Formal Matters : Reading the Materials of English Renaissance Literature

The essays in this collection explore the intersection between literary and material forms of writing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England by linking formalist analysis with the insights of book history. How do the formal properties of early modern texts, together with the materials that envelop and shape them, relate to the cultural, political, and social world of their production? Formal matters: Reading the materials of English Renaissance literature answers this question by linking formalist analysis with the insights of book history. It thus represents the new English Renaissance literary historiography tying literary composition to the materials and material practices of writing. The book combines studies of familiar and lesser known texts, from the poems and plays of Shakespeare to jests and printed commonplace books. Its ten studies make important, original contributions to research on the genres of early modern literature, focusing on the involvement of literary forms in the scribal and print cultures of compilation, continuation, translation, and correspondence, as well as in matters of political republicanism and popular piety, among others. Taken together, the collection's essays exemplify how an attention to form and matter can historicise writing without abandoning a literary focus. Front matter Contents List of illustrations Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Part I Forming literature The first English printed commonplace books and the rise of the common reader Reading Shakespeare miscellaneously: Ben Jonson, Robert Chester, and the Vatum Chorus of Loves Martyr ‘Divines into dry Vines’: forms of jesting in Renaissance England Afterworlds: Thomas Middleton, the book, and the genre of continuation Part II Translations Greek playbooks and dramatic forms in early modern England Book, list, word: forms of translation in the work of Richard Hakluyt Part III The matters of writing The forms of news from France in Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI Writings and the problem of satisfaction in Michaelmas Term Saving souls or selling (virtual) godliness? The ‘penny godlinesses’ of John Andrewes and the problem of ‘popular puritanism’ in early Stuart England How to construct a poem: Descartes, Sidney Part IV Afterword What’s the matter? Index