Early Modern Masque Programmes

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Ben Jonson’s 1624 masque Neptune’s Triumph for the Return of Albion opens with ‘The Poet, entering on the stage to disperse the argument’. The Spanish Tragedy shows Hieronymo presenting the King with a ‘Copie of the Play’ and an ‘Argument of that they show’ before the performance of Solyman and Perseda. Nowadays we might refer to such synopses or summaries distributed to the audience as ‘programmes’. As they are today, programmes would have been useful during performances for their explanation of the masques’ action and symbolism, and as records or tokens of the performance.

Manuscript summaries of speeches and devices were already being distributed in the late sixteenth century at Elizabethan tilts. Philip Gawdy wrote to his father on 24 November 1587, enclosing ‘ij small books for a token, the one of them was given me that day that they ran at tilt’. Roy Strong draws attention to a Revels account payment ‘for the fair writing of all the devices on the 17 day of November … in two copies for the Queen’.

Synopsis of Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Queenes, in BL Harley MS 6947, fol. 143r. By permission of the British Library.

Do any programmes survive from masque performances? Some extant manuscript summaries of masques may have their roots in these elusive books. For example, the summary of Carew’s Coelum Britannicum (1634) now found in BL Harley MS 4931 goes to greater lengths than the printed edition to clarify the masque’s symbolism. It would be easy, however, to confuse these ‘programmes’ with summaries produced for other reasons, such as post-performance accounts, or pre-performance plot proposals for the Court. The summary of Jonson’s Masque of Queenes (1609) now in BL Harley MS 6947, for example, which contains different names for two of the characters, is more likely to have been written for the Court’s inspection before the performance, than copied from a masque programme.

The book which most fits the bill is an undated printed quarto attributed to Aurelian Townshend called The Ante-Masques which, as Karen Britland has recently demonstrated using the evidence of broken type, was printed by Felix Kingston for an entertainment at Oatlands House in August 1635. This quarto summarises the entertainment, including verses from the anti-masques and a ‘Subiect of the Masque’, which explains the masque’s proceedings.

Masques have long been understood as multimedia experiences, incorporating music, gesture, language, stage design and dance. These references to performance programmes reveal that the printed or written page could have also been a part of this experience, and may have been consulted for further information, clarification, or as a record of an ephemeral performance. Unfortunately, these programmes appear to have also lived ephemeral lives themselves.

Printed Coastlines

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Early sea pilots’ books were “books you kept on the bridge of your ship”, according to T.A. Birrell. He writes in his 1986 Panizzi Lectures on English Monarchs and their Books that one of the most intact surviving examples of the genre was owned by Prince Henry, most likely because it was never taken on board to be “soaked with the rain and the spray”. The Prince’s copy of Pierre Garcie’s Le Grand Routier (1607, Rouen) probably owes its acquisition to the navigator Edward Wright, who was the prince’s mathematics tutor and later librarian.

Le Grand Routier was just one in a series of “sea rutters” whose origins can be found in early fifteenth-century manuscripts. ‘Rutter’ was the English name for a book of sailing directions, derived from the French routier, route-book. The equivalent expression in Portuguese was roteiro; in Spanish derrota; in Italian portalano (port-book); in Dutch leeskaart (reading chart); in German, Seebuch (sea-book). Although Portuguese manuscript roteiros existed in the early fifteenth century, they were treated as top-secret documents, and it is likely that the first printed book of sailing directions, an Italian portalano published in Venice by Bernadino Rizo in 1490 derived from a compilation of French manuscript route-books. One example of an early manuscript rutter, copied between 1461 and 1465 by the scribe William Ebesham, survives in BL MS Lansdowne 285, a manuscript better known as Sir John Paston’s “grete booke”.

The route-book written by Pierre Garcie (1430?-1503?), which was later reprinted in the edition owned by Prince Henry, was the first to focus on the physical features of the coast, comprehensively describing the appearance of the coasts and the sea-bed of western France, Spain, and Portugal. Most importantly, Garcie illustrated his route-book with 59 woodcuts, made by Enguilbert coast2de Marnef, which gave seamen an impression of coastal outlines. Birrell describes each woodcut as “a heavy, crude, black silhouette: you stared at the printed page and imprinted the silhouette on your visual memory, and then looked up from the book, into the rain and the fog, trying to find a coastal outline that would fit”.

coast1 These woodcuts were made as early as 1484, but did not change significantly until the seventeenth century. Their crudeness did not detract from their imitation of important coastal features which the seaman in unfamiliar waters could recognise even through miserable weather. As D.W. Waters writes in The Rutters of the Sea (1962), the woodcuts “made prominent with simplicity what the anxious shipmaster sought”, when he perceived a coast “looming up suddenly over a darkening sea, or frowning over spume-swept waters through the gloom of leaden skies”.

coast3

Coasts in a 1671 route-book: The safeguard of sailers, or, Great rutter, p. 143, from EEBO.

 

By the later seventeenth century, printed rutters had established finer detail in illustrating coasts, though their use on board, as reference volumes with illustrations to be compared and held up to unfamiliar coastal views, remained the same. Few printed rutters survive, so Prince Henry’s well-preserved 1607 copy of Le Grand Routier is worth a browse; it has been digitised on Google Books here.

 

Sugary Books

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Recently, I have been taking a closer look at a manuscript I consulted this summer in the Folger Shakespeare Library. The volume (MS V.b.132) contains a long and absorbing set of letters by Francis Bacon, carefully copied in the late 1620s or early 1630s by the scribe Ralph (Raph) Crane (Beal BcF 187). When examining the manuscript’s binding and construction, however, my research took an unexpected detour away from Bacon and Crane, and into the everyday world of early modern shipping.

Screenshot 2015-11-02 16.24.24The manuscript’s binding guards are made up of a set of written accounts, covering the recto and verso of a single folio page (pictured). Having photographed the eight exposed page fragments, I reassembled the snippets into two misshapen, but potentially readable, pages (below), to try to date the material. Although the accounts don’t contain any dates themselves, they contain enough references to ships and people to point to a likely time of writing. The pages record the expenses involved in the importation and sale of ‘ambergres’, ‘chests of suger’, and ‘bages’ of ‘anesede’. It is possible to make out the names of two ships – the Hopewell and the Amity – and of some customers or merchants: one ‘collins’, ‘doctor lopus’, and ‘folkes the queenes ma[jes]ti[e’s] […]’.

Screenshot 2015-11-02 16.20.31From scanning the tables of Elizabethan ships in Kenneth Andrews’ Elizabethan Privateering (1964), and the detailed chronologies of sugar importation in T.S. Willan’s Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade (1959), it seems likely that the Hopewell was the ship of that name captained by Abraham Cocke and then William Craston, which carried sugar, ginger, cochineal, pepper and sarsaparilla, and that the Amity may have been the Amity which was employed in the Barbary trade between 1574 and 1594, managed by a syndicate from the Grocers Company. The reference to ‘collins’, to which the account-writer sold ambergris could therefore have been Edward Collins, factor to the brother of John Symcot, who was himself engaged in the sugar trade and also imported on the Amity during 1587-8.

Screenshot 2015-11-02 16.20.43The accounts also have a celebrity connection: ‘doctor lopus’ is almost certainly the Queen’s notorious physician Roderigo Lopez, who was involved in the importation of aniseed and sumac from 1584 until he was executed in 1594. Lastly, the word ‘grocer’ is likely to complete the line on ‘folkes’: the Royal Grocer Richard Foulkes charged a fixed importation fee on sugar under the royal right of purveyance. This fee was implemented in 1584, and lasted until the abolishment of Foulkes’ post in 1589.

With this in mind, it seems probable that the two pages of accounts were written sometime between 1584 and 1589, by an established trader in sugar, ambergris and aniseed. Unfortunately, the Francis Bacon manuscript bound in these accounts was produced much later, and does not touch on Elizabethan spice importation. Although this digression into merchant shipping led to little more than a footnote in my work on the manuscript, the process of reassembling these accounts and tracing their references was a nice reminder of the potential of binding material, and the unexpected nature of manuscript research.

Reassembling Jefferson’s Library

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IMG_1619The Library of Congress is celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of the acquisition of Thomas Jefferson’s 6,487-volume library by expanding their long-running exhibition Thomas Jefferson’s Library. Jefferson sold his library to Congress in 1815 to replace the collection lost to fire during the war of 1812. A second fire in 1851 destroyed nearly two-thirds of Jefferson’s volumes, and the present exhibition details the Library of Congress’s longstanding project to reassemble and reorder Jefferson’s library as it was first sold.

The books in the exhibition have been arranged by subject, following Jefferson’s own division of his books into History, Philosophy and Fine Arts. He followed Francis Bacon’s table of science (Memory, Reason, and Imagination) for this ordering, dividing his books into 44 ‘chapters’, beginning with Ancient History, Modern Europe, Modern France, and moving on to ‘Physical History’, which incorporates zoology, geology, and astronomy. His arrangement concludes with books on technical arts, which contained many topics new to the Congressional Library, including beekeeping, brewing, embroidery, and book-keeping.

The modern assemblers of the exhibition’s Jefferson library have further categorised his books, using coloured ribbons. A green ribbon marks books that were part of the original library, gold marks those which have recently been purchased for the project, and no ribbon is used for those which have been taken from the Library of Congress collection to fill gaps in the library. The ribbons highlight the transitional character of the library as it stands now, as well as its necessarily hybrid nature.

297 books remain to be found; white boxes mark their places on the shelves until they can be acquired. Lists of these books are currently circulating on the rare books market, but Jefferson’s preference for second editions and smaller, pocket-size editions mean that precise matches are hard to come by.TJ However, selections of Jefferson’s surviving books are still being located, most recently in the Law Library of Congress and Washington University in St. Louis.

Jefferson’s books are easily identifiable at least. Although there are very few instances of marginalia in his books, he regularly indicated his ownership of a volume in a unique way: by turning to the book’s ‘T’ signature, and inscribing a J alongside it, or by turning to ‘I’ and adding a T, he recorded his initials in the same location throughout his collection.

Out of the Ashes: A New Library for Congress and the Nation continues until May 2016, and the Thomas Jefferson’s Library exhibition is permanent.

 

Digital Annotations

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How do readers comment and read comments on digital texts? In January, the founders of the website Genius announced their intention to ‘annotate the world’, a project which they have described as ‘a wall of history’ and ‘the internet Talmud’. Previously, the site was solely a forum for the collaborative interpretation of rap lyrics, noted for its ‘hyper-intellectualisation of hip-hop’. For example, annotators explain that Jay Z’s line ‘is Pious pious cause God loves pious?’ is a ‘reference to Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma’ which ‘gets at some of the central questions of morality (sovereignty, omnipotence, freedom of will, morality without God)’.

However, the site has recently started to annotate poetry, fiction, historical texts, news stories, legal documents, speeches, drama, podcasts; anything which naturally takes, or can be expressed in, a textual form. The Canterbury Tales, the Magna Carta, Shakespeare’s plays, Wittgenstein’s Propositions, the 2015 Labour Party election manifesto, and many thousands more texts have all received sustained glossing from an expanding community of annotators. Genius.com has now infiltrated the rest of the digital world, and currently allows any webpage on the internet to be annotated. The site explains, ‘whenever you’re confused by or interested in a passage, you can click on it to read an annotation that explains in plain language what you’re reading and why it’s important’.

Annotation

How can a project like this change our experience of digital reading? Giving readers a means to respond to texts on the web is not new: comment-boxes, and streams of reader comments, have been found at the bottom of webpages for a long time. But the annotation format integrates text and comment within the text space, explaining the text whilst it is being read. If everything is annotatable, what would it mean to encounter blank or unannotated text: a lack of reader interest, an idea too obvious or difficult to be annotated, or a veneration of the text? As texts generate more prose annotations, which can also be commented upon themselves, could digital texts be buried under all this exegesis? And what does this drive to produce and read explanatory text say about our culture of reading? In 1991, Thomas McFarland suggested that textual glossing is part of an attempt to construct connections of meaning in the face of cultural disintegration: ‘footnotes and other annotational apparatus are denials of cultural fragmentation; the greater the actual disintegration of culture, the more in fashion do footnotes become’. Perhaps the internet is where readers encounter texts in their most fragmented and least anchored forms.