Shakespeare's First Reader: The Paper Trails of Richard Stonley (Material Texts) - Hardcover

Scott-Warren, Jason

 
9780812251456: Shakespeare's First Reader: The Paper Trails of Richard Stonley (Material Texts)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812251458 ISBN 13: 9780812251456
Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Richard Stonley has all but vanished from history, but to his contemporaries he would have been an enviable figure. A clerk of the Exchequer for more than four decades under Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I, he rose from obscure origins to a life of opulence; his job, a secure bureaucratic post with a guaranteed income, was the kind of which many men dreamed. Vast sums of money passed through his hands, some of which he used to engage in moneylending and land speculation. He also bought books, lots of them, amassing one of the largest libraries in early modern London.

In 1597, all of this was brought to a halt when Stonley, aged around seventy-seven, was incarcerated in the Fleet Prison, convicted of embezzling the spectacular sum of £13,000 from the Exchequer. His property was sold off, and an inventory was made of his house on Aldersgate Street. This provides our most detailed guide to his lost library. By chance, we also have three handwritten volumes of accounts, in which he earlier itemized his spending on food, clothing, travel, and books. It is here that we learn that on June 12, 1593, he bought "the Venus & Adhonay per Shakspere"—the earliest known record of a purchase of Shakespeare's first publication.

In Shakespeare's First Reader, Jason Scott-Warren sets Stonley's journals and inventories of goods alongside a wealth of archival evidence to put his life and library back together again. He shows how Stonley's books were integral to the material worlds he inhabited and the social networks he formed with communities of merchants, printers, recusants, and spies. Through a combination of book history and biography, Shakespeare's First Reader provides a compelling "bio-bibliography"—the story of how one early modern gentleman lived in and through his library.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jason Scott-Warren is Reader in Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Gonville and Caius College.

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Introduction
Material Readers

When, in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver confronts the stark consequences of her father's bankruptcy, the superiority of her nature shines through in her dismay at the sale of the family's books:Her eyes had immediately glanced from him to the place where the bookcase had hung; there was nothing now but the oblong unfaded space on the wall, and below it the small table with the Bible and the few other books.
"Oh Tom," she burst out, clasping her hands, "where are the books? I thought my uncle Glegg said he would buy them—didn't he?—are those all they've left us?"
"I suppose so," said Tom, with a sort of desperate indifference. "Why should they buy many books when they bought so little furniture?"
"Oh but, Tom," said Maggie, her eyes filling with tears, as she rushed up to the table to see what books had been rescued. "Our dear old Pilgrim's Progress that you coloured with your little paints; and that picture of Pilgrim with a mantle on, looking just like a turtle—O dear!" Maggie went on, half sobbing as she turned over the few books. "I thought we should never part with that while we lived—everything is going away from us—the end of our lives will have nothing in it like the beginning!"While Maggie's mother worries only about her initialed silver teapot with its stand (334), her "chany" (china) with "the tulips on the cups, and the roses, as anybody might go and look at 'em for pleasure" (328), not to mention her sugar tongs, Maggie's attention moves to the gap in the fabric of the room where the bookshelf used to be. But Maggie resembles her mother insofar as her reaction to the loss of her favorite things is unabashedly sentimental. Although the family retains its Holy Bible (a book that will prove to be immensely significant as the plot unfolds), Maggie laments the loss of the pleasurable Christian allegory of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a volume made more precious by her brother's coloring and by an illustration that makes the hero look like a turtle. Books here stand for religion and literacy, for the possibility of wisdom and goodness, but for much more besides: shared experience, shared jokes, and a tangible link back to childhoods that are receding all too rapidly. In Maggie's concluding sob, the disappearance of individual "things" is subsumed into a much larger loss—"everything is going away from us—the end of our lives will have nothing in it like the beginning!" Her words suggest the power of objects to hold our memories and to secure our identities, providing anchors amid the flux of experience. As she loses her grip on things, Maggie is cut adrift.

Thanks to their physical resilience, books are potent carriers of personal associations and memories. Although their spines fade and their pages yellow with time, they have a tendency to endure on the shelves, serving as visible reminders of the circumstances in which they were first bought and read. Philip Larkin's poem "Love Songs in Age" conjures up a widow's music books—"One bleached from lying in a sunny place, / One marked in circles by a vase of water, / One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her, / And coloured, by her daughter." Opened again after many years, the books and the songs they contain allow "the unfailing sense of being young" to "spread out like a spring-woken tree." Marcel Proust speculates that "there are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those . . . we spent with a favourite book." But this retrospective sense of plenitude derives not from the text but from all the things that seemed at the time to distract us from it: "The game for which a friend would come to fetch us at the most interesting passage; the troublesome bee or sun ray that forced us to lift our eyes from the page or to change position; the provisions for the afternoon snack that we had been made to take along and that we left beside us on the bench without touching, while above our head the sun was diminishing in force in the blue sky; the dinner we had to return home for, and during which we thought only of going up immediately afterward to finish the interrupted chapter." Such seemingly extraneous things stay with us, so that now, "if we still happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that have vanished, and we hope to see reflected on their pages the dwellings and the ponds which no longer exist." Like a taste or a scent, a book can bring the past flooding back.

Books decay over time, of course, and countless numbers have been lost. But they put up a dogged (or dog-eared) resistance to change that allows them to bear witness to distant times. James Joyce's story "Araby" begins with a boy's recollection of coming to live in a new house: "Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers. Among these I found a few papercovered books, the pages of which were curled and damp: The Abbot by Walter Scott, The Devout Communicant and The Memoirs of Vidocq. I liked the last best because its leaves were yellow." In the dank air, a flash of color—which is at once a visible color and the literary color of books that continue to communicate long after the worlds that gave them birth have passed away. This power of the book as witness has been pushed to an extreme by the photographer Yuri Docj, in a project entitled Last Folio. Docj was making portraits of Holocaust survivors when he was taken to see an abandoned school in Bardejov, on the border between Poland and Ukraine. The school was a time capsule: everything remained where it was left on the day in 1942 when the Jewish students were taken away to the camps. On seeing the building, his collaborator Katya Krausova recalls, Dojc became fascinated by the books. "The disintegrating tomes, the beautiful decaying spines, all the crumbling pages are mesmerizing. They speak volumes about those who never came back to read the texts, to explain, to teach, to learn from them." The felicitous wordplay of "speaking volumes" captures the miracle of Docj's photographs, in which the brooding presences of Hebrew books become powerfully eloquent. They tell of loss and the evisceration of human lives, but they also come to seem like Holocaust survivors, things of flesh and bone rather than paper and cloth, guarding unspeakable memories.

The histories that lie buried in books are often traceless; purely personal associations that leave no physical mark. But books become more palpable "calendars . . . of the days that have vanished" when they are annotated by their owners. An act as seemingly straightforward as writing one's name and the date on a flyleaf makes the book part of a skeletal autobiography—why that book, for that person, at that time? A gift inscription marks a particular occasion and a particular relationship, and makes us wonder still more about the title in question—why that book, passing between those people, at that time? If the book is the gift of its author, it is known in the trade as an "association copy," but any kind of inscription creates an association that can reveal something important about the lives of those who made it. One of the most familiar kinds of annotated book in the West was the family Bible that was turned into a repository for lists of births, marriages, and deaths. This usage, which materializes Proust's sense of the book as a repository of past times, presumably evolved partly because Bibles were once prefaced with calendars marking out the red-letter days of each month. It was eminently practical; if a family had no other books, it would have a Bible, and the durability of the volume would help to...

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Verlag
UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812251458
ISBN 13 
9780812251456
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
344
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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