November 3, 2014

William Alexander’s “Woorkes”



Alexander, William. The monarchicke tragedies. London: Valentine Simmes [& George Eld] for Edward Blount (1607). STC 344.

Bound with

Alexander, William. A paraenesis to the Prince. London: Richard Field for Edward Blount (1604). STC 346.

and

Alexander, William. Aurora. London: Richard Field for Edward Blount (1604). STC 337.

Collation: π1 5A4(-A1 & A2)*, a2 A4(-A1 & A2)** B-M4 N2 2A-K4 2L2, 3A-C4 3D2, 4A-M4, 5B-2D4 5E2(-E2)

* These are the two preliminary leaves of The Alexandrean tragedie, misbound at the front of the volume.
** In both 1604 and 1607, these usually appear before a2. In 1604, A3 was preceded by A2, the general title, and a blank (present in the Beinecke copy). In the 1607 issue, the title page to The Monarchic Tragedies is a single-leaf insert (π1 here), canceling the 1604 title page.

More than fifteen years before he helped finance Shakespeare’s First Folio, Edward Blount published a collection of plays by the Scottish politician and writer William Alexander. When issued in 1604 and when augmented in 1607, The Monarchic Tragedies was one of the only collections of English plays available in print. In fact, a good case can be made that it was the first, though Blount apparently designed it as one part of a larger collection of literature. On 30 April 1604, he registered “The Woorkes of William Alexander of Menstrie” with London’s Company of Stationers. Along with The Monarchic Tragedies, the “Woorkes” were to include some non-dramatic poetry: “Paranethis to the Prince. and Aurora.” There is no evidence that a title page for the collection was ever printed, but volumes like this one indicate that Blount did market The Monarchic Tragedies, A Paraenesis to the Prince, and Aurora as a set—to some customers, at least. The first issue of The Monarchic Tragedies, which came out with the poetry in 1604, contained two plays: The Tragedy of Croseus and The Tragedy of Darius. In 1607, Blount reissued The Monarchic Tragedies with two more plays written by Alexander: The Alexandrean Tragedy and The Tragedy of Julius Caesar.

The present volume preserves the 1607 issue of The Monarchic Tragedies and both of the 1604 poetry editions, A Paraenesis to the Prince and Aurora. In this copy, A Paraenesis to the Prince and Aurora follow Croseus and Darius. The Alexandrean Tragedy and Julius Caesar then come after. Because the 1607 plays follow the complete 1604 “Woorkes,” they were probably added to the earlier material, which had previously been in its own binding. (More on this below.) In other copies I have located, Paraenesis and Aurora follow all four plays. As noted in the collation, the two preliminary leaves of The Alexandrean Tragedy have been misbound at the very front of this volume, immediately after the general title page of The Monarchic Tragedies.

Paraenesis and Aurora both collate complete, including the final blanks. The Monarchic Tragedies lacks the divisional title page for The Alexandrean Tragedy, the blank that may have preceded it, and the blank that should precede the general title page. The blank at K4, the end of Darius, is present. Of the copies I have been able to check, only one at the Beinecke preserves the blank preceding the general title page, and none retain a blank, A1, before The Alexandrean Tragedy. The pages throughout the book are remarkably clean and bright.

The volume remains bound in seventeenth-century sprinkled calf; it has not been rebacked or otherwise conserved. The covers are decorated only with a frame of blind double fillets near the board edges, and the fillets cross to form small Oxford corners. The spine has four raised bands with pairs of blind lines at the top and bottom of each of the five compartments. All of this is very typical of English trade bindings from the period. There is some scuffing and one larger (~1cm) gouge out of the leather on the front cover, and the rear cover looks to have sustained a rather serious ink spill, causing discoloration and damage to a significant section of the leather (~8cm x 9cm). Though unfortunate, the damage does attest to the early modern recommendation that readers be able to write in the presence of their books. All three board edges are decorated with a gilt diamond pattern, which, unlike the austere covers and spine, would have been visible when the book was shelved with the fore edge facing out. The text block would also have been visible; all of its edges are colored yellow with red sprinkling. Dust over the centuries has darkened it, but this edge decoration was once quite vivid. The foot edge is brighter than the others, and some pages preserve the original yellow where it has encroached into the margins. A seventeenth-century owner has written “Allexanders tragedies” on the fore edge, further enabling potential readers identify the book on a shelf. Both hinges are rubbed and the front one has cracked through, but the tawed supports remain intact and secure both covers well. The binding includes plain paper pastedowns and a free endleaf at front and rear. The first black-letter quarto of the King James Bible (1613, STC 2227) makes an appearance here, too: waste from the Book of Ezekiel is used for endpaper guards. This helpfully indicates a terminus post quem of 1613 for the binding. Everything about the style also fits with an early- to mid-seventeenth-century date.

Notably, however, a témoin (a folded “witness”) on H4 of The Alexandrean Tragedy all but guarantees that the book—or part of it—was previously bound: the extended edge is also trimmed. That said, there is significant ink transfer from the 1607 Monarchic Tragedies title page onto the front free endpaper, indicating that the two leaves have been in contact for a long time. This, of course, is confirmed by the early date of the binding itself. The témoin may suggest that the current binding is the second binding for the whole collection, and perhaps a third binding for the 1604 sequence. Because the current binding dates from no more than a few decades after 1607, this would be surprising, but it is by no means impossible. Bindings can damage easily, and well-to-do owners would have had no problem financing repairs. An alternative possibility is that the 1607 material was taken from a separate bound collection, and that the témoin only tells us about its early binding, not the history of all the volume’s printed material. If true, the current binding would be the second for both parts. The idea would be that the 1604 material and the 1607 material had been in separate bindings, and were newly joined when the present book was made. The more basic claim that this is not the first binding for the 1604 material is supported by the fact that A3 and A4 of The Monarchic Tragedies, which would have followed the original 1604 title page, are soiled in a way that surrounding leaves are not. Light staining on the margins of both of these leaves and the final leaf of Aurora probably place them at the extremities of an earlier bound volume. Unfortunately, because the binding is tight and so well preserved, the underlying structure cannot be examined without special imaging. X-ray or CT would likely help to clarify the early history of this book.

There are some annotations at the very front of the book. Two names have been written multiple times on the recto of the front free endpaper, giving us some sense of the book’s life in the eighteenth century: “Henry Howms” and “Richard Wetherhead.” The date “1713 14” appears in the middle of the leaf, and is perhaps attached to one of the Henry Howms inscriptions. Richard Wetherhead has also written his name and initials on the title page. All of the handwriting on the endpaper and title page is consistent with an eighteenth-century date, and there are no other marks in the volume.

All said, this book represents an important watershed, both in Edward Blount’s career and in the larger history of English literature. The Monarchic Tragedies was Blount’s first foray into vernacular drama, and the larger collection of Alexander’s “Woorkes” was his first significant investment in an English author. But although it is perhaps easiest to tell the story of this book as a precursor to the First Folio, as I have been doing, Alexander’s works are not without their own merit. They were praised by personalities as notable as Sir Robert Aytoun, Samuel Daniel, Sir Davies of Hereford, Michael Drayton, and William Drummond. Indeed, although he is often forgotten now, he was one of the major literary figures of his time. Like Spenser’s, his sonnets depart from the Petrarchan model by looking toward marriage instead of unrequited love; Paraenesis speaks to his attempts to curry favor with James in the first years of his new role as monarch of England; and The Monarchic Tragedies demonstrates the vitality of one of the most important genres of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: Senecan tragedy. More research is needed, but this may be the only surviving copy with all four plays, both works of poetry, and an untouched early binding. It is almost certainly the only one that also preserves the curious binding order. SOLD

August 29, 2014

Rare Book School in the News

I have just completed my first summer as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School. While I was in Charlottesville for a course on analytical bibliography with Stephen Tabor, Lee Powell of the Washington Post was in town filming for a short piece about Rare Book School. Though I’m not convinced that my own appearances in the clip helped things, the finished product turned out pretty well. You can find the video and a short article here.

I’m posting the video here in part because it should give readers of my site a glimpse into the kind of things that happen at RBS. (I promise it’s not as quaint as the video sometimes makes it seem.) The main reason, though, is that I’d like to build off my comment that appears near the beginning. As I began to suggest in the clip, and as I suggested to Lee in the longer interview he did with me, my sense is that the real strength of Rare Book School is its ability to bring together a community of scholars who share a commitment to books as material objects, but who come from a wide range of backgrounds and who engage with books in a range of capacities. The mix includes traditional humanities scholars, special collections librarians, library catalogers, binding and paper conservators, professional booksellers, and collectors. The publications that arise from academic research in departments like my own tend to have only one name attached to them, but, from start to finish, they are almost always products of conversations and collaborations. And often the best work, especially in bibliography and book history, is work that engages with the experiences and knowledge of those who sit adjacent to and outside of the academy. The coursework at Rare Book School is more or less unique in its ability to generate the kind of critical mass necessary for this, and I am grateful to have been invigorated by my experiences so far.

May 10, 2014

Flipping EEBO

The other evening, I had a provocative—if (because?) vaguely charged—exchange on Twitter with Whitney Trettien, a very sharp PhD candidate at Duke. You can find the central strand of my discussion with her on Storify, here. It began after Marissa Nicosia, who studies at Penn, solicited stories about researching with EEBO for a talk that she’s soon to give at the Rare Book School, stories illustrating both the opportunities and the challenges that the resource presents. In a post responding to the request, Whitney (if I may) expressed her frustration with the fact that EEBO (and the UMI series before it) very frequently obscures the material forms that early modern books take. And she is surely right that by taking the edition or issue rather than the individual volume as its unit of organization, EEBO demonstrates a disinterest in the kinds of juxtaposition and packaging that scholars have increasingly looked toward in an effort to understand reception and use. Material that sits outside the boundaries defined by an edition’s collation formula doesn’t usually make it in, and when it does, it often appears to be by accident. In fact, the focus on editions demands this kind of exclusion as a matter of principle; if EEBO is to be consistent with the way it has been designed, it can’t give us more. As a result, in addition to having to skip much of the material that makes books, well, books, EEBO has to leave out reappropriations of printed materials that in some cases constitute the creative labor of women and others traditionally excluded from the publication mechanisms of the book trade. When Whitney made a version of this point during our discussion, I suspect that she had in mind, at least in part, the Gospel Harmonies of Little Gidding, which she’s been doing exciting work on for her dissertation. These volumes contain what is almost exclusively printed material, but it would be quite a distortion to treat them in any straightforward way as copies of an edition or set of editions. Because of this, there’s no room for them in EEBO as it currently imagines itself.

The question about what EEBO should include and how it should organize itself can usefully be reframed as a question about what we should take “Books” in “Early English Books Online” to mean. As I’ve already indicated, what EEBO currently has in mind is the very same thing that the STC and Wing meant when they used it in their titles: distinct editions and issues published in print. An individual “book,” for EEBO, is a abstraction used to refer collectively to a set of actual copies made from, largely, the same setting of type. Yes, this is the stuff of Bibliography 101, but it’s worth spelling out in this context because it can be hard to tell what EEBO is in fact up to; its practices sometimes seem to border on incoherence. Still, when EEBO returns search results, it’s pointing more to ideas of books than particular, physical ones—even, awkwardly, as it turns around and displays images taken from specific copies. Like the concept of the edition itself, EEBO’s results emphasize a degree of sameness while washing over the differences that materiality almost necessarily entails. The paradox, as I just hinted at, is that EEBO organizes itself around abstractions at the same time that its facsimiles derive from objects quite particular and material. When using EEBO, as I wrote in reply to Marissa’s initial query,

Bibliographers and observant readers know that no truly representative copy of a given edition exists; even the most carefully planned and printed editions result in copies with formes in different states, and we should always expect different patterns of inking, shifting type, variations in paper stock, and, of course, different histories of use (and disuse). But as long as we understand that individual copies of an edition are necessarily individual and remain cognizant of the errors that multiple remediations might introduce (from original to microfilm and from microfilm to digital), EEBO remains an invaluable resource, one that has for years now made research possible that was impractical before it—at least for those researchers who have access to it. (Do remember that The Renaissance Society of America has secured access to EEBO for its members.) Since I’ve digressed somewhat into a discussion of best practices, I might as well repeat this here:

OK, so EEBO as we know it thinks of “books” as editions and issues, and continues to digitize in an effort to make available at least one instantiation of each, both of which produce and continue to produce the blind spots described above. But what would it mean to turn EEBO on its head—to flip EEBO—and make its primary unit of organization the individual extant volume, the physical “book”? The sense of “book” as a copy you can in fact hold in your hands is arguably more intuitive than “book” as an abstraction, an edition or issue, and would allow the database to include all types and components of print that circulated in the period—the Little Gidding volumes; images of books’ bindings, pastedowns, and endpapers; complete composite volumes (sammelbände); etc. It would also avoid the problem of asking individual copies to masquerade as something they can never be, while in no way prohibiting searches by reference to STC, Wing, and ESTC numbers. EEBO currently subordinates individual copies under a larger category, but it would be relatively straightforward, both conceptually and practically, to include any possible classifications within copy-specific entries/listings. That is, such an EEBO could easily continue to facilitate the kind of searches we have come to expect—and very frequently want—from it. And if EEBO were to emphasize the particularity of its digitizations by branding itself as a database of volumes and not editions, it could retain this old functionality while simultaneously discouraging the temptation to think of a digitized copy as an ideal representative of its edition. The quality and reliability of the digitizations themselves would remain an issue until they’re replaced, but they would fit without a problem into the new database schema that the flip would require. It may even prove possible to piece together some sammelbände from the images already available.

Obviously, all of this is just a preliminary proposal, and does not work through the serious challenges that conversion from the existing system would pose. That said, though, I think this is probably the best way forward for EEBO—or its replacement—and would in fact make the database more consistent with many other repositories of digitized books now available.

One final note: while we were chatting, Whitney suggested the possibility of an object rather than a relational database, an idea that I entertained while thinking this through, but it turns out that the move I describe in this brief post wouldn’t necessitate a complex structure at all: a traditional SQL database would do the job just fine, and would actually be quite extendable and scaleable. Each volume could have a general entry in a table that contains all of the fields relevant for describing it, and there could be another table containing specific entries for each constituent text (even if the book only includes one) that links back to the volume. This latter table could contain any relevant catalog citations, including STC, Wing, and ESTC numbers. Of course, I’m simplifying a bit, but an actual implementation of even a fairly large database like EEBO wouldn’t need to be much more complex.

* The featured image comes from an EEBO copy of Hic mulier: or, The man-woman (London: John Trundle, 1620. STC 13375.5), sig. A3v. It’s the copy taken from UMI 839:14. Hopefully my use here will be considered fair. As you may know, Hic mulier is itself a book about “flipping,” though it’s far less keen on the idea than I am.