John Webster's handbook of model letters: a study in attribution

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Annual, 2006 by Charles R. Forker

Introduction

IN 1625 "I. W. Gent." issued a collection of letters, most with replies attached, designed both to amuse readers and to instruct them in the art of personal correspondence. This slim volume of fifty-nine pages, printed in black letter, is entitled A Speedie Poste, With certain New Letters, or The First Fruits of new Conceits, neuer yet disclosed. Now published for the helpe of such as are desirous to learne to write Letters (STC 24909). Only two copies survive--one in the British Library (10905 bb 29), the other in the library of the Princeton Theological Seminary (SCB #11914). The British Library copy contains a table of contents (sigs. A4 and A4v), which the Princeton copy lacks; but apart from the missing "Contents of this Booke" in the American exemplar, both copies are complete and differ from each other only in a few insignificant stop-press corrections. The book was entered in the Stationers' Register 15 January 1625 and printed by Miles Flesher (or Fletcher) for William Sheares. A second edition was issued in 1629 and printed "by Elizabeth Allde, for Francis Coules, dwelling in the Old Baily" (STC 24909.5), an imperfect copy of which is in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

A Speedy Post constitutes a late addition to the popular succession of so-called letter writers or correspondence manuals that began with Angel Day's English Secretary and William Fulwood's Enemy of Idleness (both 1586) and continued well into the seventeenth century. As Jean Robertson pointed out in her useful history of the genre, such handbooks took "a new turn in 1602 with the publication of Nicholas Breton's A Poste with a Packet of Madde Letters." (1) This last volume, the instant success of which prompted the author to enlarge it a year later and to issue a second part in 1605, was closely imitated by later writers including "I.W.," who followed Breton in attempting to entertain readers as well as moralize pithily on various subjects. Like Breton, I.W. included letters of compliment, of preferment of a servant, of declaring love to a mistress, of proposing marriage, of condolence, of challenge in a quarrel, of seeking to borrow money, and of offering advice. Like Breton also, I.W. goes in for pointed satire, insistent alliteration, tireless wordplay, and other "fantasticall" or studied artificialities of style. We get the letter of a country bumpkin to his sweetheart, an exchange of letters between a courtier and a university student with much debunking of the court and praise of the scholarly life, and letters that delight in scoffing or leveling vituperative abuse at a third party or even at the recipient him- or herself. Toward the end of the book I.W. offers advice for prospective letter writers, urging them to avoid pedantry, "perfumed phrases," and the insertion of pretentious Latin mottoes or proverbs more appropriate to public orations than to personal missives. One sign that I.W. is following closely in Breton's traces is the printer's use of the same woodcut on the title page that had earlier introduced A Poste with a Packet--the figure of a galloping postman blowing his horn to announce his service.

Ever since the Australian scholar R. G. Howarth ascribed it to John Webster on the basis of the title page initials ("I.W. Gent.") and a striking verbal parallel between the book's preface and the dramatist's dedication of The Duchess of Malfi, (2) A Speedy Post has languished in the limbo of Webster apocrypha. In his address "To the Courteous ... Reader" I.W. rails "against the ignorant worldlings of this iron age, who (as wormes in a Library) seeme onely to live, but for to destroy learning" (sig. A3v); Webster uses nearly identical phraseology in dedicating The Duchess to George Harding, Baron Berkely, where he refers to "the ignorant scorners of the Muses (that like wormes in Libraries, seeme to live onely to destroy learning)" (11. 19-21). It is possible of course that an unknown writer calling himself "I.W." merely lifted a quotation from Webster's work, published two years earlier (1623); but we know that the dramatist sometimes recycled sententiae or favorite images and locutions, imbedding them in fresh contexts, (3) so that, given the tempting initials and the designation "Gent." (which Webster also may have claimed as a Middle Templar), (4) an identity of authorship in the present case would not be implausible. It is interesting also that R. W. Dent, who has investigated Webster's innumerable borrowings more exhaustively than anyone else, was unable to trace any source for the reference to worms in libraries, which reads like the kind of rhetorical nugget or sententious saying that Webster liked to copy down in his commonplace book. (5) Webster's source (if he had one) was apparently obscure, so that we have reason to doubt that I.W. and Webster were drawing independently upon some now forgotten writing.

In Skull beneath the Skin (1986), a book that discusses Webster's canon at some length, I wrote that I was "inclined to accept Howarth's ascription" (xi) but compelled then to defer full consideration of A Speedy Post until a later date. The present article is an attempt to present such evidence as I have since then accumulated and to argue that, such as they are, these data justify the attribution of the letter book to Webster on grounds of heightened probability. The method employed is first to show various kinds of linguistic congruency or parallelism between A Speedy Post and the dramatist's acknowledged works as found in A Concordance to the Works of John Webster by Richard Corballis and J. M. Harding (Salzburg: Institute fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1979); second, to test these parallels, many of which are elements of usage or verbal expressions common to other writers, against the Breton letter book (which I.W. was imitating) and also against other authors of the period (principally Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Dekker) for which concordances exist; and third, to inquire if A Speedy Post shows indebtedness to any of Webster's own principal sources, namely Sidney, Montaigne, Guazzo, Alexander, and Matthieu. The Webster concordance is based on The Complete Works, edited by F. L. Lucas (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927; repr., 1966); on the established Websterian sections of Westward Ho and Northward Ho by Webster and Dekker in volume 2 of The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, edited by Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955); (6) and on "The Progenie of the Most Renowned Prince James, King of Great Britaine, France and Ireland," a short poem by Webster discovered later than Lucas's edition and reproduced by Bernard M. Wagner in "New Verses by John Webster," Modern Language Notes 46 (1931): 403-05. I quote A Speedy Post and the concorded works of Webster in the original spelling, normalizing only i/j and u/v. In order to save space, I also in troduce the following abbreviations for individual works cited: