Have just spent a fascinating couple of days at a conference on ‘Printing as an Agent of Change in Tibet and Beyond’, a spin-off from the project on ‘Transforming Technologies and Buddhist Book Culture’ based in the Department of Social Anthropology in Cambridge. It’s been really exciting to see how the picture of Tibetan printing, stretching back to the 12th century, is being pieced together with great patience and smartness by a very devoted community of academics.

Spot the printing house…

Part of the jigsaw is the cultural analysis–what sort of texts were being circulated, and what were the relationships between those texts and the patrons who funded the costly business of woodblock printing, often as a form of spiritual ‘merit-making’? But at the same time there are the nuts-and-bolts questions about exactly what was being printed and where, the basic assembly of a corpus. (Large quantities of relevant evidence are still making nests for birds and food for rats in obscure buildings across the country). Thankfully, Tibetan texts seem usually to come with colophons, which offer information about the various agents who were involved in the particular printing project. Then there’s the mapping of print, and particularly of the apparent explosion of print in the fifteenth century–where were the printing houses, and why? Then there are the big questions about the difference that printing made, and how that relates to its impact elsewhere in the world.

The Tibetanists turn out to be doing amazing things with the material evidence, going right down to the fibres of the plants that were used to make the paper (which can be analysed by peering down the microscope, but also by conducting fieldwork with papermakers and by gathering local knowledge). And let’s not forget the wood that made the boards (which the dendrochronologists in Arizona want to be able to date thanks to the tree-ring evidence) or the pigments that went into decorating it (which can be analysed by UV reflectance spectography by a band based in the Fitzwilliam Museum who normally concentrate on Western illuminated manuscripts). Each of these subjects of microscopic analysis is also dauntingly macroscopic, since you can only make sense of the data when you have mapped both the local ecosystem and Tibet’s trade links with the wider world. It’s truly pioneering work, and as an added bonus it’s usually accompanied by breathtaking images of life on the roof of the planet.

Tomorrow I’m heading off to the new Library of Birmingham for a conference entitled ‘Resurrecting the Book‘. When I tell people this, they tend to ask: ‘Is it dead?’ I could point them to a letter sent home my son’s school last week, which read:

“Dear Parent / Carer of Year 8,

We are delighted to inform you that your child has been loaned a copy of A Christmas Carol, which they will be studying in English until the end of the Autumn term. Students will be bringing their copy home to enable them to continue reading and enjoying the novel outside of lessons. We ask that you join us in encouraging students to look after their copy as it will be passed on to other students in the future.

Each copy has been marked with a unique code, which will enable us to keep track of the books. Your child is responsible for returning their copy of A Christmas Carol, at the end of term, by the 19th December 2013. Any books which are not returned will need to be replaced at a cost of £4.99. Please note this is specifically a charge for books that are not returned and not a general charge for borrowing the text.

We look forward to enjoying reading the novel alongside year 8 in the coming weeks.”

I’m sure that a year or two ago the act of borrowing a book from school would have been an everyday affair, completely taken for granted. Now it needs a detailed explanation and a fanfare of celebration. Soon each book will have to come with an instruction manual, and (probably) a charger.

I first learnt the name of William Herle thanks to this website–I posted an image of an illegible signature I’d found a sixteenth-century book and got a response (from Arnold Hunt at the BL) telling me that it was Herle’s. Then I came across the online edition of Herle’s letters, created by Robyn Adams, Alison Wiggins and their team at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. And then I started to get interested in Herle himself, as a couple of vivid letters took me into the Elizabethan underworld, which turned out also to be a literary underworld, a place where people forged books as readily as they forged coins.

Herle was an intelligencer–a news-gatherer and secret agent–working for Elizabeth’s spymasters William Cecil, Lord Burghley and Francis Walsingham. His main area of expertise was the Low Countries, which he visited on several occasions, sometimes on his own, sometimes with official delegations (accompanying the duke of Alençon in 1582, following the earl of Leicester’s army in 1585). Despite his evident value to the authorities, he spent much of his life in crippling debt, and his letters mingle their nuggets of ‘intelligence’ with petitions for financial support. But, as David Lewis Jones puts it in the new DNB, ‘his many requests for a permanent position were ignored by his powerful friends and this suggests that they considered him useful but not entirely trustworthy’. Such was the allotted destiny of a double-agent who hung around with the dodgiest of characters in order to keep Elizabeth’s brutal regime on the tracks.

While we have a mine of information about Herle’s activities from the 1560s through to his death in 1588/9, we have no idea when he was born, and know nothing about his early life, save that he was born in the Welsh Marches, the son of Thomas Herle of Montgomery. He seems to have kept up his ties to the borders (an illegitimate daughter was baptized at Guilsfield, near Welshpool, in 1576). We also know that, somewhere along the way, he acquired many tongues. DNB says that ‘he was well educated with a good knowledge of languages, including Latin, Flemish, and Italian, and probably also French and Spanish’.

Recently a book has surfaced that might shed some light on Herle’s language-learning, and thanks to the generosity of its current owner I’ve had the privilege of spending some time poring over it. It’s a copy of Boccaccio’s Decameron, in the edition printed by Filippo Giunta in Florence in 1516. The title-page is signed ‘Guilielm[us] herleus’, alongside a cynical epigraph: ‘If honest & good thinges were as hard to be preised as don, I think it [sic] shold be as littill praised as now folowed. Q[uo]d W. Herle.’ The book bears various other Herle signatures, no two of which are alike. And strikingly, offsetting the cynicism, there are also a couple of lovey-dovey marginal inscriptions in which Herle celebrates his relationship with an ‘Elizabeth’. ‘E.H. / W.H. / two hearts in one Body joined as Elisabeth & William’, runs one of them. Who the lady was, we don’t know (there is no evidence that Herle ever married).

Besides these signatures, the book contains quite a serious scattering of notes to the text, the majority of which are in Italian. Some analyse the structure of the stories or pick out striking details (the number of people killed by the 1348 plague that provides the spur for the narrative cycle; the ladies’ claim that ‘men are women’s leaders’; a proverb dropped by a crafty abbot, ‘peccato celato mezo perdonato’–‘a sin hidden is half forgiven’; or a range of bogus relics including the finger of the Holy Spirit and the forelock of a seraph). Other bits of marginalia note particular words and phrases (‘paliscalmo’, a little boat; ‘muratore’, bricklayer; ‘inimicheuol tempo’, a terrible time). Some of these may have been penned by other readers, possibly Italian readers–with such tiny samples it’s hard to say how many annotators were involved. But a few of the notes are in English, or they translate Italian terms into English–as when ‘sopra la stangha’ is glossed (correctly, it seems) as ‘a perche for a ha[w]ke’. And one of the tales–a charming narrative which sets out to prove part of the wisdom of Solomon to the effect that women need to be beaten to be kept in line–is marked (in English) ‘to be tra[n]slatyd’. This strongly suggests some kind of language-learning context, in which translation exercises are being set for the students.

Perhaps the most delicious feature of the book is that it lets you see Herle in the process of turning Italian. In one of the margins, apropos of nothing in the text, he writes in tiny, precise letters: ‘Io vorrei [I would like] / Giugl[ielm]o herl’. Having already Latinized himself on the title-page, Herle here turns his name into an Italian equivalent, and produces it in an unusual hand that looks as if it might itself be aspiring to southern European elegance.

Although they have some features in common, it’s not easy to match the writing in these notes with the later writing of the spy William Herle. But then there is a bewildering variety of styles on display even in his signatures–suggesting this is an identity under construction, playing with different hands and tongues (the perfect training for a spy?) It can only be an educated guess, but my strong suspicion is that these notes are indeed evidence for the early life of the intelligencer. More guesses: it’s the 1540s, we’re in a schoolroom, somewhere in Italy, and Herle is immersing himself in one of the greatest of storytellers.

[Thanks to Guyda Armstrong and Elisabeth Leedham-Green for discussing aspects of this book with me. An exhibition commemorating the 700th anniversary of Boccaccio’s birth is currently taking place at the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester].

A postscript: this book has now been purchased by the Cambridge University Library, and can be called up in the Rare Books Room: classmark 5000.c.73

In all of the media reporting of the trial and conviction of Marine A for the murder of an ‘insurgent’ in Afghanistan in 2011, surprisingly little has been said about the conspicuously literary reference that accompanied the fatal gunshot. ‘There you are, shuffle off this mortal coil, you cunt. It’s nothing you wouldn’t do to us’.

The quotation comes from one of the most enigmatic moments in Hamlet (and the whole of English literature?), right in the thick of the ‘To be or not to be’ speech, when the prince of Denmark is at his most ruminative. To be or not to be? Death is deeply desirable, a ‘consummation / Devoutly to be wished’. But if death is a sleep, it is a sleep that may be disturbed by dreams. And ‘there’s the rub, / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / Must give us pause’. (For ‘mortal coil’, the RSC edition glosses: ‘bustle or turmoil of this mortal life’). And so, Hamlet concludes, we carry on bearing the pains of life because we fear greater pains after death. That is the reason why he is not going to commit suicide, or to undertake what he construes as a suicide mission to revenge the murder of his father upon his uncle.

The soliloquy is about the avoidance of action, and is itself a way of avoiding action, of spinning out words rather than deeds. Avoiding action turns out also to mean avoiding plain speech. Those ‘dreams’ that Hamlet talks of, the ‘something after death’ which ‘conscience’ fears, probably mean the fires of Hell (his father’s ghost, after all, is sizzling in Purgatory). But hellfire cannot be named directly. Part of the weirdness of Marine A’s quotation is that he co-opts the circumlocutions and avoidances of Hamlet’s speech for a purpose which is terrifyingly direct, the execution of his revenge. The eruption of the literary may, however, be linked to the fact that Marine A was himself spinning fictions about the physical condition of the enemy fighter. A couple of minutes earlier, he radioed to a colleague using a comparable euphemism: ‘I hate to say it, administering first aid to this er- individual, he’s er … passed on from the world, over’.

A bit of me wants to ask whether Shakespeare has ever been turned to such savage ends, but you only have to think of Titus Andronicus to realise that the field of modern warfare overlaps substantially with the world of Shakespearean drama. Meanwhile the London Review of Books recently reported that medical staff in Guantánamo Bay have taken Shakespearean names to make it harder to report them for misconduct. The doctors who are being encouraged to flout the rules of the 1975 Tokyo Declaration, which forbids the force-feeding of hunger-strikers, are now called Leonato, Varro, Cordelia, Cressida, Helena, Silius, Valeria, Lucentio and Lucio. Again, there’s some kind of grim appropriateness to this institutionalized insanity.