testimonials to an interest in English verse" such as Berthelette's CA (and Thynne's "Workes" of Chaucer) is "not new" in 1532 but a development out of the interests of "networks" of "personnel involved in the printing of English works of poetry." Such agents worked together to compete with "continental printings" of vernacular and classical authors (229), and their interests in making English poets available "involved them in considering the changing forms of the language and the different states in which the texts had survived." Further, their "reading and researches brought [the] poets to the fore as authors, to be prominently named, celebrated, and sometimes pictured in printed forms" (220). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]
- Date
- 2020
- Gower Subjects
- Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations
Confessio Amantis