The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. - book reviews

Criticism, Spring, 1995 by Marilyn L. Williamson

This is a simply extraordinary first book: its scope and detail are most impressive, as it raises questions about authorship, technology, genre, gender, class, and politics, while dealing with a number of canonical and noncanonical texts written at a liminal moment in the history of English literature. It is the time when manuscript circulation of poems and other forms of writing, with its collective or anonymous creators, was challenged by the existence of print, the possibility of fixing and monumentalizing a text by a single author.

Scholars have discussed "the stigma of print," deeply felt by Shakespeare's contemporaries, for almost fifty years, but it has remained for our time to investigate the two cultures - manuscript circulation and print - seriously. It would have been difficult to get New Critics, with their reverence for the single-authored text, closely read, and the imperative to publish or perish in the great graduate schools of America, to believe an age in which the social transactions that attended a poem were more important to its author than the work itself. But now that the author has dwindled into the author function, books are seen as commodities, and all have audiences who read from different positions, the issues that Wall addresses are not only thinkable, but fascinating. It is characteristic of Wall's scholarship that she refers to J. W. Saunders' article written in 1951, instead of citing just the latest thing from the new historicists. Her introduction is a full history of how the questions she addresses and how the approaches she uses have developed in the last half century. That practice is carried throughout with scrupulous citation of an enormous body of scholarship.

The class and gender politics of the manuscript-print culture are relatively simple: the pen is virginal and aristocratic; print is promiscuous and vulgar. Printing one's works becomes therefore metaphorically public wantoness, a transgressive act that needed to be negotiated with various strategies. One was to make sonnet sequences into books to be read as they were circulated in coteries, as conversations with participation of lover and beloved, as part of labyrinthine ways of courtship, instead of a clear narrative development. Printed books retained the trappings of manuscripts. They became pseudo-morphs or books which seemed like manuscripts until the authors assumed sufficient authority to become men in print.

The sonnet cycles also placed the reader in the position of the voyeur in relation to the text, a position that suits perfectly the gendered rhetoric of male authors about their printed texts: the text is female; the reader and writer, male. Thus, Renaissance publishing is constructed as an enticing and dangerous cultural event, also one in which the male author risks effeminization, as his text is associated with fallen women.

Wall shows how Spenser and Gascoigne used the The Shepherd's Calendar and A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres to impersonate manuscripts early in their careers, and then went on to claim authority in later works. Daniel and Lodge use the complaint, joined to a sonnet sequence: they adopt the very voice of the fallen woman, thereby dislocating gender and blending genres. But all these transitions are negotiated; few took the way of Ben Jonson, to assert authority in print for the most scorned of genres, popular plays.

Wall shows, however, how another aristocratic genre, the pageant, when it is printed, extends its theatricality because what was improvised is inscribed. She demonstrates how two of Elizabeth's courtiers, Sidney and Gascoigne, attempted to coerce their sovereign to take stances favorable to the author's politics. Both failed, and so the author's intent in the pageant was foiled. Then the hoped-for outcome became more securely fixed by the author in print - and certainly monumentalized in the apparatus of the book. Moreover, print brought with it many more claims of bringing immortality to an author and to his subject/object.

If men were ashamed to seek print, women would bring upon themselves double shame to publish their work during the Renaissance. Women's negotiations took very conservative forms in this period: mothers published legacies to their children. Mary Sidney, countess of Pembroke, published certain translations, but never her psalms, which she did prepare to present to the queen at court. Aemelia Lanyer published Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum in 1611, imitating some of Sidney's strategies for making her work public. Another member of the Sidney clan, Lady Mary Wroth, used the strategy of making the author of her sonnet sequence a fiction from Urania. Each female author sought her own negotiation within the very narrow band of orthodox behavior.

One learns so much from this book, it seems churlish to criticize, but that is the task of the reviewer. There is more redundancy in the writing than necessary. The arguments are complex and very well developed. But conclusions are repeated a bit too often. The two chapters on the sonnet sequences probably should have been brought together, where the separate points still could have been clearly made, always granting that both points about the sequences are extremely valuable. In reading a really good book, one always ends lusting for more; so I will conclude with gratitude for the smart and provocative book that Wendy Wall has given us.