The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)

Early modern pamphlets serve as an important vehicle for examining print culture, especially the historical entanglement between print technology and a developing capitalism. Attention to the circumstances of pamphlet production and to the controversies surrounding their circulation reveals that pamphlets became a focus for anxieties about print culture in general. Alexandra Halasz combines close readings of pamphlets by Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Gabriel Harvey, Thomas Deloney, and John Taylor, among others, with a discussion of the history and deployment of print technology and its specifically English organization as a monopoly. Taking account of the theoretical and historical issues surrounding textual property, authorship, and publicity, The marketplace ofprint is both a work of historical recovery and a reflection on the ongoing problems of the relationship between the marketplace and the public sphere.

Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture General editor STEPHEN ORGEL Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Humanities, Stanford University Editorial board Anne Barton, University of Cambridge Jonathan Dollimore, University of Sussex Marjorie Garber, Harvard University Jonathan Goldberg, Duke University Nancy Vickers, University of Southern California Since the 1970s there has been a broad and vital reinterpretation of the nature of literary texts, a move away from formalism to a sense of literature as an aspect of social, economic, political and cultural history. While the earliest New Historicist work was criticized for a narrow and anecdotal view of history, it also served as an important stimulus for post-structuralist, feminist, Marxist and psychoanalytical work, which in turn has increasingly informed and redirected it. Recent writing on the nature of representation, the historical construction of gender and the concept of identity itself, on theatre as a political and economic phenomenon and on the ideologies of art generally, reveals the breadth of the field. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture is designed to offer historically oriented studies of Renaissance literature and theatre which make use of the insights afforded by theoretical perspectives. The view of history envisioned is above all a view of our own history, a reading of the Renaissance for and from our own time. Recent titles include Seizures of the will in early modern English drama FRANK WHIGHAM, University of Texas at Austin The emergence of the English author: scripting the life of the poet in early modern England KEVIN PASK, Concordia University The poetics of English nationhood, 1590-1612 CLAIRE McEACHERN, University of California, Los Angeles Textual intercourse: collaboration, authorship, and sexualities in Renaissance drama JEFFREY MASTEN, Harvard University The project of prose in early modern Europe and the New World edited by ELIZABETH FOWLER, Yale University, and ROLAND GREENE, University of Oregon A complete list of books in the series is given at the end of the volume.

Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 17

The marketplace of print Pamphlets and the public sphere in early modern England

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The marketplace of print Pamphlets and the public sphere in early modern England Alexandra Halasz Dartmouth College

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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521582094 © Alexandra Halasz 1997 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1997 This digitally printed first paperback version 2006 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN-13 978-0-521-58209-4 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-58209-1 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-03470-8 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-03470-1 paperback

In memonam Anna Woltjer Halasz

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

page xi 1

1 Print matters

14

2 Figuring the marketplace of print

46

3 The patrimony of learning

82

4 Artisanal dispossession

114

5 The public sphere and the marketplace

162

Afterword

204

Notes

207

Bibliography

225

Index

237

IX

Acknowledgments

Versions of material in this book were presented at meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America and the Modern Language Association, and at the Conference on the New Economic Criticism. I thank James Siemon, Joan Pong Linton, Margo Hendricks, and Arthur Marotti for providing stimulating disciplinary forums, and the organizers of the Conference on the New Economic Criticism, Donald McCloskey, Mark Osteen, and Martha Woodmansee, for the richness of an interdisciplinary gathering. At an early stage of my research Peter Blayney facilitated my immersion in the technical knowledge and lore of the print trade. Over the years friends and colleagues have given generously of their time, criticism, and encouragement. I am variously and gratefully indebted to Lynda Boose, Jonathan Crewe, Juliet Fleming, Neal Halasz, David Kastan, Thomas Luxon, Matthew Rowlinson, Peter Stallybrass, and Abby Zanger. Elizabeth Hanson's companionship, intellectual and otherwise, and her editorial acuity are writ into the lines of this book. To my husband, Paul Reed, and our daughter, Lianna Woltjer Reed, profound thanks for their patience and their insistence that I come out and play.

XI

Introduction

Thomas Bodley famously wanted to exclude pamphlets from the library he founded at Oxford in 1603, claiming that they were "not worth the custody in suche a Librarie."1 The librarian must have occasionally disagreed, for over the years Bodley becomes increasingly admonitory: "the benefit therof will nothing neere contervaile, the harme that the scandal will bring unto the Librarie, when it shalbe given out, that we stuffe it full of baggage bookes"(222). "Baggage" means moveable or portable property. From the sixteenth century to the eighteenth, it is also a term of abuse, meaning "trashy" or "valueless"; a gendered abusive use referring to women who are promiscuous in speech or behavior continues into the nineteenth century. "Baggage books" are literally portable; they have been published in small formats (such as quarto or octavo) that allow for ease of transportation, of circulation. Bodley will not have them in the library both because they circulate too widely and because they do not require the learned man's critical and custodial attention in order to circulate. But the scandal that the pamphlets portend to Bodley - that, included in the library, the pamphlets will undermine the authority of the Library - is not dissipated by their exclusion. Rather, the gesture of exclusion makes a problem of pamphlets' claim to discursive authority explicit even as it attempts to assign them to another, amorphous place. It is a gesture whose implications may become clearer if we substitute for "baggage" the term "mass market." I do not make a four-century historical leap lightly. Whether the distinguishing term is "baggage," "pamphlet," or "mass market," the boundary between discourses that count and those that do not has repeatedly been drawn in relation to the marketplace-situatedness of discourse. Any number of texts can cross the boundary - in either direction - without affecting the regulating function of the boundary itself. Though a hierarchical valuation of discourses may be a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon, the problem I examine in this book is historically specific. It arises, I will argue, in relation to the deployment

2

The marketplace of print

of print technology in Western Europe, for print enabled the increasingly widespread production of discourse as a commodity and in so doing disrupted existing patterns of production, circulation, and valorization. We now inhabit a world in which the mediation of print and even more recent technologies goes without saying and yet gives rise to variously formulated anxieties that a once-stable mediation of public discourse has become compromised by what might loosely be called marketplace interests. This book thus has a double agenda. It is a case study of early modern circumstances of pamphlet production on which is predicated a larger argument about the nature of the public sphere. The double agenda can be formulated as a single proposition. Close attention to the discourses in and around pamphlet production at the turn of the sixteenth century reveals a phobic conception of widely circulated discourses at the emergence of a public sphere that affords an instructive parallel to the twentieth-century lament for its decline. Other, less intensely invested late sixteenth-century comments provide a more useful brief index to the problem this book addresses. Writing to Dudley Carlton at his diplomatic post in Europe in 1598, for example, John Chamberlain, the indefatigable news gatherer and letter writer of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, sends along a book and some pamphlets, saying: "You shall receve by this bearer your Thesaurus Geographicus . . . I send you likewise such pedlarie pamflets and threehalfpeny ware as we are served with; make the best use you can of them, and use your owne censure, but if I be not deceved some of the satires are passable."2 The pamphlets are offered in the same spirit as the news of city and court that forms the bulk of Chamberlain's letters to Carlton - they are of current interest and in public circulation. "Pedlarie pamphlets" and "threehalfpeny ware" name discourse as a commodity: "pedlarie" describes a mode of circulation and "threehalfpeny" a price.3 By these terms Chamberlain classifies the pamphlets and separates them from the book he sent "likewise," Ortelius's Thesaurus Geographicus. However commonplace for its time, Chamberlain's distinction is worth pausing over, for Ortelius's book is also a commodity. The effect of distinguishing the pamphlets as commodities is to denegate the commodity status of the book, or to render it incidental to the book's reputation and use as a work of systematic learning, sanctioned by the university and several generations of learned men. In contrast, "pedlarie pamphlets" have no such sanction. But the pamphlets also complicate Chamberlain's distinction, raising issues of authority for him, which he defers to Carlton: "use your owne censure." Though authorial names and/or titles undoubtedly were attached to the pamphlets that Chamberlain sent to Carlton, or that Bodley excluded from his library,

Introduction

3

they are not recognized. By denying pamphlets names and authors, learned men like Chamberlain and Bodley manage their anxiety that discourse bearing no sanction other than its appearance in the marketplace might actually claim some authority. The problem of pamphlets' place arises in part from the fact that books and pamphlets are implicated in a world that is also scribal and oral, a circumstance Chamberlain's letter nicely illustrates. Between its occasion, its subject matter, and its enclosures, it sets out an array of discursive possibilities: the letter itself, the gossip of the men in "Paul's walk" that Chamberlain reports to Carlton, and two kinds of printed text, one ephemeral and the other authoritative. The pamphlets' ephemerality associates them with the orality of gossip, their printedness with the authoritative texts that they materially resemble. Yet it is their printedness that allows them to circulate like gossip. Thus equivocally positioned, pamphlets are an anomaly. They present an enigma not only of discursive register and authority but of kind, for neither "pamphlet" nor "book" is a generic category, but rather, an indicator of object form that slides easily into commodity designation (and dismissal). The categorization of pamphlets by their commodity status, rather than by their authors, titles, or discursive kind draws attention to them as only pamphlets and thus distinguishes them from other discourses produced in small formats and sold in the marketplace. Yet no clear and stable lines can be drawn to distinguish between a pamphlet, a small book, and a book. Indeed pamphlets were sometimes collected and bound into books by booksellers as well as readers. Nor can "pamphlet" be considered as a clear unit of trade production; the "job" is measured in sheets (of paper), underscoring the continuum on which pamphlet and book exist. If at one end of the continuum "pamphlet" slides into bookness, at the other it is potentially interchangeable with the broadside ballad. Hence "pamphlet" functions as a floating signifier in the heterogeneity that characterizes the opportunities made available by print. Printed sermons, say, or a quarto edition of a court masque, are less likely to be called pamphlets than a collection of tales or jests, or the report of a battle or criminal execution. Yet any of those discourses would be a pamphlet or small book, capable of relatively quick production and wide circulation. My specific focus in this book is on pamphlets, writers, and the book trade in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. By marketplace of print I mean the practices involved in the making of books - writing and printing, and the processes involved in producing and circulating books - the capitalization of the book trade and its distribution procedures. "Discursive field," in contrast, describes the

4

The marketplace of print

discourses that printed texts entered, addressed, or appropriated whether oral, scribal, or printed. The development of the marketplace coincides with the rise of the vernacular as a religious and literate language and an increase in literacy not to be equaled until the eighteenth century, at least in England. If the combined effect of these changes, over time, is a realignment of the positions, coordinates, and vectors that shape the discursivefield,the initial effect is one of sustained instability. Print permanently altered the discursive field not by bringing books to the marketplace (medieval scriptoria did that) but by enabling the marketplace to develop as a means of producing, disseminating, and mediating discourse independent of the sites and practices associated with and sanctioned by university, Crown, and Church. I use these terms metonymically; the point is not that learned, aristocratic, or religious discourses were monolithic or stable, but that the positions of (high) literacy, privilege, and authority they implied were challenged by the proliferation and variety of discourses in the marketplace of print. That challenge was an inchoate one, seen alternately as a potential benefit and as a threat. In either case, print seemed to promise a reshaping of the discursive field. Two premises underlie my discussion. First, because pamphlets are - in the abstract - ubiquitous and polymorphous, they imply a generalized access to the circulation of printed discourse and thus open up the social space that will come to be conceptualized as a public sphere. At the same time, they imbue that nascent sphere with ambivalence about the loss of social distinction that generalized access suggests. In other words, the perception of pamphlets as a marginal format notwithstanding, they become an important focus for anxieties and hopes about print culture in general. My second premise is that the problem I am examining is at once structural and historical. The situation all writers faced was one that initiated a structural change in the conditions of discursive production, for print technology developed in a capitalist mode. Thus the structural problem is what the economic capital organizing the production and dissemination of discourse as a commodity means for (the work of) writing. But the marketplace of print only gradually effected qualitative change in the conditions of public discourse. For some writers, the structural issues of the marketplace did not immediately affect their production, while for others, especially for pamphlet writers whose discourses were at least partly identified with their commodity status, those issues precipitated a struggle to find ways of figuring and describing the altered conditions of their discursive production in historically specific circumstances. Obviously I make no claim to survey the range of pamphlets produced, even within a limited period. But neither are my choices of pamphlets

Introduction

5

accidental or random. Chapter 1 sets out the matrix of pamphlet production and circulation at the end of the sixteenth century in England and a theoretical framework for its understanding. It focuses first on general historical issues in the emergence of print and then on the structural conflicts within the English book trade that came to a crisis in the mid15808, resulting in a special commission of investigation that brought the social relations in the economy of print - questions of property, labor, control, and ownership - into an extended moment of sharp relief. Chapter 2 focuses on a single pamphlet, Kind-Hartes Dreame, written by Henry Chettle, a member of the Stationers' Company; chapter 3 on an exchange of pamphlets between two university-educated men, Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey; and chapter 4 on ballad books and historical fictions written by a silk weaver, Thomas Deloney. Each of the writers was known to the others and all of the pamphlets of the central chapters were written between 1592 and 1600. The near contemporaneity of the pamphlets and the acquaintance of each writer with the work or reputation of the others assumes a strategic importance because questions of reception and dissemination are so difficult to address in the absence of evidence external to the texts under examination. The point of the cluster or series is not so much that these pamphlets and writers read each other in this or that specific way as that they exemplify a process of witting and unwitting collaboration that produces the tropes and terms of a marketplace-situated discourse and an emergent public sphere. Chapter 5 takes up the question of the relationship between the marketplace of print and the public sphere by reading Jiirgen Habermas's normative model of the public sphere against the accumulated evidence of the central chapters and the ways in which early seventeenth-century pamphlets represent the scene of consumption and the relations between production and consumption. All of the pamphlets I discuss are known, some even well-known, in histories of English literature. Yet in focusing on pamphlets - certain pamphlets - I have subjected my discussion to an artificial boundary. In chapter 1 I make an extended case for "pamphlet" as an organizing category of analysis in terms of my argument. Here I want to address briefly the critical concerns that underwrite the boundary I have drawn. From a literary-historical perspective, the pamphlets I discuss are categorized as minor literature and assigned to one of several arenas of interest. Gathered and edited in the nineteenth century by gentlemanscholars involved in reconstructing the circumstances of Shakespeare's accomplishment, they were and are considered as "sources" for the work of major figures. That republication also made them available as "popular" literature and exemplars of "hack" or "professional" writing.

6

The marketplace of print

As such, they have been important to the disciplinary investigations of social historians, where they serve as data for discussions of lowerclass life, and influential in understanding eighteenth-century (and later) constructions of an opposition between "popular" and "elite." Alternatively, the association of pamphlets with "professional" writers and with prose, especially prosefiction,inscribes them into a telos of the novel. As I reviewed this work in the very early stages of my research, I was struck by how the significance of the material was repeatedly established by reference to some other, more obviously compelling topic or purpose, by a kind of post hoc legitimation. Methodologically speaking, there is nothing wrong with such a procedure and it continues to produce distinguished and fruitful scholarship such as Michael McKeon's The Origins of the English Novel or, more recently, Sharon Achinstein's study of Milton's fellowship with mid-seventeenth-century pamphleteers, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader. But positioning pamphlet material in relation to now canonical genres or figures, or treating it as primary data, obscures questions about the literary and social meaning of pamphlets in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Writing about the process of canon formation, John Guillory argues that "the real social process is the reproduction not of values [said to be embodied in canonical works] but of social relations."4 The social relations of pamphlets are unquestionably implicated in issues of canon formation, and it could be argued that the intersections I trace between the interests of writers, the book trade, and readers expose the process of a canon-in-formation, but I am not interested in making that argument. At the same time, however, in focusing on the ways in which pamphlet writers responded to the complex circumstances in and about which they wrote - their modes of self-description and allegorization, their attempts to figure production, the marketplace, and audience(s), I am engaged in work of historical recovery that clearly implicates our understanding of major figures and issues in Renaissance literature. The writers I discuss in the third chapter, Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey, for example, were involved in networks of patronage and coterie circulation. Conversely, writers of contemporary and subsequent high distinction, such as Harvey's friend Edmund Spenser or Nashe's sometime collaborator Ben Jonson, were keenly attuned to issues of the marketplace of print. Indeed, one of the more memorable phobic figurations of wide circulation is the image of Error's vomit in the opening canto of The Faerie Queene, "full of bookes and papers" and "deformed monsters . . . blacke as inke" (1.1.20, 22). Recent work such as Richard Halpern's Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, Evelyn Tribble's Margins and Marginality, Wendy Wall's The Imprint of Gender, and Arthur Marroti's

Introduction

7

Manuscript, Print and the Renaissance Lyric - to name only a few of those books addressing the intersections between discursive registers and modes, literary form, and the practices of print - indicate the range of what Halpern calls "the historical renarration at work in Renaissance studies" (1). More particularly, any simple notion of a "stigma of print" has ceded to a highly nuanced understanding of various opportunities and strategies available in the two or more centuries during which manuscript and print coexisted as equally significant modes in public discourse.5 The artificiality of the boundary I have drawn around pamphlets is perhaps especially conspicuous from the perspective of new historicist interest in cultural formations, in literature as part of an ensemble of cultural practices. While this book is both a product of and a contribution to new historicist work on the culture of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, I have resisted pursuing the resonances of my argument in terms of related period-defined issues. Early new historicists were criticized for claiming to open Renaissance studies toward the history of cultural formations while still producing readings that continued to operate in the interest of demonstrating the achievement of canonical figures and dominant discourses. More recent work that focuses on noncanonical, nonelite figures and discourses or thematic issues such as the construction of class, race, gender, and sexuality still produces what Karen Newman recently called "canonical effects," in part because the Renaissance itself is a quasi-canonical category.6 To reinscribe pamphlet production into one or another of the familiar narratives about the literary culture of the period or the history of English literature, however much those narratives might be revised in the process, would be willy-nilly to emphasize either the period or the work of its major figures. Though such a reinscription would be both valid and important, it would once again mask pamphlets' most interesting features, the ways in which they trouble categories within the discursive field and the distinctions between economic and cultural forms of value, in short, their dissolving effect on systems of classification or opposition. Social relations, as Guillory goes on to argue, are not opposed to the reproduction of value but the means by which notions of value are produced and adjudged.7 Precisely because pamphlets are, on the one hand, caught up in questions about their value and authority, and on the other, neither susceptible as a group to canonical revaluation nor restricted as a commodity form to the early modern period, they keep open multiple avenues of access to the social relations in which they are implicated. And I have followed multiple avenues of investigation in

8

The marketplace of print

my research. My own intellectual commitments put me closer to the British variant of new historicism, cultural materialism, and its avowed sympathy with marxist discourses. My focus on issues of production and consumption has been refined by the work of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel de Certeau, whose tacit (and sometimes repudiated) engagement with the inadequacy of the marxist formulations of ideology and the base-superstructure model made available notions of the discursivefield,cultural and symbolic forms of capital, and the practices of institutional and everyday life. I am also indebted to the work of historians examining questions of literacy, technology, economic development, and "popular culture;" to legal historians and their accounts of property, copyright, privacy, and the public domain; and, finally, to a productive nonalignment between two twentiethcentury bibliographic traditions, the Anglo-American concern with establishing a definitive authorial text and the continental (predominantly French) concern with "the history of the book," in which the complex interactions between writing, printing, publishing, and reading practices emerge.8 Of the pamphlets I discuss, only Deloney's pamphlets had an indisputably wide circulation; they were reprinted regularly for some 200 years.9 Indeed, it might be argued that examining the implications of wide circulation would be better served by an investigation of the print production of sermons and other religous texts, or of schoolbooks, which account for such a large portion of early modern printed texts. Let me say here, first, that pamphlet production includes sermons and assumes literacy, and second, that I am not making an empirical argument but rather one that traces the emergence of imaginary constructs - authors, public(s), an abstract marketplace, a public sphere - out of a material process, the commodification of discourse. Nonetheless a certain empiricist desire accompanies the project. Where and how were pamphlets sold? Who bought them? Who read them? Where and how were they read? How did someone like Deloney, the silk weaver, or John Taylor, a waterman on the Thames, come to practice writing as a vocation? Where evidence exists, I have addressed these questions in the general, specific, or speculative terms the evidence permits. But the available evidence weighs heavily on the side of production; questions of reading and dissemination are far more elusive both in terms of the available evidence and my argumentative strategy of examining exemplary pamphlets. Because neither the contextual framing afforded by the first chapter nor the reading of specific instances of pamphlet production in the central chapters addresses the general questions of who read and what the actual post-production trajectories of pamphlets were or

Introduction

9

might have been, I want to conclude these introductory remarks with a brief discussion of the existing evidence of reading, distribution, and dissemination. The surviving external evidence of pamphlet readership consists largely of wills, probate inventories, and library catalogs. The form of that evidence emphasizes, indeed, distorts, the privacy of pamphlet reading, for pamphlets, if mentioned, are not individuated. In the 200 inventories of books in Cambridge University estates published by Elizabeth Leedham-Green, for example, 145 of the inventories include one or more entries of "additional bookes unnamed," and such entries often specify that the unnamed books are small-format publications. In some inventories the number of quarto, octavo or duodecimo books unnamed equals or exceeds the named titles. As Leedham-Green notes, "we may suppose that such entries as 'item all his other books' conceal, among other things, a quantity of current vernacular literature not deemed worth the binding" (xiii). Robert Burton's library offers a more specifically telling example of pamphlet presence at sites of institutional high literacy. The catalog reveals a fair number of pamphlets, including Kind-Hartes Dreame and pamphlets by Nashe, as one might expect, along with others by Deloney, Thomas Dekker, Samuel Rowlands, and John Taylor (all of whom I discuss) among others. On the one hand, none of these writers or texts by them is mentioned in Burton's own public discourse. On the other, when the library was bequeathed to the Bodleian in 1640,313 quartos and 104 octavos from the English books in Burton's collection began tofillthe lacunae created by Thomas Bodley's earlier refusal to allow pamphlets into the Bodleian.10 Similarly, as I discuss in chapter 3, Gabriel Harvey's ongoing reading of and desire to write pamphlets is attested not so much by his published writing as by its acknowledgment in his unpublished marginalia. And the pamphlets mentioned in the marginalia do not appear in the twentieth-century reconstruction of his library, so he evidently read them but may not have owned them, or kept them, or signed them, or written in their margins. What might be called the university archive suggests a fairly widespread reading of pamphlets together with an ambivalent perception of their value. When the Bodleian librarian chose from Burton's books, he recognized the importance of pamphlet material, but when he made an accession list, he intermittently failed to note individual titles among pamphlets bound or "coupled" together into books. The Cambridge stationers or officials who did the inventories Leedham-Green published account for pamphlets only in terms of their (minimal) economic value. Away from the universities, where books were obviously valued and pamphlets ambivalently so, the evidence becomes sparser but remains

10

The marketplace of print

revealing. An essay that reviews the wills of 67 English bishops who held office between 1600 and 1640, for example, finds only two-thirds of the wills mentioning books at all.11 Of those that do and make provisions for their dispersal, 7 explicitly separate "English Books" as a testamentary gift to wives or other female relatives. A library originally belonging to a mid-seventeenth-century Midlands gentry woman, Frances Wolfreston, survived relatively intact until the nineteenth century and consisted primarily of small-format publications.12 The catalog of the sale offered some 960 titles, of which only 5 were folios. (Only half of the material offered at the sale was printed before Wolfreston's death and thus was presumably in her collection.) The collection included a significant number of pamphlet titles printed before she was born that she either inherited, received as a gift, or purchased secondhand as well as "chapbooks" of the mid- and late seventeenth century. Plays, jestbooks, poems, sermons, conduct books, story collections, and topical pamphlets evidently occupied her over the years. While the Wolfreston collection presents an apparent wealth of evidence, for she, like Harvey, often signed her books and otherwise wrote in them, no systematic reconstruction of the collection has yet been undertaken. Whatever the results such an effort might yield or the methodological problems that would beset it, it is worth underscoring the multiple contingencies implicated in the survival of those books offered for sale as a collection and partially individuated by titles in 1856. In her will Wolfreston identifies the collection in general terms: "all my physicke bookes and all my godly bookes and all the rest" (200). The evidence of the bishops' and Wolfreston's wills can be multiplied, but that multiplication would conform to the pattern of the Cambridge inventories - titles, and especially pamphlet titles, are not specified. To the predictable circulation of pamphlets among university men, then, we can add both vague and specific evidence of a female readership. The predilection among university men not to acknowledge pamphlet reading as a serious activity might be correlated with the evidence of female readership: reading fit for women's leisure hours would demean male intellectual pursuits. That both men and women might have read and owned a similar range of pamphlets does not mitigate the effect or importance of such cultural posturing. If the evidence of pamphlet reading among both male and female members of the gentry, professional, upper merchant and aristocratic classes affirms Peter Burke's point that early modern culture had not yet experienced the withdrawal of the upper classes from a common culture, both the tacit disavowal and the projective gendering of pamphlet readership suggest the imminence

Introduction

11

of the split that would emerge and the complex interplay between class and gender in its construction.13 While it is possible - and to be hoped - that an image of the reading matter and, to a lesser extent, the reading practices of the upper classes in the late sixteenth and early seventeeth centuries might be constructed, the status of pamphlet material, and especially of secular pamphlets, would remain its most ill-defined and speculative element.14 More important, the reading matter and practices of artisans, yeomen, and members of the lower classes remains both more closely tied to the dissemination of small-format publications and more difficult to trace because fewer wills survive. The "explosion" of printed pamphlet material in the Civil War period, exemplified by the 20,000 items collected by the Stationer George Thomason (known as the Thomason Tracts), implies a wide class- and gender-varied readership, but it does not answer the question of how that potential readership came to be or what its other patterns of variation - geographical, political, religious - might have been.15 Tessa Watt's study, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640, suggestively describes the coexistence of traditional, evangelical, conservative, and radical ways of thinking as well as the interaction between aural, visual, and literate modes of apprehension in the audiences implied by inexpensive and presumably widely circulated printed material before the Civil War. Margaret Spufford's earlier work, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England, reconstructs the potential readership of the chapbooks collected by Samuel Pepys at the end of the seventeeth century from the evidence of literacy practices, claims made in the books themselves, publishers' inventories and lists, and what few readers' accounts exist. As Spufford notes, the two least visible figures in any such investigation are the reader and the person - chapman or local retailer - from whom the reader acquires the book. Nonetheless, readership can be indirectly established from evidence of distribution, but here again late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century evidence is sparse. We know that booksellers or their agents traveled to regional and town fairs, that London booksellers shipped books to individuals, that residents or travelers to London brought or sent books to acquaintances in the provinces, that Drapers, Mercers and Grocers stocked books, especially outside of London, that the London Stationers trained an increasing number of apprentices who, whether or not they finished their terms of apprenticeship, eventually set up bookselling or bookbinding shops in provincial towns, and that peddlers included small books among the merchandise they offered on their circuits. But we know these things in a random way, by the survival of a letter or

12

The marketplace of print

inventory or a comment in passing. Here again, the regional, class, and other variables remain to be investigated in any systematic fashion.16 Other evidence of lower-class reading and its practices comes in tantalizing bits. In a deposition taken after the Duke of Buckingham's assassination, the wife of a Stationer admits to having lent the assassin some books.17 Are her involvement in the book trade and her lending of books to Fenton coincidental or did bookshops lend as well as sell books in the early seventeenth century?18 In a survey of book ownership in three Kentish towns between 1560 and 1640, Peter Clark cites evidence from lawsuits - the wife of a yeoman is said by her maidservant to read before going to bed in one lawsuit, and in another, a husband assaults his wife and tears apart her books.19 Is reading an alibi? A provocation? Or incidental to other, more pressing matters? The provisions for poor relief in Norwich in 1571 specify that those children and "maids" remanded to the care and supervision of "select women" under the provisions of the statute were to be taught to "learne letters."20 Were the provisions enforced? What about the men? How many other towns afforded a basic literacy at public expense? If evidence of reading, or of apparent hostility to female reading, or of rudimentary literacy suggests contexts in which widespread pamphlet reading can be imagined, it does not afford "positive" evidence of that reading or its impact. Conversely, as in the case of pamphlet ownership, the absence of such evidence cannot be taken negatively, as implying an absence of readers. The inadequacy of external evidence is not simply a problem of historical recovery. It is built into the empiricist premise. My point, however, is not to criticize positivist assumptions but rather to suggest that a frustration of the desire to know who read pamphlets, where and how, is endemic to the circumstances of their production and dissemination at the end of the sixteenth century. In later centuries, it might be argued, greater familiarity with and acceptance of a market economy and the development of its infrastructure means that readership and reading practices can more easily be predicted, constructed, and reconstructed. Even so, the recurrence in various guises over the centuries of a monstrous or phobic conception of the audience of widely circulated discourses, of a mob or mass culture of undifferentiated and unthinking readers, reveals the pressure of not knowing, of not being able to control or predict the dissemination of discourses. In the prefatory material of late sixteenth-century pamphlets, what stands out are not so much invocations of a specific audience - whether a patron or readers of a certain status - or of an simple abstract "reader" as the efforts to imagine unknown and unknowable readers: "To al yoong Gentlemen, marchants, citizens, apprentices, yeomen, and plaine countrey farmers;" "To . . . the

Introduction

13 21

most honourably renowned No-body;" "To the world." The opacity of pamphlet readership results not from an absence of evidence or a failure of method but from the very existence of pamphlets in the marketplace and the wandering and multiple trajectories of their discourses subsequent to purchase.

Print matters

"To ask 'What is a pamphlet?' is rather like asking 'What is a dog?'," writes George Orwell in an essay introducing a two-volume collection of British pamphlets written between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. "We all know a dog when we see one, or at least we think we do, but it is not easy to give a clear verbal definition, nor even to distinguish at sight between a dog and some kindred creature such as a wolf or a jackal." 1 The genus Orwell selects - canis - is not without significance, for he wants to privilege the pamphlet as a special polemical literary form, as writing with a bite. In setting out species alternatives, however, he raises rather than answers questions about pamphlets' status. Is the pamphlet, like the dog, a domesticated creature, capable of performing directed tasks, or is it, like the wolf, fierce, wild, and not susceptible to control? Or, is it a jackal, a servile carrion feeder moving in on others' leftovers? Seeking to define "the true pamphlet" so that its prestige can be restored in the tradition of Milton, Swift, Defoe, and Paine, no sooner has Orwell begun than his metaphor reveals a problem of breeding: born of a bitch, the pamphlet always runs the risk of being seen as a bastard, or of being a crossbreed. Orwell's effort to assign pamphlets specific discursive qualities undoes itself, for "pamphlet" does not describe content or even genre. It names a format, a small book that, from a commercial perspective, can be produced quickly, transported easily, sold inexpensively, and yet can contain a variety of discourses. The press that actually breeds pamphlets is a shadowy figure in Orwell's essay, taken for granted as the machine of production. I will be arguing here that pamphlets have an intrinsic relation to the economy of print because they soflexiblyand efficiently utilize the productive capacity of the press. The particular status of pamphlets, however, is not simply an economic matter. Precisely because the pamphlet can be defined only in minimal terms, it seems to offer the writer an unrestricted discursive opportunity - save for the length of the text, a qualification easily circumvented by frequent or serial publication. But the promise and potential of pamphlet discourse is also 14

Print matters

15

its potentially nightmarish quality, for the forum without restrictions is one that cannot be controlled, one whose quality and quantity cannot be monitored. Orwell's desideratum - that the pamphlet be a site of principled discourse - is always potentially frustrated by the fact that the marketplace of print generates a heterogeneity that cannot be fully recuperated by a notion of the public sphere, to which Orwell implicitly appeals, and its classic liberal implications of free discursive exchange. In suggesting a close link between pamphlets and the press I am not working backward from the great ages of pamphleteering, with their specific focus on freedom of the press. Rather, I take my cue from the earlier history of print culture and from the material implications of mechanical, as opposed to scribal, reproduction. The very nature of the press, its capacity for multiple reproduction, invites the idea of continuous production and hence creates a demand for new material to print. More specifically, the economic organization of the print shop, from the beginning, optimally involved the production of two kinds of texts, and/or two rhythms of production. First and most obvious are those texts we generally associate with the advent of print, like the various Renaissance Bibles and commentaries, or the editions of the classic authors - texts whose enduring value had already been established within a scribal culture and which were thus assured a market. Printing these texts, however, tended to be a rather involved undertaking from a variety of technical points of view, tying up the resources invested in their production (primarily the cost of paper and wages).2 An economically viable operation also depended on the production of texts that could be produced and sold quickly, thereby ensuring a relatively continuous use of equipment and labor and a "cash flow."3 In the printing house founded by Gutenberg and later run by Peter Schoeffer, for example, at least half of the items printed were single-sheet productions.4 In other words, pamphlets and other short, ephemeral texts occupied a particular and necessary position in the economy of print. Thus the early modern marketplace of print makes possible two equally important but quite different kinds of claims: that printed texts offer the possibility of widened access to discourses that have enduring cultural value, and that printed texts offer topical information or ephemeral pleasures on a regularly renewed basis. If, for the sake of simplicity, we take Peter Schoeffer's list as an exemplary one, it is clear that these two claims are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary: on the one hand, liturgical texts and books of canon law; on the other, papal bulls and pamphlets about the Turkish threat to Western Christendom. The range of the list does not differ significantly from that

16

The marketplace of print

of the textual material that circulated by means of scribal production. The initial difference of print would seem to be the simple one of quantity. But such a formulation does not take into account the economic structure of the print shop as opposed to the scriptorium, that is, the capitalization necessary not only for press and type but also to secure in advance a supply of paper for an entire edition - for 250 or 500 copies rather than, say, 10 - and the marketing problems that result from a stock of 500.5 In other words, though a market of/for texts preexists print, the technology of print was developed in ways that precipitated a profound transformation of that market. As the increase in quantity satisfies and enlarges the existing market for printed texts, producers must then seek new markets, either by further expansion or by greater diversification. It is in the context of these pressures of production and dissemination that the pamphlet becomes a significant format - not simply a small book but one that because of the ease in its production, its generic and substantive flexibility, and its transportability makes an excellent vehicle for opening up new market niches. I have used Peter Schoeffer's shop as an example because it demonstrates how the economic issues underlying pamphlets' status are present from the initial deployment of print technology. As print became established, a third, intermediate range of production can easily be identified, that of regularly (re)printed texts like primers and other school texts, prayer books, and almanacs - steady business. Obviously the schema I have just drawn is a simplified one; the model it offers applies to the trade, rather than to every print shop, and it is complicated by the influence of different forms of protection and privilege the various European states offered to printers. While the protections afforded to printing attempted to secure the economic well-being and benefit of the trade within regional or national boundaries and allowed political oversight of the heterodox potential of print production, it is the steady business of the trade - the texts of and for literacy and orthodox religious practices - that suggests the fullest extent of the convergence between economic and sociopolitical investments in print technology. The polymorphousness of pamphlets foregrounds the complexities of the socioeconomic formations of print. On the one hand, from the perspective of the trade, pamphlets can be considered a necessary complement to the production of more substantial books. On the other, in relation to the economic and sociopolitical investments in the trade's "steady business," pamphlets occupy an ambiguous position, for the format not only allows for ease of production and circulation, but it is especially suited for discourses that require lesser investments on the part of readers, whether those investments are construed in terms of cost, time available for

Print matters

17

reading, or reading competence. Thus pamphlets might be considered a second point of convergence between economic and sociopolitical investments in print. (Some pamphlets become, in effect, steady business, reprinted unchanged for generations like grammars and prayer books.) Yet any one of a number of exemplary instances of pamphlet dissemination - Luther's writings come quickly to mind - might be adduced to foreground the possible divergence of interests within the economic and sociopolitical alignments that "protected" the development of print. "The great function of the pamphlet," Orwell writes in his essay, "is to act as a sort of foot-note or marginal comment on official history" (15). When Orwell commented, in 1948, the "official history" of print had not so much been written as assumed, taken for granted. It is neither surprising nor accidental that the project of collecting and understanding that history in nontechnical terms (that is, outside of textual bibliography and histories of technological innovation) should have coincided with the emergence of other potentially "revolutionary" technologies of dissemination.6 Though this book does not directly address the situation of the electronic media, in its attention to an analogous moment in which technological change challenged existing structures and practices and provoked their reshaping, it offers a lens on the future as well as the past. If, as Peter Jaszi has suggested, "the conditions of the Internet environment today resemble those which prevailed at other moments of polymorphous collaboration, unrestrained plagiarism, and extraordinary productivity - such as the Elizabethan stage or Hollywood before 1915,"7 then the issues at stake are those that print technology shaped for the modern era - How does the deployment of a technology structure identity and agency, relations of property, place, and knowledge? Who gets to "speak?" At whose cost and benefit? Under what conditions? With what effects? As Marx noted, a spinning jenny is simply a machine that spins cotton into thread; it becomes a capitalist machine only under certain conditions. So too the press. Though a certain capitalization is required for the deployment of the technology, successful deployment does not stipulate a specifically capitalist organization. One could imagine, for example, the development of an economic organization in which the capital costs are shared among producers and a "nonprofit" structure developed in which prices are set at a level that recovers those costs and provides a decent income for producers. In such a scenario, the productive capacity of the press would still generate a certain disseminative pressure, a potential of expanded production and circulation. And as a commodity, discourse differs from, say, cotton thread, because its manufacture

18

The marketplace of print

utilizes a more or less openly available and unlimited resource.8 And unlike the case of cotton thread, both supply and demand are extremely elastic. The production of discourse as a commodity implicates issues of access - cost, for one, literacy, for another, and, in general, the structures, practices, and extent of potential participation in public discourse. Even in a "nonprofit" scenario, print production of discourse-as-acommodity differs from other sites of commercialized discourse - the scriptorium and the stage - because of the potential amount and extent of its dissemination. I pause over a scenario that seems to have been foreclosed historically to underscore a theoretical distinction between the implications of the technology - the intensified and expanded production of discourse-as-a-commodity and the public whom that production implies - and the historical entanglement of the technology in a specifically capitalist mode. The consequentiality of that entanglement cannot be underestimated. Indeed, it has been a prolific source of historical metanarratives and sweeping formalizations, ranging from Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change to the provocative and idiosyncratic work of Marshall McLuhan to the account that will be most important for my argument, Jtirgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. But the identification between "free" speech, freedom of the press and a free-market (capitalist) economy was established long before the twentieth-century awakening to the cultural significance of print technology. In the "true" tradition of pamphleteering whose disappearance Orwell laments, print and the publicity it implied served precisely to negotiate and articulate the ideology of (proto)capitalist socioeconomic formations. The notion of a public sphere of discourse so central to that ideology is also implicated in the theoretical distinction between the implications of print technology and the historical conditions of its deployment. The sine qua non of a public sphere is the possibility of access to both "producing" and "consuming" positions in public discourse. Though neither "producing" nor "consuming" positions are limited to texts, let alone printed texts, it is the convenience of the technology that enables the publicity of a public sphere. In his discussion of the philosophy of technology, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, Albert Borgman argues that technology tends to efface the device that is the technology per se: Of all the physical properties of a device, those alone are crucial which constitute the commodity the device procures . . . those aspects or properties of a device that provide the answer to "What is the device for?" constitute its commodity and they remain relatively fixed. (42^43)

Print matters

19

Print, like writing (script), is a technology whose purpose or end is, broadly speaking, communication. "Every device," Borgman notes, "has functional equivalents, and equivalent devices may be physically and structurally very dissimilar from one another" (43). We might say then, that the particular convenience or commodity of print is the expanded and intensified production of texts it enabled - increased communication. We might also note that Borgman uses "commodity" in the now rare or obsolete sense of convenience, advantage, or capacity that was its dominant meaning in the sixteenth century. Borgman makes a further distinction within the device or technology between its machinery and its function, which he posits as a substantial variant of the means-ends distinction. The machinery or means is subservient to and validated by the function or end ... In the case of the technological device, however, the machinery can be changed quite radically without threat to the identity and familiarity of the device . . . [C]losely tied to the [concommitance of radical variability of means and relative stability of ends] is the concealment and unfamiliarity of the means and the simultaneous prominence and availability of the ends. The concealment of the machinery and the disburdening character of the device go hand in hand. (43-44)

In the sixteenth century (and before), the commodity of the technology was perceived in deeply ambivalent ways. On the one hand, print seemed simply to be a functional equivalent of writing, while on the other, it suggested an opening up of relatively stable and restricted patterns of production and consumption. The concealment of its machinery, it might be argued, made the (social) machinery of writing all the more conspicuous. In any case, in the two or three centuries following the appearance of the technology, its commodity is shaped in simultaneous anticipation of and resistance to a developing market economy. Thus, to anticipate my argument with Habermas, the possibility of a public sphere bears a necessary relation to both the commodity of the technology and the commodity/market economy in which that technology was employed. That is to say, first, that a modern (or early modern) public sphere has existed only and always in relation to the ambivalence of (emerging) capitalist socioeconomic formations, and, second, that the forms of anticipation and resistance that characterize the sixteenth-century response to print and its implication in the marketplace afford a means of rethinking the historical entanglement between the technology and those formations. I make these general comments, however, as a prelude to a much more specific and local analysis. On the one hand, I am arguing that pamphlets afford an ironically privileged perspective, a "footnote" view, from which to examine the emergence of print culture. On the other

20

The marketplace of print

hand, that argument depends on and arises from close readings of a limited number of pamphlets and the discourses that sought to regulate print in one country, England, within a relatively short time frame. Regional, national, and historical differences in the development of print are crucial and any generalizations must necessarily be tested and modified in relation to local circumstances. Yet insofar as local conditions are important, it is only by attending to the details of specific situations that a reliable comparative and general picture of print culture can be developed. More particularly, I would argue that the circumstances of pamphlet production in England at the end of the sixteenth century offer a compelling model for thinking about print culture precisely because of local circumstances, specifically the charter granted to the Stationers' Company of London in 1557, in which they received a national monopoly on the production of print and agreed to act as the Crown's agents in regulating both the production and the circulation of printed material. To put it as succinctly as possible, the circumstances of the Stationers' monopoly allowed the English book trade to develop the capitalist potential of print technology with exceptional relative ease. But to speak of the capitalist potential of print technology is no simple matter, for if "print" is itself a term that raises complex issues of agency, invoking "capitalism" only compounds the problem. Thus while interconnections between "print" and "capitalism" are a commonplace of Western European history, the ambiguities of their relationship are most often bracketed and agency granted to print itself, as evidenced by the title of Eisenstein's influential book, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Print, however, is not an agent, but a technology used in the manufacture of texts; it was not print that altered the discursive field, but the interests of those who knew, used, and controlled the technology. As a craft, printing was a mystery, its secrets learned by apprenticeship, transmitted from one practitioner to another orally and by example. (The first complete description of print shop practice was Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises on the whole Art of Printing [1683].9) Those who used the technology were craftsmen; who controlled it was a matter negotiated between thefinancialinvestors (who might also be craftsmen) and the state and/or church and their agents. Yet Eisenstein and others are surely right to emphasize print's effect on the production and organization of knowledges. Learned men were also implicated in the use of the technology, and not simply as agents of church or state. The attribution of agency to print itself not only effaces the complex interplay of interests involved in the deployment and impact of the technology, but tacitly or explicitly privileges those interests particularly

Print matters

21

involved with learning and knowledge. Given the association of figures like Luther and Erasmus with the early history of print, and the increased dissemination of book-knowledge that print made possible, this is hardly surprising. But it is worth pausing over the fact that the privileged link between print and learning is a claim made early on, by learned men, in ways that reveal a defense of their interests against others which the technology might serve. I take as an example here William Camden, the English historian and pedagogue, who records an account of the history of printing in some thirty lines that survive in a manuscript of notes and drafts for his Remains Concerning Britain (1605). About half of the notes record early printed books, the rest offer a loose narrative structure for a chapter on printing.10 The chapter is evidently intended to stand in "ironic juxtaposition" to an adjacent chapter on artillery: "As gunnes were invented, to destruction so shortly after was the arte of printing found to the conservation and restoringe of learning which then laye at the last gaspe" (147). The chapter on artillery was published, the chapter on printing never completed, evidently unworkable. Though he cites the early humanist adage Imprimit una dies quantu non scribitur anno [He can print in one day what it would take a year to write], it was impossible for a man of Camden's interests and experience to regard printing as an unalloyed good or exclusively a blessing for learning. (The plenitude the adage implies becomes Bodley's nightmare in his effort to maintain a boundary between worthy texts and others.) Moreover, guns and printing presses cannot remain for long in proximity and simple opposition; a few years later Francis Bacon was to link them, together with the compass, as "discoveries . . . [that] have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world."11 The deeper irony of their complex interdependence may have been apparent to Camden; at any rate, he distances himself rhetorically from the "arte of printing" as he narrates its "invention": "when he [Lawrence Hans Coster, a Dutchman] had brought them [cast letters] to some perfection he was robbed on a Christmas daye att night, of all his instrumentes by John Faustus who fled to Mentz in Germany. Where after the common consent of writers John Gutenburg is reported to first have devised the arte" (147). In identifying actors in the dispersal of print, Camden places criminality at the origin (or before it).12 The criminality associated with print at its origin might be read as a sign for the operations of the marketplace not yet understood but already functioning as an "invisible hand" in the operation of the social world. In the story Camden cites, however, the hand is not invisible; it belongs to a German named Faustus who not only steals but violates a Christian holy day.

22

The marketplace of print

For Camden (and others who told a version of the story), the taint of criminality serves to protect his interest as a learned man and antiquarian. The theft imputed to Faustus preemptively attacks the origins of print in order to defend the position of learned men and the texts they write, interpret, and conserve against the claims of those who materially produce them for dissemination. Bacon's notice of print's impact makes a similar preemptive move when he remarks that its origin is "obscure and inglorious" (118). The ambivalence of the learned man's relation to the discursive opportunities that print afforded is shared by the agents of Crown and Church. For those who materially produced printed texts, however, mechanical reproduction and assembly line organization made the opportunities of print almost endless - as long as the texts manufactured could be sold. By associating a criminalized agency with an artisanal figure and with the dispersal of the technology per se, Camden secures his particular (and representative) interests in the use of the technology. It is no accident, then, that the generalized agency he initially attributes to print - "the conservation and restoring of learning" - is identical with those interests. That there had to be a villain in the history of print and that it was most often Faustus who emerged is telling, for the real story of Johan Fust/Faustus sets out another conflict of interests in the production of printed texts. Fust was a partner in the print shop where "after the common consent of writers John Gutenburg is reported first to have devised the arte." As Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin note in The Coming of the Book, though Gutenberg's work is widely acknowledged by contemporary references, no book survives with his name in the imprint. The story of his print shop can be reconstructed, however, from the lawsuit that Fust brought to break up their agreement. It is a story about the dispossession of Gutenberg's "invention." In it can be seen two crucial elements involved in the development of the marketplace of print: the need for capital and the need for skilled labor. Gutenberg was a goldsmith who engaged in a number of practical experiments, among them the casting of type. (The consensus among historians of print is that the last development, an efficient method of casting type, was aided by the goldsmith's knowledge about casting and stamping metal. The crucial innovation was one that goldsmiths had no use for, an adjustable mold so that letters of various sizes could be cast in one font.)13 Neither Gutenberg's work nor his story is unique: Gutenberg had a wealthy financial backer, Fust, and an intelligent assistant, Peter Schoeffer, who had trained and practiced as a scribe. Indeed, Gutenberg's work would have been impossible without the capital and the skilled labor of other men. Within two years the agreement between

Print matters

23

Gutenberg and Fust broke down and the shop was developed by Fust and Schoeffer in partnership. If the story that emerges from the lawsuit suggests another kind of theft in the history of printing, the legitimation of Fust's position by the law forecloses recognition of it as theft. Rather, Fust's interest, which is that of capital, comes to control the book trade and the skilled labor of printers and writers alike. Yet contemporary understanding of the technology of print and its economic relations and implications was inhibited by two factors: no clear idea of the operation of capital was available, and the craft techniques themselves were not available to common knowledge. The criminality which figures so insistently in early accounts of print can also be read from the perspective of a guild economy. Insofar as a guild was a kind of corporate proprietorship - of knowledge, practices, and skills - the spread of techniques regarded as constitutive could only be seen as a kind of theft. Yet because the technology of print was not strictly within the purview of traditional crafts, and because it impinged on associated practices (bookbinding, papermaking, scrivening, etc.), it necessarily became the object of struggle, creating opportunities for existing guilds to expand their range and for new corporate structures, like the partnership between Fust and Gutenberg. When the technology was incorporated into a guild structure, the tensions between financial investment and skilled labor in its deployment put the ethos and practices of artisanal brotherhood under pressure. An emerging split within the guild economy between mercantile and handicraft elements was not unusual in the sixteenth century, but print technology was exceptional because its mechanical processes so dramatically reduced the (skilled) labor required.14 In England the scenario I have been sketching was intensified by the monopoly on printing exercised by the Stationers' Company. Granted a charter in 1557, in 1560 the Stationers became a liveried Company of the City of London; by this means they formally consolidated their control over printing in England.15 Both the Stationers' monopoly and the Crown's interest in regulation and surveillance were secured by granting the Stationers the right to search anywhere, anytime, for printing equipment, copy to be printed or printed text, and to seize anything not within the monopoly or protected by royal patent. The monopoly granted was one on printing per se\ the language of the charter and subsequent writing concerning the trade is couched in the vocabulary of print shop practices and materials.16 The dominant founding members of the Company conceived of themselves artisanally: they were printerpublishers. By the monopoly on printing they thought they could control

24

The marketplace of print

the trade. But even as the Company was being founded the functions of printing and publishing were separating, the material production distinguished from the financing that enabled it. A single edition of a book could easily cost more than the initial equipping of a print shop with press and type.17 "Printing" involved the having of a press and type and the labor, while "publication" involved the supply of material - text to be printed and paper - and the distribution of the finished commodity. I use "printer" to refer to the former function and "publisher", or sometimes "bookseller," to refer to the latter. But it is important to emphasize that though these functions were increasingly separated in the later sixteenth century, that separation did not necessarily correspond to a differentiation between persons.18 Some individuals continued to perform both functions regularly or intermittently. The monopoly of the Company was complicated by monopoly within the Company - the dominance of those members who held preexisting patents and privileges that covered most of the steady business of the trade. Though the Stationers who held such privileges were called "printers," more often than not they employed printers and derived their own income from their control over the conditions and materials of production and sale. As the print trade quickened, investments in publication (capital tied up in paper and stock, together with the various protections of an exclusive right to print) began to outweigh investments in printing equipment. By the end of the sixteenth century, the legal monopoly on printing was a de facto monopoly on textual property. Textual property is a peculiar form of property because it consists not in owning something, but in having control over a particular text, in controlling if and when and under what conditions that text might become a printed book. In the case of privileges and patents, that control was vested in the Crown and granted to specific parties for specific titles or classes of books. Strictly speaking, the patents and privileges granted by the Crown were not property, but exclusive rights to printing and distribution that had a specified term. While those rights could sometimes be assigned, they could not be sold and they reverted to the Crown according to the terms set in the grant. Eventually those rights became property, a matter to which I will return momentarily; more to the point, they functioned like the textual property developed by the Stationers, Copy. Copy is a legal fiction that establishes ownership of a text.19 Unlike patents and privileges, Copy does not refer to the Crown's authority except insofar as the Stationers' charter is itself a general patent. Rather, Copy is an abstract form of a text, consisting in the right to reproduce the text (or to sell it to someone else for reproduction). As such, it is a form of capital.

Print matters

25

Any free man or widow of the Company could establish ownership of Copy by submitting to the Company's procedures, which included presenting the claim to the Wardens of the Company, paying a fee and registering the claim and payment in the Company Book. The "entrance" included record of licensing approval as well and marked ownership by writing the Copy owner's name in the margin. Often further conditions were added: a particular printer might be named for the first edition and another for the second, or further permission from ecclesiastical authority might be required. It was possible and legal to print unentered texts, though theoretically not unlicensed ones, but it was illegal to print someone else's Copy without his or her consent. Entrance secured Copy as a form of property, on occasion even after an initial printing. In 1619, John Bill, the King's Printer, noted that Copy was "the greater part of their [Stationers'] Estates" (Arber, 111:39). The Stationers' development of Copy and their assiduous efforts to protect the interests of Copy owners and patentees exacerbated the divergence between financial and artisanal interests within the trade. The artisanal model of investment in printing equipment and the skills to use it continued to structure the discussion of print, but it no longer adequately described the actual conditions within the trade, for the organization of textual property made it increasingly difficult for a newly freed printer to set up on his own. Pamphlet production at the end of the sixteenth century takes place in this context defined by the quickening of the book trade and the increasing divergence between financial and artisanal interests. By the time the apprentices who began their training in 1557 became journeymen and freemen of the Company, there was very little steady work that was not privileged and it was difficult to set up as a master printer, let alone a printer-publisher. A number of printers began to print privileged Copies for which they knew there was an easy market. The conflicts over privilege, which spanned years and scores of incidents, finally came to a crisis in the 1580s and resulted first in the Crown's appointment of a special commission to investigate and resolve "the controversy in the Stationers' Company," and eventually in the Star Chamber decree of 1586, which attempted to consolidate both royal and Company authority over printing. The conflict over the work and profits to be had from the privileges and patents issued by the Crown was addressed initially by resolutions that the work was to be shared among needy and deserving printers. By the end of the century the major patents had been organized into a capitalized, shareholding entity that came to be known as the English Stock. In 1603 the Crown granted those patents to the Company in perpetuity, in effect making them

26

The marketplace of print

the Company's property. The joint stock arrangements developed by the Company not only recognized that property as a form of capital, paying an annual dividend, but also treated it as investment capital, using it to purchase real estate, for example, or shares in an "Irish plantation."20 The importance of the English Stock lies in the way it formally acknowledged and distributed the (major) capital of the book trade. While the total value of the shares was divided equally among the three ranks in the Company (Assistants, Livery, Yeomanry), the value of an assistant share was twice that of a livery share, and a livery share twice that of a yeoman share.21 Moreover, of the 350 men who became free of the Company (yeomen) between 1557 and 1582, only 45 eventually entered the livery (from which assistants were drawn). The 45 shares allocated to the assistants and livery in 1603 meant that most, if not all, members of those ranks could aspire to ownership of a share, while the 60 yeomen's shares necessarily became a matter of struggle and contest. Not only did the distribution of shares preserve intra-guild class distinctions, it also maintained, if not contributed to, tensions between financial and artisanal interests within the guild. In the report issued by the commission investigating the crisis of the 1580s, pamphlets figure both as a symptom of the disorder in the trade and as the means by which that disorder might be remedied. On the one hand, the report argues, if patents and privileges are not respected "onelie pamflettes, trifles and vaine small toies [will] be printed, and the great bokes of value and good for the Church and Realme [will] not be done at all" (127).22 On the other, the proliferation of pamphlets means that printers can find work and even accumulate textual property. All stationers, the report suggests, can potentially own Copies "which they enjoye as fully as if they had the Quenes privilege for everie of them, in so much as one of the complainants Jones hath above a hundered copies to him self" (127). The complainant Jones, Richard Jones, was a printer and bookseller who specialized in pamphlets, ballads, and small books. At least 75 per cent of his list, if not all, would be described by the sliding lexicon "pamflettes, trifles and vaine small toies." In the flurry of registration following the Star Chamber decree of 1586, Jones entered 123 ballads as a block, Copies that went on to become the basis of one of the first publishing syndicates in the seventeenth century, that of the Ballad Partners.23 In other words, pamphlets simultaneously have no value and are the basis on which an economically strong business can be built. From the perspective of the trade, pamphlets are an ideal speculative venture, for they require little initial investment and might become valuable Copies, especially given their potential to convey discourses easily accessible to a rudely literate population and thus to broaden the market

Print matters

27

for printed texts. At the very least their production would afford work for printers. (The flood of pamphlets that emerged during the breakdown of royal and Company control in the period prior to the Civil War attests as much to the readiness of printers for work as to the political agendas of their writers.) In the split perception of pamphlets evident in the Commissioners' Report can be seen a crossing of two systems of value: though pamphlets bear no cultural value or authority, they are the basis on which economic capital can be accumulated. The issues that came to the fore in the crisis of the 1580s were not definitively settled by the Star Chamber decree, nor by subsequent efforts to reassert, modify, or augment its provisions. Nonetheless, because the crisis exposed the relations within the guild as well as between guild and Crown, it permitted a heightened awareness of what was at stake, and for whom, in the book trade as the tacit arrangements and understandings became subject to scrutiny, discussion, contention, and renegotiation. The question of textual property links the discussions within the trade to the interests and concerns of those outside, for textual property is not only a trade issue. For the Crown, as I have noted, the issue is not so much one of property as of control and supervision; as long as the Company served the Crown's interests, its internal arrangements were of no concern. The coincidence between the interests of the Crown and the Company constructed by the charter, however, meant that challenge to the internal arrangements of the Company could be represented as challenge to the Crown. For writers, the development of textual property fundamentally altered the conditions of publication, for the value of their discourse came to be defined, directly or indirectly, by the property relations of the marketplace. Not only were they, as writers, structurally excluded from owning textual property, but the increasing accumulation of textual property reconfigured, compromised, indeed sometimes extinguished what might be called propriate interests in the production and circulation of discourses. By propriate interests I mean those claims of special status, control, customary right or privilege that might be understood as a kind of ownership but fall short of the standards of property because they cannot be bought and sold.24 The learned man's anxiety about the proliferation in the marketplace of discourses hitherto more or less restricted to sites of high literacy can be understood from this perspective, which is directly analogous to that of those craft guilds on whose practice the new technology of print impinged. Finally, from the widest possible perspective, one in which discourses are collectively produced and used, textual property gradually enclosed parts of that discursive commons.

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As I will discuss below, the conflicts of interest generated by and around textual property eventually became stabilized under a regime of copyright, which apportioned the interests of authors, members of the book trade, and a public domain. But the articulation of clearly differentiated interests at the intersection of the discursive field and the marketplace could not proceed until the availability of discourse as a commodity became unremarkable, until it seemed natural. My working definition of a commodity derives from Marx's discussion in the chapter on commodity fetishism in the first volume of Capital. A commodity is not simply an object that is exchanged, but one which manifests what Marx calls a "social hieroglyphic"(79), for the object's very existence as a commodity presupposes social relations of production and consumption. In this minimal definition, neither the commodity nor its "hieroglyphic" qualities presuppose capitalism.25 In non- or precapitalist socioeconomic formations, gift exchange, for example, or patronage systems, the social relations that the commodity mediates might be said to be legible insofar as the participants in the exchange are known to each other, not necessarily personally, but in terms of status or group affiliations. In other words, both the destination of the commodity and the cultural value(s) recognized in it have a certain predictability. In a capitalist formation the marketplace becomes the immediate destination - the site of exchange - and a market mechanism arbitrates the economic value of the commodity. The interposition of the market in the trajectory the commodity traces from production to consumption not only makes the "final" destination opaque but also complicates the assignment of value(s) to the commodity because the market mechanism foregrounds economic value in rendering all commodities potentially equivalent. The primacy of exchange value, Marx argues, mystifies the social relations embodied in the commodity. Marx's definition of the commodity famously rests on a distinction between use value and exchange value, and on an emphasis on the labor of production as the source of value. A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labor appears to them as an objective character stamped on the product of that labor; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor. (77)

Hence, Marx argues, commodities are "social things," bearing a "stamp," a kind of writing that is illegible insofar as it refers to "a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things" (77). Use value, in Marx's argument, is the

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means by which both labor and the thingness of commodities are recuperated as self-evident necessities of human existence. "So far as it [the commodity] is a thing in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labor" (76). In other words, use value exists outside the "social hieroglyphic," as the ground on which social meanings are inscribed. Marx's unexamined assumption in this passage is that "human wants" and "human labor" are not themselves socially constructed. If that assumption is undone, use value can be seen as a function of exchange value, as what Jean Baudrillard calls the "alibi" or "satellite" of exchange value.26 "Use" is a socially mediated category and one that, like exchange, establishes and serves complex symbolic relations. My discussion assumes neither the use-value/exchange-value distinction as Marx formulated it, nor the necessary primacy of productive labor in determining value, but rather explores the claims made about the value(s) of pamphlet-commodities and the processes by which they were produced, circulated, and recognized at an historical moment when they were indeed "fantastic" things. What I take from Marx is an assumption that the commodity manifests and mystifies - to a greater or lesser extent - social relations of production and consumption. Discourse, moreover, is a peculiar commodity because its usefulness as a commodity is not immediately evident, given the concomitant circulation of discourses outside of commodity forms. Thus in order for discourse to acquire an exchange value, active claims have to be made for its use/usefulness as a commodity. In other words, the marketplace commodification of discourse requires the conversion of social practices - storytelling, preaching, the dissemination of "news" or knowledge into things available for purchase. "Available for purchase" conceals a range of possibilities: the opening up of access to discourses previously restricted in their circulation, the restriction of access by making discourses available only or primarily through purchase, the extension of scribal and oral/aural modes of discursive exchange, the replacement of scribal and oral/aural modes of discursive exchange. Obviously no single or self-evident claim of usefulness can serve; rather, such claims must be improvised repeatedly in order to secure purchase, in order to make the exchange transaction seem sensible or beneficial, in order to make speakers/writers and listeners/readers into consumers. In short, the conversion effects a kind of doubling of discursive function, for the very relations of production and consumption that the commodity mediates, discourse (whether or not a commodity) also constructs as an ensemble of social practices.

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Until the marketplace of print achieved a certain density, the commodity status of discourse was unremarkable in the sense that the production and circulation of books was linked to established sites of (high) literacy, which the market of/for texts served.27 As we have seen, however, the marketplace of print gradually developed its own operative structures and logics, disrupting the relationship between the social relations of discourse and the economy of its production and circulation as a commodity and making its commodity status a locus of attention, if not conflict and anxiety, both within and without the trade. Just how complex the figurations of the marketplace, textual property, and discourse-as-acommodity were and how the alliances between different interests shifted circumstantially can be seen by juxtaposing two brief case studies, one foregrounding the position of a printer and publisher in the trade and the other the position of a pamphlet writer. One of the key figures in the crisis of the 1580s was John Wolfe, a Fishmonger who had trained and set up shop as a printer. Wolfe parlayed his early position as an articulate spokesman among the unprivileged printers into a position of influence in the Stationers' Company and a career in publishing.28 Wolfe first achieved notice as an illegitimate printer of privileged books and he has since been tagged a "pirate." Even Joseph Loewenstein, who recently argued Wolfe's importance to the development of "literary property," calls him "one of his culture's greatest sneaks" and describes his career as one of "worm[ing] his way into favor" (390). In contrast, William Ponsonby, who also illegitimately printed privileged books, comes down to us as "one of the most important publishers of the Elizabethan period." 29 Scapegoating Wolfe, then and now, obscures the ways in which his career illustrates the operations characteristic of many members of the Company. If anything distinguishes Wolfe, it is his shrewd entrepreneurial sense and ability to imagine the marketplace of print. In 1582, at the height of the crisis over privileges, Christopher Barker, an aggrieved privilege holder and Warden of the Stationers, admonished Wolfe to "leave [his] Machevellian devices, and conceit of [his] forreine wit . . . if [he] mean[t] to deale like an honest man" (Arber, 11:780). Though Barker had a personal interest in disciplining Wolfe because Wolfe had been printing titles within his patent, he articulates the case in principle. For Barker, "dealing like an honest man" meant submitting to the monopoly (of patents and privileges) within the monopoly of the Company. What Barker considers a "Machevellian device" is Wolfe's contention that "it was lawfull for all men to print all lawfull bookes what commandement soever her Majestie gave to the contrary" (Arber, 11:781). Wolfe and his cohort, however, refuse to accept the coincidence

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between Crown and Company interests; they recognize the Crown's prerogative to proscribe certain books or discourses but not its right to create and support economically privileged positions in the trade. When, some years later, Wolfe was the Company's agent in tracking the printers of the Martin Marprelate pamphlets attacking Church government, Martin too identifies him with Machiavelli: "John Woolfe alias Machievill, Beadle of the Stationers and most tormenting executioner of Waldegraves [the printer of the Marprelate pamphlets] goods."30 Here it could be argued that Wolfe (and the Company) are acting within the Crown's prerogative to define "lawfull" books. The order to go after the Marprelate printers came, after all, from the Star Chamber. But from Martin's perspective, the issue is not one of lawfullness but one of trade. For Martin, the Machiavellian position is precisely opposite to the one Barker attributes to Wolfe: Wolfe acts to restrain Waldegrave's trade. "Machiavelli" can describe both Wolfe's challenge to the Company's authority and his exercise of that authority neither because Wolfe is a hypocrite nor because he has a principled notion of what ought to be a "lawfull" book, but because his position is in fact consistent: his relation to the authority of Company and Crown alike is determined by his selfinterest in the exercise of his trade. More to the point, he sees his self-interest as identical with that of the trade: WOLFE being admonished that he being but one so meane a man should not presume to contrarie her Highnesse governmente: 'Tush', said he, 'LUTHER was but one man and reformed all the world for religion, and I am that one man, that must and will reforme the government in this trade,' meaning printing and bookeselling. (Arber, 2:782)

To set "Luther" in unconcerned relation to "this trade" already evidences a shift, for trade and religion are rendered equally authoritative, separated spheres of influence.31 Trade, moreover, has its own logic or "government," one that might oppose the status quo promulgated by Crown and Company. What Wolfe's comment reveals is a sense of how important printing and bookselling could be to the transformation of the marketplace, to the reformation of "all the world for [trade]." In 1584 Wolfe was thefirstto print Machiavelli's and Aretino's work in England (in Italian).32 The decision to print such (in)famous texts resulted as much from a marketing calculus as from an intellectual or ideological one. Wolfe had spent time in the Italian print trade; he knew the continental market and undoubtedly hoped to open an English one as well. Most of the editions were entered to Wolfe in the Stationers' Register, but his imprints indicated Italian cities and publishers.33 The false imprints might seem to have an obvious purpose in the printing of prohibited books, but the papal indices that proscribed the printing

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of Aretino and Machiavelli had no force in England. Rather, the false imprints tacitly call attention to the papal proscription, mocking it by manifesting its relative impotence. At the same time, Wolfe's interest in using the false imprints is economic: Italian books were more easily marketed both on the Continent and at home if they were of Italian origin; the false imprints thus function as a sign of the text's authenticity. Several of the Machiavelli and Aretino editions also construct elaborately fictionalized prefatory narratives that extend the implications of the false imprints to include issues of textual property. 34 In the Machiavelli editions, for example, the prefaces collectively work out a fake history of publishing houses which inherit and compete for texts. Two generations of fictitious Antoniellos defend their production of Machiavelli's texts. The preface to / Discorsi claims that the "heredi d'Antoniello" searched out the author's autograph manuscript. They are challenged by the "heredi di Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari," who publish the Historie and claim to be the rightful heirs to Machiavelli's texts, of which they promise to publish more. Significantly, the best copytext the Antoniellos could find was not an autograph manuscript but the editions printed a generation earlier by the Aldis and Giolito houses. The key issue in the collective narrative is not that of establishing an authorial text, but rather that of establishing the texts as property. Strictly speaking, the property in dispute is inheritable publishing rights; the Giolito complaint is that the "heredi d" Antoniello" have done "a great wrong in having printed those books which have always been printed by our [house]." 35 The incipient claim of textual property is made, however, in an arena where neither textual property nor printing rights is actually in dispute. Rather, the publishing histories work to make the more general doubled claim that the texts are inheritable property, thus valuable, and are the object of competitive desire, thus more valuable. By tracing the relations between texts or between texts and publishing houses, the prefaces implicate the reader in the world they represent, a world in which texts that become books are valuable property and objects of desire. That is, the prefaces establish an alliance between publishers and buyers of books in which the dispute over textual property functions to intimate the property value of the commodity-book. The alliance Wolfe's prefaces establish between publishers and buyers of books elides the position of the author, or rather renders it identical with the commodity-book. The apparent self-sufficiency of the commodity-book makes this identification possible and makes it impossible to distinguish between authoritative and authoritative-seeming discourses, as Wolfe, who also printed propaganda pamphlets at the behest of the Privy Council, surely realized.36 In the case of classical or

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medieval auctores or early humanist learned men, a similar identification between author and text occurs, but it is produced and validated elsewhere, in scholarly or patronage circles. Moreover, discourse is transmitted through those circles as a kind of (elite) collective property, inheritable but not vendible. The fictional history in the prefaces to Wolfe's Machiavelli editions conflates the propriate interests of learned men with the property interests of publishing houses and book buyers. By representing property structured by and available in the marketplace as if it were and would remain valued in traditional terms and transmitted apart from the marketplace, the prefatory fictions invest the printed text with an aura of authenticity apart from its commodity status. Chapter 3 will examine in detail the impact of textual property as capital on the propriate interests - the patrimony - of learned men. Here I want to underscore how the alliance between publishers and book buyers constructed in the prefaces functions in relation to the conflicts within the trade. The issue of privileges and patents becomes moot if the field can be expanded by stimulating readerly desire for discourse he or she can buy, to own. Or to consume. The news pamphlets for which Wolfe's list is also known suggest the other side of the market logic he imagines: if one pamphlet awakens interest, several flame it, and the interest excited is both immediate (providing for quick sale) and transitory (providing for quick succession). The development of the marketplace of print depends on both conceptions of value - the inheritable property invoked in the prefaces and the immediate and transitory value of the pamphlets. To put it in metaphoric language that would have made sense in a predominantly agricultural economy and was to become important in the eighteenth-century discussion of textual property: those texts gathered into the patents and privileges increase the arability of the field; Copies like the editions of Machiavelli and Aretino represent substantial capital improvements (such as orchards and vineyards), and pamphlets are a quick cash crop. It is an economy that depends on enclosure and treats labor as an expense of production and not as a proprietary interest in its own right. A reversed image of the relation between textual property, the propriate interests of learned men, and the commodity status of the printed text can be seen in a pamphlet called Greenes Groatsworth of Wit, published in 1592 immediately following the death of Robert Greene. The authorship of Greenes Groatsworth of Wit has been disputed since itsfirstpublication. (What initially attracted attention was a letter addressing "those Gentlemen his Quondam acquaintance that spend their wits in making plaies" [43], a letter now famous for the

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earliest allusion to Shakespeare.) Robert Greene wrote some thirty pamphlets and a handful of plays in the nine years following his graduation from Cambridge University; his work sometimes issued from John Wolfe's presses. Though the literary historical position Greene comes to occupy, that of the disgraced poet, is one he anticipates repeatedly in the small books and pamphlets he wrote, it is but one pole of an oscillation in which he imagines himself caught between "wanton works" and "effectual labors" and from which he cannot extricate himself. I am interested here in the figurations of pamphlet writing that Greenes Groatsworth of Wit offers; whether or not Greene wrote the pamphlet is incidental to the pamphlet's representation of Greene and the impasse of authority at which he arrives. Greenes Groatsworth of Wit tells a story about the transmission of an old usurer's estate to his two sons. The bequest punishes Roberto, the eldest son, for his opposition to his father's usury by denying him his birthright. But the father's dying words do not simply exclude Roberto from any share in the estate. They construct a chiasmus that distinguishes financial wealth from cultural wealth. Luciano, the second son, inherits the fortune and one book ("Machiavels workes at large" where he can learn "what tis to be so foole-holy as to make scruple of conscience where profit presents itselfe" [12]). Roberto, "brought up in the universitie," inherits one groat and all that books afford ("your bookes are your counsellors, and therefore to them I bequeathe you" [11]). The bequest to Roberto also perversely identifies him with the father who built his fortune out of one groat: "only I reserve for Roberto thy wel read brother an old groat, (being the stocke I first begun with) wherewith I wish him to buy a groats-worth of wit: for he in my life hath reproovd my manner of life, and therefore at my death, shall not be contaminated with corrupt gain" (10). In the story that follows, Roberto deliberately effects Luciano's squander of the patrimony by bringing him to a courtesan who "cause[s] him to consume in lesse than two yeeres that infinite treasure gathered by his father" (35). Though Roberto had hoped to share in the proceeds of the courtesan's cosenage, she betrays him. Dejected, he meets up with a player who suggests that he can make a living by writing plays. Eventually, "by conversing with bad company" (35), Roberto is reduced to his last groat, which, the narrator notes, was "the just proportion of his Fathers Legacie" (38). He resolves to "see if [he] can sell to carelesse youth what [he] negligently forgot to buy" (39). Immediately following, the narrator reveals Roberto's story to be his and Greene's: "Heereafter suppose me the saide Roberto and I will go on with that hee promised; Greene will send you now his groatsworth of wit" (39). The remainder of the pamphlet presents various papers in which Greene

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repents of a profligate life - a poem, a set of prescriptive rules, the famous cautionary letter to gentlemen "who spend their wits in making plaies," an insect fable, and a letter of apology and farewell to his wife. The "groatsworth of wit" of the pamphlet's title situates Roberto, Greene, and the pamphlet itself in the terms of simultaneous opposition and identification set out in the old usurer's bequest. By causing the squander rather than the increase of the patrimony, Roberto inverts his father's practice. But by participating in the ruin of a wealthy naif (Luciano), he also enacts a version of that practice. More significantly, Roberto's resolution to "sell to carelesse youth what [he] negligently forgot to buy" identifies pamphlet writing with the father's practice of "mak[ing] spoyle of yoong Gallants" (12) as if, like usury, pamphlet writing both created and consumed wealth without creating value. Yet by its title the pamphlet proclaims a value (a groat is a coin worth four pence), and situates the reader as one who is unproblematically identified with the father's will, for the reader already has bought a groatsworth of wit. Greenes Groatsworth of Wit locates its value in the marketplace and identifies it with the practice of usury. Usury and the marketplace are not, however, identical. Roberto's resolution to sell what he forgot to buy and the narrator's revelation that it is Greene who sends his groatsworth of wit both imagine a marketplace that directly links producer and consumer. Usury marks a third position in the marketplace, that of the protocapitalist financier whose practice depends on stimulating the marketplace - both production and consumption - so that his capital can circulate and multiply. Usury, like finance capital, interposes itself in the production and circulation of commodities and thus structures the potential relation between producers and consumers.37 The chiasmic articulation of the father's bequest (the fortune and one book to Luciano; one groat and Roberto's book knowledge to Roberto) does not so much distinguishfinancialfrom cultural wealth as predict in its own crossing of terms their intersection in the marketplace. Roberto's opposition to and identification with the will of the father figures the problem of cultural wealth in the marketplace. Represented in opposition to usury, learned and poetic knowledges have a value incommensurable with a financial calculus. Represented in analogy to usury, they become a kind of capital whose value increases when they are (re)produced and circulated as commodities. Even as the narrative imagines a direct link between producer and consumer that would elide the mediating position of the usurer/capitalist and recapitulates Roberto's initial opposition to his father's practice in the moralizing discourses of its conclusion, it also positions itself as a usurious practice - stimulating the market for its potential sale.

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After the story has been reframed as Greene's autobiography, Greene asks his readers to "gather [his] follies altogether; and as yee would deale with so many parricides, cast them into the fire" (40). To call his works parricides is not to disown them, but to claim them more emphatically, "for now they kil their Father" (40). In asserting his "fatherhood," Greene displaces the old usurer. He constructs himself as a figure of authority by acknowledging himself as the begetter of "offspring" which he must repudiate in order to claim the position of authority. If, on the one hand, this is a gesture of writerly control, on the other, it is a fantasy of annihilation by writing.38 Designating his pamphlets as (potential) parricides attributes to them an agency that derives from and refers to his original act of begetting/writing. Greene imagines his labor as a kind of self-murder in which the commodity form of his writing violently dispossesses him. Among the multiple ironies of Greene's gesture is the fact that in the marketplace Greene indeed appears as a dead author and a commodity-book. The extravagance of the gesture arises from the impasse that the narrative of the old usurer's estate represents in terms of the opposition/identification between Roberto and his father. Roberto cannot evade the terms of his father's will; he must "convert the sweetnes of his study" (14) and put his book knowledge to work in the marketplace. Both the claim that Roberto/Greene is sending/selling his discourse directly to readers and the claim of fatherhood, however tortured, are efforts to figure a position of writerly control. They work to deny the mediation of the marketplace, specifically the position of the publisher to whom Greene actually surrenders his "labors" and "works" and to whom the financial profit accrues. But such efforts of writerly control either force Greene into a version of the usurer's position, stimulating the production and consumption of his own discourse, or pathetically assert the inevitable loss of control as the effect of his own agency. The terms of the marketplace cannot be avoided. If the usurer-father figures the financial operations, not necessarily visible, that structure the marketplace, the courtesan to whom Roberto brings Luciano figures its visible operation "in the suburbes of the Citie"(16). She explains to Roberto the failure of his "revenge" (14) against his brother. It may be you will thus reason: Had not Roberto traind Luciano unto Lamilias lure, Luciano had not now beene Lamilias pray: therefore sith by Roberto she possesseth the prize, Roberto merites an equal part. Monstrous absurd if so you reason; as well you may reason thus: Lamilias dog hath kild her a Deere, therefore his Mistris must make him a pastie. No poore pennilesse Poet, thou art beguilde in m e . . . Reasonlesse Roberto, that having but a brokers place, askest a lenders reward. (30-31)

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Lamilia's analysis of how profit works in the marketplace offers the poet two possible positions: that of the laboring dog or that of the broker. Indeed, it is to avoid being a laboring dog that Roberto brings Luciano to Lamilia and thereby becomes a broker. Later, when Roberto is "famozed for an Arch-plaimaking-poet," the narrator notes that "his purse like the sea sometime sweld, anon like the same sea fell to a low ebbe; yet seldom he wanted, his labors were so well esteemed" (36). Making the relation between Roberto's labor and his purse analogous to the steady-state equilibrium of the sea naturalizes the poet in the ebb and flow of transactions in the marketplace and obscures the issue of whether he is a laborer or a broker. He is, of course, both: he makes plays and in so doing brings players and audiences together, but this formulation of the poet's position assumes that he is in a position of control over his labor, that his poetic skills are his and he can claim a "lender's" place. The sea analogy syntactically separates his purse and his labor, thus masking the exchange that converts his labor into piecework wages and emphasizing instead the fame and esteem that poets, after all, desire. Despite the player's clear statement that poets labor for the profit of players ("men of my profession gette by schollers their whole living" [33]), the recuperation of "esteem" initially obscures to Roberto the similarity of the relations he has with Lamilia and with the players. The ambivalence of the player arises from his kindred relation to the poet, for poet and player are necessary collaborators in making plays. Not until Roberto's story has collapsed into Greene's and the narrative has collapsed altogether does the figure of the player reemerge in Greene's letter to his playwriting contemporaries: "Is it not strange, that I, to whome they [players] all have beene beholding: is it not like that you, to whome they all have beene beholding, shall (were yee in that case as I am now) bee . . . of them forsaken" (45). Here Greene claims for poet-scholars the place of a "lender" from whom players have borrowed "wit" and to whom players therefore are beholden. Players forsake poets because they do not acknowledge that indebtedness. Greene wishes that poets might find ways for their "rare wits to be imploied in more profitable courses" (46), but the countermove he suggests - "let those Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions" (46) - simply reveals the basis of "forsaking," the fact that play texts become the players' property. The countermove Greene himself makes (writing the pamphlet) is not a "more profitable course," but a structurally similar one in which the publisher occupies the players' position insofar as he owns textual property. While the courtesan can be made tofigurethe poet's betrayal in and by the marketplace, the player cannot be so easily vilified. The player is a

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necessary and necessarily inadequate figure of the poet's relation to the pamphlet space that the marketplace of print affords, allowing the poet to imagine his "labors" and "works" both as his performance and as someone else's performance of his text and thus to conceptualize both his invention and its dispossession. The publisher, however, does not perform the text he owns, but arranges for its conversion into commodity form. Precisely because the player enables metaphors of space and performance, however, he cannot figure the making of discourse into a thing. The problem Greenes Groatsworth of Wit poses with particular clarity is how the discursive space of the pamphlet becomes the site of a contest for authority in relation to the marketplace. If the figure of the player and the analogy to theatrical space allow the pamphlet to be imagined both as a space and as implicated in the marketplace, they fail to account for the material presence of the pamphlet and the social spaces it occupies and traverses as it is produced and consumed. Greenes Groatsworth of Wit is not unique in its figurations of the impasse between the discursive authority learned men and poets claim or desire and the demands of the marketplace. However, it is privileged by the circumstances of its publication immediately following Greene's death alongside two other pamphlets, one a fairly straightforward narrative of Greene's repentance, final prayers and death, the other claiming to be a vision Greene had "at the instant of his death" and consisting of a dialogue and storytelling contest between Chaucer and Gower with Greene as their interlocutor.39 Collectively, the pamphlets set out a "life of the poet" and pose the question of its waste and/or value. Greenes Groatsworth of Wit in particular situates the poet in the marketplace and the problem of poetic value in terms of the ongoing practices of Greene's contemporaries. Yet, collectively the pamphlets place each other under suspicion, not only because they cannot all be Greene's last words, but also because their appearance within a few weeks of each other in the fall of 1592 tacitly replies to the impasse figured in Greenes Groatsworth of Wit the poet is indeed an instrument of the marketplace. Issued from three different print shops for three different publishers, the pamphlets are the (collective) act of the trade, not the poet. But the trade needs the figure of the poet/author. "Greene" emerges as an author in and of these texts in order to mark a claim of value apart from the marketplace, but that claim to discursive authority functions to establish the value and vendibility of commodity-texts associated with his name. In the two scenes I have sketched can be seen various elements of what late twentieth-century theorists like Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes have called the author-function.40 Though both critics link the

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development of an author-function to the marketplace (Foucault to a "system of ownership for texts" and Barthes to "merchandise offered through traditional channels"), their discussions do not address how texts or writers become implicated in the marketplace, but rather take their starting point from the recognition of an author as someone vested with property rights in relation to the texts produced. That is, their discussion assumes authorial copyright. Foucault is explicit about this when he specifies what he means by "ownership": "strict rules concerning author's rights, author-publisher relations, rights of reproduction, and related matters"(148). The rules and rights to which Foucault refers were established by the French copyright laws of 1791 and 1793; the analogous English law was the Statute of Anne in 1710. Whatever the differences between the systems of copyright derived from these codifications, they share a basic common model that articulates the intersection between the discursive field and the marketplace.41 First, the legal entities of author and textual property are statutory constructions of an already existing de facto form of property - the exclusive rights to print and to profit from the printing of texts. The regime of copyright, in fact, extinguishes the claims made by publishers and booksellers that they had perpetual rights to textual property and substitutes a time-limited property right nominally vested in the author. Second, from the perspective of copyright, the author is a convenient figure or fiction of the individual or private interests at stake in textual property. Its necessary counterpart is the public domain, the legal recognition or (re)construction of a discursive commons whose existence marks the social limit to the individual interests figured in the author. By positioning textual property in relation to the limiting figures of the author and the public domain, copyright rationalizes the processes that subordinated, however incompletely, the discursive field to the marketplace. The legal recognition of textual property does not resolve the tensions and contradictions that result from the widespread commodification of discourse. Nor does the author, defined at law, wholly coincide with or exhaust the author-function. Rather, the regime of copyright is the product of the sustained instability that attended the development of the marketplace of print; its tripartite configuration of author, textual property, and public domain created a situation sufficiently stable and flexible to allow further layering/construction of its constituent elements. Eighteenth-century and subsequent discussions of the copyright configuration most often assume or are conducted in terms of high cultural value - original expression, genius, the advancement of learning, the protection of creativity. In those discussions the prehistory of copyright

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is frequently invoked as part of a narrative in which the "natural" rights of authors are finally recognized and substituted for the publishers' rights that provided the model for copyright. What gets lost in this triumph of the author is not only that fact that, as David Saunders notes, "the legal status of copyright owner has been possessed only contingently by individuals who write," but also the fact that the regime of copyright protects an economic act - the exploitation of discursive circulation.42 Joseph Loewenstein's ongoing work on intellectual property in the Renaissance is exemplary in its unfolding recognition of this fact, moving from an early focus on Ben Jonson's "bibliographic ego" as an originary moment in the development of author's rights and copyright (in "The Script in the Marketplace") via perhaps the essay on Wolfe and literary property to a focus on "the stationers as an agent of discourse." 43 Looked at from the prehistorical side of the copyright divide, the author is a back-formation by means of which the triumph of property relations appears as the affirmation of a prior authority and subjectivity vested in individuals who write. Yet the author is not simply a backformation but a term and a figure whose historical and etymological associations with invention, power, creation, and auctoritas are all crucial to negotiations of discursive authority. As Roger Chartier notes, summarizing work of the last decade, elements of the author-function are clearly present in late medieval textual production and circulation, arising from gestures that seek to protect the writer's propriate interests as well as those that seek to classify discourses.44 Such evidence suggests once again the ripeness of the social formations in which print technology was deployed, especially perhaps the already strong development of both vernacular literatures and a market of/for texts. Thus the figure of the author condenses processes both complex and mundane; elements of the author-function that both preexist and continue to have reference outside the marketplace are nonetheless transformed by those economic relations. To the extent to which discussions of the author-function assume a "system for the ownership of texts" nominally vested in the author, their demystification of the figure of the author stops short of considering the ways in which that figure emerges in response to the commodification of discourse that predates the juridical, economic and institutional recognition of the author by at least two centuries. In balancing the rights of an author against those of a public domain, copyright presents an apparent reconciliation of individual and social interests in the circulation of discourse-as-a-commodity. Anyone, theoretically, might create and profit from textual property and everyone eventually benefits. The rationalization achieved by copyright thus

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coincides with an understanding of print as an agent of democratization. In the twentieth-century metanarratives that seek to explain the impact of print, especially the accounts of the rise and decline of a public sphere, print has a progressive effect in facilitating first the exchange of ideas within the Latin culture of learned men, and then the development of a "republic of letters" or "commonwealth of learning" marked by vernacularization, secularization, and increased participation in public (intellectual) discussion. The apex of that development, achieved in the eighteenth century, is succeeded by an incursion of marketplace or capitalist influence into the production and circulation of discourse, eventuating in a mass or consumer culture in which public discussion is produced and manipulated by and in the interests of an alliance between the state apparatus and capital.45 The variants of the narrative differ in their emphases - on the history of ideas, on the rise of literacy, on the salience of capitalist modes of production as a factor, for example - but there is tacit general agreement that democratic forms of governance are at stake. The decline, moreover, is not necessarily held to be fatal. Marshall McLuhan's prophecies of a second rise, an electronic revolution, producing a "global village" underwrite both a pessimistic analysis of a totalizing control exercised by multinational corporations and an optimistic vision of decentralized and wide-ranging patterns of participation in a virtual reality that interconnects, enriches, and supplements local relations of position, knowledge, and power. Benedict Anderson's idiosyncratic account in Imagined Communities of "print-capitalism" as a key factor in the genesis of the idea of "nation" affords an alternative to the rise and decline narratives by tracing a complex and uneven unfolding of the implications of and responses to "print-capitalism." By "print-capitalism" Anderson means both the historical conjunction between the technology and the emergence of capitalism and their combined effect in producing new ideas of simultaneity, historicity, community, and the status of particular vernaculars. The "imagined community" of a nation is predicated on individuals linked by and subordinated to a dominant language and positioned transhistorically, that is, in relation to the (imagined) simultaneous and continuing existence of other such (anonymous) individuals. If print creates the possibility of such virtual "communities," they become political and ideological entities because the linguistic communities created and defined by print, by "documentary interchangeability," do not correspond to the circumstances of geographic place and administrative control over place. Hence, Anderson argues, the modern state becomes thinkable first in the Americas precisely because the administrative functionaries are simultaneously included in

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the dominant linguistic community and excluded from the administrative center. Anderson's discussion is provocative, not least because the model he develops of an "interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communication (print), and the fatality of linguistic diversity" (43) is flexible enough to account for the emergence of national consciousness in second, first, and third world settings across more than two centuries. That flexibility is achieved in large measure by establishing "print-capitalism" as a constant and linguistic diversity as the variable. Moreover, within the amalgam "print-capitalism," capitalism serves as the engine and print as the lubricant. The figuring of print and capitalism as a single entity precludes the recognition of conditions under which the print dissemination of discourses might generate possibilities and positions inimical to capitalism or ones that run ahead of capitalism, driving it to recuperative measures rather than lubricating its smooth operation. In asking questions about how the production and circulation of pamphlets was perceived and represented, I place the interconnection Anderson assumes in the phrase "print-capitalism" under examination. Because my focus is on the heterogeneity generated within the marketplace of print, I assume not an imagined "community" but a public whose existence is defined and contested in that heterogeneity. Jiirgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere offers the most developed account of the publicity print enabled and serves as the focus for that part of my argument. Habermas's concept of the public sphere is compellingly problematic because it is at once normative and historical. Normatively it is "a sphere which mediates between society and the state, in which the public organizes itself as the bearer of public opinion." 46 By "the public sphere" we mean first of all a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body. They then behave neither like business or professional people transacting private affairs, nor like members of a constitutional order subject to the legal constraints of a state bureaucracy. Citizens behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion - that is, with the guarantee of freedom of assembly and association and the freedom to express and publish their opinions - about matters of general interest. ("Encyclopedia," 49) Historically, Habermas locates the rise of the public sphere in the eighteenth century and links it to the ascendency of the bourgeoisie, liberal capitalism, and representative government. Genealogically, however, the impetus for Habermas's work arose from the widespread perception

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and analysis of the mass media in the late capitalist state as a colonizing force in public opinion, reducing "freely exercised" public opinion to a plebiscite and eliminating the productive opposition between the public and the private, transforming both into a single sphere of cultural consumption organized by (private) commercial interests and administered by the social welfare state. As critics have increasingly noted, the normative level of Habermas's analysis is compromised by the historical.47 That is, the public sphere he locates in the eighteenth century and identifies with private individuals assembled publicly to exercise a rational, universal conversation is, in fact, a specifically bourgeois formation (a point Habermas would accept) and as such predicated on both exclusions (e.g. gender and class) and mystifications (the claim to universality and rationality). Such exclusions and mystifications render the normative an idealization. The genealogical account allows us to see, at least partly, what is at stake in that idealization. By reconstructing a prior moment at which a normative public sphere did exist, Habermas achieves an analytic purchase on the problems that the mass media and consumer culture pose for the heritage of the Enlightenment and the prospects for democracy. In short, the historical narrative, like Orwell's near-contemporary taxonomy of pamphlets, is in the service of a philosophical-political practice. Whether that practice is admirable or contestable or both is not my direct concern. Rather my immediate interest is in Habermas's account of print culture in the emergence, constitution, and transformation of the public sphere. What precipitates the collapse of the normative public sphere in Habermas's narrative is the entry and consolidation of commercial interests within that sphere, in short, the shift from entrepreneurial to monopoly capital. The narrative of the rise of monopoly capital that underwrites the transformation of the public sphere retrospectively grants a kind of innocence to earlier forms of capital, their organization of the marketplace and their influence on both the state and the public sphere.48 The press, for example, develops from a " mere vehicle for the transportation of information" to a "medium for culture as an object of consumption" (183).49 The notion that the press is, or was, a neutral transmitter of "information" elides the context in which the technology is applied. Elsewhere Habermas recognizes that "news itself became a commodity" and "commercial news reporting was therefore subject to the laws of the same market to whose rise it owed its existence in the first place" (21). Indeed, he locates the embryonic form of the public sphere in "the traffic in commodities and news created by early capitalist longdistance trade" (15). While the early traders could rely on personal channels for the transmission of news, the concomitant development of

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the marketplace and print culture created a public who wanted access to news not dependent on personal connection (and made state authority aware of the problematic usefulness of addressing civil society as a public in order to facilitate mercantile policies as well as state business). But commercial news reporting is a belated phenomenon in print culture, emerging almost two centuries after the introduction of the technology. Understanding this belatedness as a result of the inhibiting effect of state censorship obscures the extent to which such news circulated through other commercial channels such as scribal newsletters and, more important, the circulation of printed discourses not directly labeled news that nonetheless addressed contemporary economic, social, and political issues. Habermas's interest in news reporting per se is in the service of his effort to reconstruct a properly political public sphere, one which depends on a public not interested simply in news but conversant with a variety of ideas and discourses that would allow it to debate news and its import critically and rationally. This public is created, in Habermas's narrative, in the world of letters or the "literary public sphere," which precedes the political. Literary journalism, as exemplified by The Spectator and The Tatler, is treated as a continuation of the conversation of private individuals by other means. Habermas's argument here depends on a definition of the private realm as the space of the family "embedded" in the marketplace (defined as the realm of commodity exchange and social labor). Entry into the public sphere involves leaving both the intimacy of the family and the constraints or enabling conditions of the marketplace; only then can a freely ranging public debate emerge. Such debate occurs in associational environments like the coffeehouses where The Spectator was to be found and it folds back into the printed discourse: "one and the same discussion transposed into a different medium was continued in order to reenter, via reading, the original conversational medium" (42). In granting conversation primacy of place, Habermas makes the dissemination and consumption of printed material into the same neutral "transportation" that characterizes news reporting. Yet he also describes Addison's journalism as one concerned with the shaping (or censoring) of "manners and morals." "The public that read and debated this sort of thing," he argues, "read and debated about itself" (43). Other critics have noted the logical problem in Habermas's formulation: the public who debates about "itself" considers a representation, a discursively constructed image of who it is and what its concerns might be.50 Moreover, that representation has a commercial interest, whatever else might be said about it. In other words, not only was Addison's journalism concerned with the shaping of public opinion, it was also instrumental in

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creating a subjectivity that recognized itself as belonging to a "public" and confirmed that membership through the consumption of commodified, printed discourse. In this regard Addison's journalism is also a belated phenomenon in the development of print culture for its address presupposes an already constituted reading public whose "conversation" has been shaped by two centuries of discourse increasingly mediated by the markeplace of print. Thus the central issue in the notion of a public sphere, either at its inception or in its transformation, is the question of the marketplace. Habermas recognizes that the emergence of the public sphere depends on the commodification of culture, but he regards that commodification as simply formal. Only with the monopolization of the press does commodification become vicious - a matter of content as well as form. But the sixteenth-century perception of pamphlets as contaminated and contaminating because of their commodity status challenges Habermas's historical account of a "fall" into capitalist corruption by suggesting that the problem he identifies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is present from the beginning, as it were. My point, however, is not to (re)locate an originary moment of "corruption" but rather to investigate a constitutive ambivalence that followed from the increasingly widespread commodification of discourse. It is here that the normative aspect of Habermas's account enters into consideration, for his notion of the public sphere is predicated on a recognition that the commodification of culture creates a public that is "in principle generally accessible" (36). While it is easily enough demonstrated that the public sphere Habermas locates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not, in fact, generally accessible and that its idealization into a normative model obscures the construction and workings of a specifically bourgeois (and male) hegemony, that critique does not sufficiently address the ways in which the potentially generalized access commodification seemed to promise precipitated the very responses - of exclusion and inclusion - that underwrite the public sphere Habermas describes historically. It is, I am arguing, the possibility of broad access that informs the range and ambivalence of the responses to the commodification of discourse. Moreover, that access not only made discourses more widely available for reading and created opportunities for writing, it also fundamentally altered the disciplines and practices of production and circulation by channeling them through marketplace transactions.

Figuring the marketplace of print

In comes Chettle sweating and blowing, by reason of his fatnes, to welcome whom, because he was of olde acquaintance, all rose up, to drink a health to all the Lovers of Hellicon. Thomas Dekker, A Knight's Conjuring (1607) Controversies

Near the end of 1592 a pamphlet called Kind-Hartes Dreame appeared in London.1 It is fairly well known to literary historians because its preface defends Shakespeare's reputation against the charges made about him in Greenes Groatsworth of Wit? The pamphlet itself consists of five vignettes, each spoken by a distinct persona and offering topical comments appropriate to that persona, interspersed with a commentary presented by a sixth persona, Kind-hart. Two of the vignettes, one about ballad singing and one about playing, are often quoted in discussions of late sixteenth-century popular culture. But Kind-Hartes Dreame is more interesting than its current place in literary history would suggest, for it offers an insider's view of the effect of the book trade on the circulation of discourses. Its writer, Henry Chettle, was a Stationer who had spent some fifteen years as a member of the trade.3 After serving an apprenticeship, he worked as a journeyman compositor, briefly set up a print shop with two other men, and, if not by 1592, soon after, began writing for the stage even as he continued to work in the book trade. The preface to Kind-Hartes Dreame locates the pamphlet specifically in relation to current controversy about writing practices for the press and the stage. If, at the end of the sixteenth century, such writing took place under conditions of "polymorphous collaboration," Chettle's pamphlet affords a compelling entry into the multiplicity of interests and positions involved in discursive production because Chettle himself occupied several of those positions. The title page of Kind-Hartes Dreame identifies its writer only by the initials H. C. At the end of the preface in which he discusses "the private causes, that made me nominate myself in print" (7), however, H. C. 46

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signs himself Henry Chettle. But for those private causes, Chettle says, the pamphlet would have "come forth without a father" (7). In other words, the preface simultaneously claims that Kind-Hartes Dreame was intended as an anonymous pamphlet and that the identity of its author is important. Chettle's private causes concern the controversies generated by Greenes Groatsworth of Wit. As I argued in the last chapter, Greene's pamphlet stages the degradation of poetic authority and learning in the marketplace. The letter appended to the tale of Roberto raises questions about who writes for the stage and what credit accrues to such writers. "Puppets," Greene says, "[speak] from our mouths" and perform "Anticks garnisht in our colours"(45). Does the speaking of lines by "puppets" efface the writer altogether, compromising his poetic claim, the "colours" of his rhetorical training? Do poets have a recognized role in the commercial circumstances of play production or can their work be done by anyone? These controversial questions about the poetic authority and authorship of plays are compounded by the posthumous publication of Groatsworth.4 Chettle and Thomas Nashe are among those to whom it is ascribed, and Chettle says he writes the preface to clarify the facts of publication. As Chettle briefly puts it, Nashe had nothing to do with the text and Chettle simply edited the deceased Greene's papers.5 In a new edition of Greenes Groatsworth of Wit, D. Allen Carroll challenges Chettle's claim, describing Groatsworth as "one of the most successful creative hoaxes in our culture"(x) and ascribing it almost entirely to Chettle. Years of attention to matters Shakespearean have detached the preface from Kind-Hartes Dreame, making it into a document that attests to "our culture's" continuing preoccupation with authorship and originality. Restoring the preface to its textual position as an introductory gesture does not answer the question of who wrote Greenes Groatsworth of Wit, but rather, first, exposes the ways in which that question ramifies throughout Kind-Hartes Dreame, and, second, makes the intertextual affinity between the two pamphlets intelligible in terms of cultural preoccupations at the end of the sixteenth century. We might describe those preoccupations provisionally as a concern for what Stephen Greenblatt, in Shakespearean Negotiations, has called the "cultural circulation of social energy" (12). In calling attention to controversial matters, the preface to Kind-Hartes Dreame momentarily arrests that circulation in order to restore itsflowby means of apparently clear attributions and apologies. As an introductory gesture, however, the preface simply asserts that Chettle's signature is contingent: only because he feels compelled to produce an account of someone else's authorship, does Chettle claim his own.

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Had Kind-Hartes Dreame "come forth without a father," it would have had only its textual presenter, Kind-hart. Kind-hart opens his text by telling of a dream in which five apparitions come to him bearing papers inscribed with "several bills invective against abuses raigning" (14). Awakening from the dream, he finds the papers and proceeds to publish them, carefully marking the authorship of each by a signature. Kind-hart, too, is an editor; as such he mimics Chettle's editorial relation to the text Chettle claims is Greene's. But the signatures he provides are belied by his statement in the "dedication of his dreame" that "the folly raging universally, hath infired me, to write the remembrance of sundry of my deceased friends"(9). Kind-hart provides incommensurable accounts of the pamphlet's genesis. Together they offer a scenario of competing claims for authority in the production of the text and complicate Chettle's initially simple claim in the preface that he intended the pamphlet to be anonymous. By making Kind-hart equivocally an author and/or a publisher, Chettle foregrounds a problem of authorship: where, in the gap between writing and publication, can the author be located? Later, at the center of what is presumably Kind-hart's text, Robert Greene appears and addresses his invective to Thomas Nashe, revealing Kind-hart as an obvious double for the Chettle of the preface. Thus Chettle's signature is not contingent, but rather a means of securing the ironic point that anonymity, whether or not it remains fully mysterious, is a placeholder for agency. As the controversy over Greenes Groatsworth of Wit indicated, even if a name is given, others might be supplied. Kind-Hartes Dreamed initial emphasis on authorship - Greene's, Chettle's, Kind-hart's - is a means of opening a wider investigation of the various interests and forms of agency involved in the production, distribution, circulation, and consumption of printed texts. Within the book trade, Copy, the accuracy of the printed text, the legitimacy of any given publication, and the appropriate personnel and channels of production and circulation were all matters of special contention and attempted legislation at the end of the sixteenth century. Grounded in Chettle's practical experience of the book trade, Kind-Hartes Dreame both addresses and is a product of these controversies and their impact on other networks of discursive production. The complications surrounding authorship set up by the juxtaposition of the preface and Kind-hart's "dedication" are structurally embodied in the pamphlet's five distinct papers, each purportedly written by a persona with particular interests in the production and circulation of discourse. Even a brief listing of the personae and their topics suggests the variety of practices and agencies involved in the marketplace of print. Anthony Now Now, an old ballad singer, laments the difficulty of controlling the circulation of printed

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texts; Master Doctor Burcot worries about the threat that the wide dissemination of printed texts poses to learned men; Robert Greene voices the problem of representing and defending the authorial position in pamphlet discourse; Richard Tarlton, the player, addresses the competition between printed texts and other forms of commercialized entertainment; and William Cuckoe, a juggler, exposes the anonymity of production and circulation in the retail marketplace. If both the variety of and the contradictions between the interests articulated by the personae make the project of correlating their diversity seem impossible, nonetheless only by means of such an analytic effort is the scope of the problem revealed. Since neither the marketplace itself nor the practices and positions within it are circumscribed entities, there is no "wholeness" available for representation. Rather, the marketplace of print enables a proliferation of texts and discourses that cannot be controlled from any single position, nor can its multiplicity be contained within a unified representation. The tension between the effort to produce a coherent representation and the impossibility of doing so is embodied in Kind-hart, for he is the figure of the pamphlet's narrative impulse, its desire to render an account of what happens in the gap between writing and publication. Explaining what has provoked him to write, Kind-hart formulates the problem as an historically specific one: the folly of this age, so witlesse, so audacious, that there are scarce so manye pedlars brag themselves to be printers because they have a bundel of ballads in their packe, as there be idiots that think themselves Artists, because they can English an obligation, or write a true staffe to the tune of fortune. (9)

Kind-hart names two vocational practices, the printer's and the artist's, each threatened by fraudulent imitation. If peddlers announce themselves as printers and scriveners, or ballad writers as artists, then how can "true" printing and "true" art be distinguished from their imitation? Can vocation be made a fixed category of persons rather than a circulation of practices among persons? Kind-hart presents the practices of printer and artist as analogous, an analogy that depends on recognizing both practices as "arts," as clusters of accumulated skills and techniques by means of which practitioners produce objects of value. The threat to the vocational integrity of printer and artist alike is compounded by the circulation of products - ballads - that are also susceptible to imitation. The two practices analogized in Kind-hart's complaint are commonly separated in the twentieth century by calling one "artisanal" and the other "artistic." This distinction is itself problematic, implying as it does

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that some kinds of labor can be categorically separated from others on the basis of a distinction between work of the hands and work of the mind. In 1592 the distinction proceeded along slightly different, equally suspicious grounds: an "artisan" could be distinguished from an "artist" only if the latter term were limited in reference to those who had mastered the curriculum of the Liberal Arts. (I will use "Artist" in this restricted sense, and indicate it with a capital A.) More to the point, "art" referred any application of human skill and especially those skills by which human agency produced things, ideas, or wealth.6 In this usage, art is distinguished from (simple) labor by a certain ingenuity or skill. Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century economic writers would rank "art" among the factors of production: "lands, art, labour, and stock."7 Kind-hart's complaint about "the folly of this age" is that distinctions between what is "art" and what not have collapsed. The distinction he desires accords with Greenblatt's argument that "the collective dynamic circulation of pleasures, anxieties and interests [social energy] . . . depends on a separation of artistic practices from other social practices, a separation produced by a sustained ideological labor, a consensual classification" (12-13). In Kind-hart's age, however, not only is classificatory consensus absent, but "peddlers" and "idiots" are claiming, evidently successfully, the "art" that should be credited to printers and Artists. If the underlying question is when labor becomes "art," something not just anyone can do, that question is complicated by the fact that in the marketplace both printing and writing - whether of Artists or ballad writers - are mediated by the interests of publishers. Is publishing also an "art" or is it "peddling?" Kind-hart poses a problem of vocational integrity whose cause he describes as a circulation of practices and products across vocational boundaries. Kind-hart's desire for distinctions, for clear vocational boundaries, also reformulates the issues raised in the notorious passage in Groatsworth calling Shakespeare an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the only Shake-scene in a countrey. (46)

If "feathers" circulate, to whom does the credit belong? And if a play maker "bombast[s] blank verse as [well as] the best of [them]," can the play maker claim to be an artist? Or is he, like the "idiot," merely versifying, "writfing] a true staffe to the tune of fortune?" By asserting that it is "the folly of this age" that has produced a collapse, Kind-hart generates his discursive task, the attempt to reconstruct the stable boundaries

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of a former age. By producing a narrative that has speaker-protagonists identified with specific vocational interests, he might be able to formulate an account of the various agents and facets involved in production and thus stabilize vocational claims in the marketplace. One of the organizing ironies of the pamphlet is that none of the personages Kind-hart invokes can locate a stable vocation. They each bemoan a version of collapsed distinctions and thus echo the nostalgia of Kind-hart's complaint about "the folly of this age." The story Kind-Hartes Dreame tells emerges out of the sequence and overlay of its parts. But the parts do not add up to a coherent narrative. Indeed, the notion of coherence is parodied even before the narration proper begins by the questions the preface raises about Kind-hart's role. In the dream itself, the speakers emerge "after a harsh and confused sound" and Kind-hart quickly recognizes them by various signs. After charging Kind-hart to publish the papers they bear, they disappear in another burst of sound that discomfits and awakens him: "this charge seemed to mee most dreadful of all the dreame, because in that the distinguishing of their severall voices was heard, farre from the frequent manner of mens speech" (14). Kind-hart's role as publisher seems to be reinforced when he claims that "suddenly out of my hand fell the five papers, which confirmed my dreame to bee no fantisie" (14). But how can five papers confirm a dream, let alone the authenticity of voice in a pamphlet that begins by admitting that there is no way to distinguish the writer from the evidence of a published text? The multiple voices of Kind-Hartes Dreame exist in a distant and ambiguous relation to a public discourse ("farre from the frequent manner of men's speech") that is represented as simultaneously oral ("a harsh and confused sound") and textual ("when suddenly out of my hand fell the five papers"). By foregrounding the problem of "distinguishing . . . severall voices" and by representing voice as simultaneously or alternately oral, scribal, and printed, Kind-Hartes Dreame positions itself in relation to a discursive field that is neither exhausted nor solely constituted by the marketplace of print. The surviving documents that seek to regulate the public discourse mediated by the book trade speak of the "printing, putting to sale, or uttering" of texts.8 In the language of statute and proclamation, to utter is simply to publish, but in "the frequent manner of men's speech," to utter might alternately be to speak, to write, to publish, and to offer for sale: that is, the term encompasses the entire range of activities involved in discursive production. The "bills invective against abuses raigning" in Kind-Hartes Dreame are concerned about the conditions and effects of utterance, in all senses of the word. If the semantic range of "utter" suggests that the practices of

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the book trade might be too diverse to be effectively controlled by individual authors, printers, or publishers, it also indicates the trajectory utterances follow in their separation from the author - the trajectory of production and circulation. Proliferation and circulation

The first published voice in Kind-Hartes Dreame is Anthony Now Now's "friendly admonition . . . to Mopo and Pickering, Arch-overseers of the Ballad Singers, in London or elsewhere." Anthony Now Now is concerned that there be a company of idle youths, loathing honest labor and dispising lawfull trades, betake them to a vagrant and vicious life, in every corner of Cities & market Townes of the Realme singing and selling of ballads and pamphlets full of ribaudrie, and all scurrilous vanity, to the prophanation of Gods name, and withdrawing people from Christian exercises, especially at faires markets and such publicke meetings. (15) He would have Mopo and Pickering, in their capacity as overseers, reform this abuse. As Anthony Now Now describes it, the problem equally concerns the movement of people and texts: the vagrant youths transport and sell ballads and pamphlets that in turn cause people to wander from "Christian exercises." Neither Anthony Now Now's complaint nor its terms are novel. The ballad singer regularly appears in the sixteenth century as a figure of the circulation of discourse in the marketplace, most frequently as a signifier of the degradation of discourse so circulated. In this use, the ballad singer is distinguished from the poet, and charges of impiety, which might be leveled at poet and ballad singer alike, settle primarily on the ballad singer. Thomas Lodge's comment in A Defence of Poetry (1579) is typical: "those foolish ballets that are admitted make poets good and godly practices to be refused."9 In the context of Anthony Now Now's complaint about "ballads and pamphlets," what matters is that the ballad singer is the figure who can be made to represent each and all of the moments involved in uttering a printed text; he writes, he sings, and he sells. Both the multiplicity of his roles and the insistent secularity of his songs call for his reform. If the ballad singer cannot be controlled, how can production and distribution be subjected to control, or to narrative description? Multiple ironies inform Anthony Now Now's stated concern. Most important, his language parodies the legalistic discourse of those attempting to regulate the book trade. In 1580, for example, William Lambarde, lawyer, historian of Kent and a justice of the peace, drafted

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"an acte to restraine the licentious printing selling and uttering of unproffitable and hurtfull Inglishe books" in order to legislate those writings whose end, he claims, is only to let in a mayne Sea of wickednesse, and to set up an arte of making lascivious ungodly love, to the high displeasure of GOD, whose guiftes and graces bee pitifully misused thereby to the manifest injury and offence of the godly learned, whose prayse woorthie endeavours and wrytinges are thearfore the lesse read. (Arber, 11:751)

Lambarde's fear that, if uncontrolled, texts will "set up an arte of making ungodly love" offers an erotically vagrant text in place of the youthfully vagrant text (and audience) in Anthony Now Now's description. But the erotic text threatens a similar breaking of bounds; lasciviousness is not only what these texts are about, but also what they do, overwhelming the godly text in their proliferation. Three years later, during the dispute over the illegitimate printing of privileged Copies, Christopher Barker and Francis Coldocke, Wardens of the Stationers' Company, petition the Privy Council to intervene in the affairs of the Company because the Company cannot control the production and distribution of texts: "some . . . do print those priviledged Copies at their pleasure, and have other as disordered as themselves, who runne up or downe to all faires and markets through a great part of the Realme, and make sale of them" (Arber, 11:779). Behind Lambarde's concern with the divine authority that underwrites the distinction between sacred and ungodly textuality, and the Wardens' with the royal authority that underwrites the system of patents, is an anxiety that the social space available to printing and to printed texts is limited and that "bad" texts and printers will, through uncontrolled proliferation, take over that space to the detriment of "good" texts and printers. Anthony Now Now's discourse also articulates a good/bad understanding of print, and distinguishes good and bad practice historically: when he practiced, "there was no thought of that idle upstart generation of ballad-singers, neither was there a printer so lewd that would set finger to a lascivious line" (16). Anthony Now Now's complaint, however, undoes its own historical terms. One, if not both, of the addressees of Anthony Now Now's admonition were, in fact, booksellers and ballad publishers.10 The gesture of calling upon ballad publishers and booksellers to control the publication and circulation of ballads recalls the accord struck between the Crown and the Stationers, in which the Company agreed to act as the Crown's agent in supervising the production and circulation of printed material in return for a monopoly on production. At the same time, Anthony Now Now shares with the Queen's Printer (Christopher Barker) and the other

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defenders of privilege, the historically informed understanding that the Stationers' Company has not been successful in maintaining the good practice that it agreed to uphold. The abuse against which Anthony Now Now inveighs arises, in his argument, from the collapse of a good order present in an earlier age. His remedy involves a repetition of the founding gesture of that now collapsed good order. Yet he recognizes that the interests of ballad publishers and booksellers lie, by definition, in the circulation of ballads: some as I have heard say taken to be apprentices by a worthlesse companion (if it prove true that is of him reported) being of a worshipfull trade, and yet no Stationer, who after a little bringing them uppe to singing brokerie, takes into his shop some fresh men, and trusts his olde searvantes of two months standing with a dossen groates worth of ballads. In which if they prove thrifty, hee makes them prety chapmen, able to spread more pamphlets by the state forbidden then all the Bookesellers in London, for only in this Citie is straight search, abroad smale suspition, especially of such petty pedlers. (19) The practice Anthony Now Now calls "singing brokerie" encompasses two operations, production and distribution. As Chettle would have known, one of the standing controversies in the trade involved the use of apprentices to do work that might otherwise have gone to journeymen. 11 Since apprentices generally received no wages, the cost-effectiveness of "tak[ing] fresh men" into one's shop is obvious. Booksellers, moreover, were often enough not Stationers, but Drapers or other retailers and thus not within the control of the guild.12 In any case, bookselling depended on a constant supply of copies to sell. So, too, the profitable operation of a print shop (or the trade) depended on continuous production and especially on a constant supply of new material that could be produced and distributed quickly. Thus Anthony Now Now's focus on distribution presumes the pressure of production, the constant supply of apprentices and texts brought into the shop. And though he would have us understand that no Stationer would operate in the way he describes, in fact, he repeatedly offers the same model of distribution. It is impossible to imagine a "singing brokerie" that would not involve its spread "abroad" and the consequent loss of centralized control. The irony of Anthony Now Now's historical understanding is that, in his terms, the only possible practice is a bad one. The logic of that bad practice indicates why neither the founding gesture nor its repetition can maintain good order: booksellers and publishers do not operate on the basis of a distinction between good selling and bad; they operate on the basis of calculated risks. In seeking incorporation, the Stationers' Company calculated risks; the bargain they struck in 1559 allowed them to control the printing, and

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to a lesser extent the publication and distribution of books. Good practice, and the only legitimate practice, was that sanctioned by the Company. When Christopher Barker defends privilege by arguing that "unless some few printers be well mayntayned, it will bring both the one and the other to confusion and extreme povertye" (Arber, 1:115), he means publishers, not printers. Though printers would be employed in the orderly production of books in high demand, the investment being protected is that of Copy; two thirds of Barker's 1582 report is devoted to listing and defending privileged Copies. But the printed text exists apart from its status as Copy, as property. The pirated or illegitimate texts to whose printing and distribution Barker is responding attest to a breakdown in the Company's monopolistic control: it cannot control its own member printers, who have to struggle to find copy to print, and it can no longer, if it ever could, control the distribution of printed text. Barker's report traces the history of the Company's monopoly on printing, and, like Anthony Now Now, he calls for a reaffirmation of the Company's original monopoly: "more power . . . to the Master, the wardens and assistantes of the Stationers, to oversee and correct... false printing, evell paper, evell workmanship and such like faults" (Arber, 1:144). For this power to be effective, he argues, the number of printing houses in London should be reduced by more than half. Only by limiting the space where books are printed can "many frivolous and unfruitfull Copies [be] kepte back, which are daily thrust oute in print, greatly corrupting the youth, and prejudiciall to the Comon wealth manye wayes" (Arber, 1:144). Barker thus tries to control production in time and to restore the "original" conditions of production - by controlling the space allotted to productive resources. But his report also makes it clear that, by the 1580s, what constituted good practice was contested both by printers within the Company and by booksellers and publishers within and without the Company. Bad practice became what the Stationers could not control - within or without the Company. By invoking a history, both Barker and Anthony Now Now seek to protect the various integrities of the book trade, but the historical narratives they produce are inadequate to the contemporaneity of production, to its necessity of doing many things, not in an orderly chronology but all at once. When Anthony Now Now speaks of bad ballad singers, publishers and sellers, it is not clear at what point in the circulation of a ballad the intervention he desires from civic or Company authority would be effective because what is to be controlled is not clear: the text? the singing? the printer? the publisher? the seller? The word that names all of these, again, is "uttering" and it is the simultaneity and multiplicity of ballad singing that makes uttering possible. Immediately after

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renewing his request to the ballad overseers that they "restraine such straglers" as "utter . . . licentious songs," Anthony Now Now defends some ballad singing as "an honest handicraft": "shamefull it is (had they any shame) that men brought uppe to an honest handicraft, of which the realme more need than jigging vanities, should betake them to so impudent a course of life" (18). Bad ballad singers, he argues, are like masterless fiddlers and players or unlicensed rogues; they need restraint: "It were to be wisht, if they will not be warned, that aswell the singers, as their supporters, were burned in the tongue that they might be ever utterly mute, then the triumphers of so many mischiefs" (18-19). To make "as well the singers as their supporters" mute is the one effective method of controlling utterance: if no song issues forth, it cannot circulate or be sold. Everyone who is involved in uttering is to be made "utterly mute." The pun in "utterly" embodies the impossibility of controlling utterance: "utter" has so many meanings all at once that it is effectively useless, a mute word. Anthony Now Now's suggested restraint both recalls the punishments inflicted on those whose utterance was, or was understood to be, proscribed and marks the impossibility of controlling utterance. "Song" substitutes for text in the alternating current of uttering. To make song "utterly mute" is to render it as a text; while at the same time the voices that come into print not only increase, but are increasingly individualized. The play on "utter" recalls, in a word, both Kind-hart's anxiety about "distinguishing several voices" and the problems of production and distribution that Anthony Now Now's invective examines from the perspective of a ballad singing practice. In the sixteenth-century discourses of print, the text exists in relation to two sliding lexicons - one of writing terms and one of names for the printed text - that, like "utter," range out of control: "to devise, penne, gather, or translate and set forthe in the Inglish tongue, sundrie books, pamfletes, Poesies, ditties, songes, and other woorkes and wrytinges, of many sortes and names" (Arber, 11:751 [Lambarde]). When does "setting forth" take place? Where or what are the dividing lines between a ditty and a song, a pamphlet and a book? The polysemy of various efforts to name and control the objects and phenomena of the marketplace of print unwittingly calls to attention the variety of practices implicated in the circulation of printed discourse. Ballads and ballad singers come to function as tropes precisely because the ballad singer breaks down temporal and vocational distinctions - between oral and written, performance and text, author, printer, publisher, and seller. The ambiguities of the trade can be stabilized and abjected in the figure of the ballad singer. In invocations of the trope,

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ballads are said to "stuffe every stall," and to be sold in "every Towne, Citie and Countrye," their very proliferation "making the learned sort to be silent when als they see the unlearned sort so insolent."13 The threat ballads pose is compounded because of their capacity to shift between oral, written, and printed modes. Thus their effect is not limited to the literate. Indeed, one commentator makes ballads the vehicle of literacy: "they cannot reade themselves . . . yet [some] will have many Ballades set up in their houses, that so might learne them, as they shall have occasion."14 Though ballad makers are sometimes named, most often ballads are invoked as anonymous publications directed toward an equally anonymous audience. Thus ballads and ballad singers come to signify a proliferation of texts that undoes distinctions of status and vocation and provides indiscrimate access to irresponsible discussions of topical issues.15 The trope serves not only to establish a literary hierarchy, but also to identify and separate the "negative" potentialities of print culture, as if by repeated name-calling such deleterious effects would be contained, if not avoided altogether. If the proliferation of texts makes the Stationers anxious about their ability to control the book trade and the Crown and its (would-be) agents worried about maintaining civil and religious order, for a writer it simultaneously offers the fantasy of an immense audience and the nightmare of trying to distinguish and protect his meaning, his authority, in afieldteeming with other, comparable claims. This doubleness appears in the second paper that Kind-hart publishes, which addresses issues of authority from the perspective of "maister Doctor Burcot," "in England for phisicke famous." Burcot's practice is not a making, but a way of operating mediated by texts, and it is through his relation to textuality that his claim to authority is represented. In the dream Kind-hart recognizes Burcot because "in his right hand hee held a Compendium of all the famous Phisitions and Surgions workes beelonging to Theorike, in his lefte hand a table of all instruments for mans health, appertaining to practise" (12). Burcot's invective situates itself in terms of and distinguishes between competing interests within medical practice: physicians, barber-surgeons, apothecaries. Of these, the physician's practice is the one most concerned with texts. "Much reading," Burcot notes, "and long practise in every Art makes men expert" (30). Like other learned men, physicians were trained in the humanities, "in every Art." Indeed, men frequently cross-trained in medicine and divinity, and men who trained in physic and received licenses sometimes never practiced medicine.16 Though the Royal College of Physicians of London had a statutory monopoly on the practice of medicine and the licensing of medical practitioners, it was even less able than the Stationers' Company to effectively police its

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jurisdiction. At the end of his invective, Burcot calls upon the "Colledge of learned Doctors and worshipfull Company of experienst chirurgions" (31) to search out ignorant and illegitimate practitioners. Burcot's invective, like Anthony Now Now's, echoes and parodies other contemporary discourses addressing his practice. In seeking to protect "phisick" from "injurious enemies to Arts, that have sought to make [it] among the common people, esteemed common: and chirurgery contemptible" (23), Burcot addresses an amorphous group of illegitimate practitioners whose practice is represented and advertised by printed texts. How fares it then, blinde abusers of the blind, your blushles faces are so seasoned, that you can in print or publike writings, open the skirts of your shame, by promising sight to the blinde, sound joyntes to the gowty, steady members to the Paraletike, strong limmes to the lame, quick hearing to the deafe, sence to the franticke. (24)

Complaining that practitioners "open the skirts of [their] shame," Burcot identifies illegitimate practice as a form of prostitution, locating it at an intersection of gender and status issues marked by the skirts of women and learned men. The problem with these practitioners and their texts is twofold: "they will undertake to warrant what no wise man can" and precisely because they do so, "who but these are welcome to diseased or endaungered people" (25). In other words, neither the medical discourse presented by the texts, nor its interpretation by those who would use it is reliable. At the same time, the self-advertising rhetoric gives the texts wide circulation and threatens the concurrent circulation of good texts. Either circulation, and especially both, makes physic "common." Indeed, any medical discourse that circulates outside of forums controlled by learned men threatens the exclusivity of their control; thus proliferation alone is a threat. But the problem Burcot sees is more complex. It is not simply the possibility that bad texts will drive out good ones (as it was in Anthony Now Now's and Lambarde's concern that ballads drive people away from godly texts), but the more difficult situation produced by multiple and ambivalent discourses whose use requires the ability to discriminate among and correctly interpret competing texts. The problem Burcot sees involves simultaneously the competence of texts and practitioners. Any effort of control would depend on constructing a clear distinction between good texts and bad, good practitioners and bad. But the only unambiguous statement Burcot can make is one that affirms the primacy of the physician's training. "Every simple hath his virtue, every disease his beginning; but the remedy riseth from the knowledge of the cause:

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If any can (in naturall sence) give ease, they must be Artistes, that are able to search the cause, resist the disease, by providing remedies" (24). Even this affirmation, with its emphasis on the search for causes and the linking of remedy to cause rather than symptomatic relief, makes it clear why "physic" is threatened by other practices more attentive to the immediate symptoms and needs of sufferers. More to the point, even legitimate practitioners misinterpret texts, so that Burcot's distinctions collapse even as they are constructed. He tells the story of a surgeon who evidently studied the anatomical image of the man under zodiacal influence often printed in almanacs for medical reference: "this woorkeman, the poore patientes deathes-maister, in that pointe not to bee termed his owne Artes-maister, dismembred him [the patient], the sign beeinge in the foote" (27). The astrological anatomy is not, in itself, a bad text; as Bernard Capp notes, it derives from the anatomies of classical medical texts.17 The bad practice results from reading an ambivalent text too literally; the workman reads the sign of the foot (Pisces, in the illustration Capp provides) as a sign to cut off the foot and the misinterpretation yields disaster. Good practice is obscured not only because texts advocating bad practice circulate, but also because once any medical discourse circulates independently of authorized practitioners, that discourse is subject to misinterpretation and consequent malpractice. Thus, mistakes are always possible, infiltrating, and operating to the detriment of, good practice: Besides these run-agates, there are some of good experience, that giving themselves to inordinate excesse, when they are writ unto by learned phisitions to minister for the patients health according to their advised prescription, negligently mistake. As for example, a Doctor directs to his Poticary a bill to minister to a man having an ulcerous sore, certaine pills for the preparing of his body, withall a receipt for the making of a corrosive to apply to the sore, hee (either witles, which is too bad, or wilfull, which is worse) prepares the corrosive in pilles, and formes the Receipt for the pilles in manner of a playster. The partie receives the corrosive inward, his mawe is fretted, death followes. (27)

In this case the text that mediates the practice is scripted, not printed. Nonetheless it offers an instance in which good text, text that should be reliable, is clearly misinterpreted, resulting in bad practice. Both stories work to foreground problems of interpretation; the ambivalent authority of the astrological anatomy and the unquestioned authority of the Doctor's script make it impossible to assign the responsibility for bad practice to the text. Rather, the responsibility rests with those who use the texts, but that understanding does not solve the problem of bad practice. As the parenthetical "either witles . . . or wilfull" indicates, the

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act of bad practice is itself open to multiple interpretation: negligence, mistake, and wilfull murder all look the same in the end. Though Burcot claims that "these Accidentes amonge Artistes happen as seldome as the proofe of a good cure amonge you that are utterly ignorant in Arte"(28), this vocationally based defense is a tautological one; there is no categorical basis on which Burcot can rest his definition of good practice. The problem of bad practice concerns both the proliferation of texts and their interpretation. As a medical practitioner, Burcot may be willing to forgive and accommodate erring surgeons and apothecaries, but as a "learned phisition," "maister Doctor" Burcot's own authority is textual and interpretive, and his image functions as a sign for the difficulties, methods, and benefits of good practice. For these reasons, the proliferation of texts, and especially of texts that indifferently popularize medical discourse, particularly threaten his privileged position. Near the end of Burcot's invective, therefore, medical discourse and the problem of printed texts collapse into each other in a single weird image that allegorizes the effects of print as a form of bad medicine. He promises to tell of "craftes whiche are not so well knowne to the world" (28), of bad obscurity and secrecy, rather than good exclusivity. Addressing a "braggart of great antiquity" who has recently taken up the "wonderfull Mettaline preparative" advocated by the discourse of chemical medicine, he says: I remember I have heard great talke, you have bene both a caster of metall, and a forger, and it seemes you have gotten the receipte which the Tinne-melters wife ministred, to breake her husbands colde, when he sate sleeping in his chaire, videlicit two ounces of pure Tinne put in an iron ladle, melted in the fire, and poured at an instant downe the throat. (29)

The metallic cure is not only fraudulent, but improbable even as fraud. Like the patient whose mawe was fretted, the Tinne-melter's mouth is affected, the oral cavity literally filled by the mettaline receipt. The image of a fluidity that fills and takes over the available space recalls, once again, the fear that the proliferation of printed texts will overwhelm any effort of "speech." As I noted in the first chapter, the final invention in the technology of print was an adjustable mold that allowed letters of different sizes to be cast in one font. Typecasting, like other technical aspects of the print trade, was not public knowledge but part of the "mystery" transmitted through guild training - hence Burcot's allusion to unknown crafts. Describing a mold in 1683, Joseph Moxon says: "Close to the Carriage and Body is fitted a Mouth-piece . . . Letter-Founders call this altogether a Mouth-piece. But that I may be better understood in this present

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purpose, I must more nicely distinguish its parts, and take the Freedom to elect Terms for them, asfirst:[set off in a vertical list] The Mouth. The Palate. The Jaws. The Throat." (140).ls When the braggart, who is also a caster of metal, acquires the receipte, a slippage occurs. The mouth of the patient becomes the mouthpiece of the technology that enables the braggart to boast that he can "make anye manne not only boldely to walke in ill ayres and converse daye and nighte with infected companye, but also to receive the strongest poison . . . into his body" (28-29). The allegory of the braggart and his receipte calls attention to founding as casting and founding as beginning. It suggests that print reconfigures practices "of great antiquity" and fundamentally alters human identity and social relations. (It is a story Marshall McLuhan would have loved.) If the braggart's claims foretell a revolutionary change in the human condition, the image of the gagged tinne-melter simultaneously allows that change to be identified with print and insists that the change will be deadly. Burcot's story thus ends in a kind of stasis and a return to the status quo ante. Addressing the old braggart once more, the physician concludes that the metalline preparative is "but a forgerie . . . [and] a parcell of [an] olde and to some a hurtfull trade" (29). "Forgery" puns on the practices compacted in Burcot's grotesque story - fiction-making, metalworking, chemical medicine - and once again foregrounds the problem of the printed text as one of interpretation. Hence the physician's warning that "they that deale with your mettaline medicine have a faire warrant against poison" (29). Texts, like chemical medicine, are ambivalent; their effect depends on their reception. As if to restore his credibility Burcot concludes with the appeal to the organizations of physicians and surgeons I noted earlier. But one might well ask what is at stake in the proximity of physician and ballad singer in the unfolding sequence of Kind-hart's publication, especially since the physician tells stories worthy of ballads. I have argued that the ballad singer tropes the displaced ambiguities of the book trade, especially the proliferation and debasement associated with the marketplace. The physician too is an obvious figure - of instrumental textuality and an idealized learning. But the juxtaposition of ballad singer and physician in Kind-Hartes Dreame allows the obvious opposition to be pushed further. Both Anthony Now Now and Burcot worry about the circulation of texts, the ballad singer about their proliferation and the physician about their proliferation and their interpretation. Their vocational practices, however, imply two different economies. In the economy of ballad singing, wealth is acquired by the production and circulation of texts. In the economy of the physician, wealth is gained by the interpretation of texts; the physician's wealth is at once material, the payment he receives

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for his medical practice, and symbolic, the privileged and exclusive cultural position he claims for his learning (an authority which, in turn, issues in real coin). Burcot inveighs against the indiscriminate and continuous circulation of texts because he believes that his practice depends on controlling a limited and sanctioned group of texts. From the perspective of the physician's economy, the continual circulation implied by a ballad singing economy compromises the circulation of those discourses on which his authority rests by making it impossible to "distinguish several voices." Though the two invectives are linked by their concern about the proliferation of printed texts, Burcot's concerns cannot be subsumed within Anthony Now Now's concerns. The economy of ballad singing raises questions about the text as an object - what it is, who controls its movement, when certain texts impinge on the circulation of other texts. Proliferation could be limited if guild mechanisms of control were effectively enforced, if the guild were to commit itself to limited production (and profit). But though the Stationers' Company is nominally a guild, its practices have evolved beyond the artisanal ones of craft. The increased technological capacity for production inevitably yields proliferation and, historically, the development of forms of control and property that disrupt the logic of craft per se. Thus the pressures of production and distribution propel the guild economy toward openness, toward concerns of capital and trade. The physician's economy is concerned with how texts function - with how they intervene in the material world in which they participate and how they mediate "health" and "disease." In the physician's economy, the proliferation of texts is also a proliferation of knowledge, a definitive breach in the principle and possibility of guild control. The addition of Burcot's invective thus reveals the inevitability of an open economy and a contest for position and authority within the marketplace no longer operating according to guild terms. Vocational integrities are necessarily threatened in such a context. Competition After Dr. Burcot's invective, Kind-hart interrupts the publication sequence with an invective of his own against bad practices in tooth drawing and the fraudulent self-advertising banners of tooth drawers and rat catchers. Kind-hart is ordinarily a tooth drawer; he too wants to protect the integrity of his vocation. In keeping with the parodic undercurrent of the pamphlet, that practice is both itinerant and performative, like the ballad singer's, and quasi-medical, like the practitioners of whom

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Burcot complains. The eruption of Kind-hart's own vocational concerns foregrounds once again questions about his role. If he is ordinarily a tooth drawer who practices alongside ballad singers, street jugglers and marketplace peddlers, how can he claim to remedy a "folly" that arises from the marketplace circulation of practices? And even if his toothdrawing practice has made him a privileged witness to fraudulent behaviors in the marketplace and thus enabled him to expose them and by exposure to expedite a remedy, what do his private concerns as a tooth drawer have to do with the account he hopes to produce of "pure" printing and "pure" art? These questions are not immediately answered. Rather, the effect of the interruption - its substantive concern with vocational integrity, its foregrounding of questions about Kind-hart's role, its enactment of a breakdown in the narrative he hopes to produce - is to return the narrative to the issues set out at the opening of the pamphlet. It is at this point that the figure of the author emerges: immediately following, the next paper is superscribed "Robert Greene to Pierce Penilesse."19 By addressing a persona, Pierce Pennilesse, not an author, Thomas Nashe, Greene, in turn, calls attention to another version of the economy of printed texts, one that Pierce Penilesse entered and still participates in, an economy of texts competing independently of their writers. Like Burcot, Greene is a "maister of Artes;" an attack on him is an attack on the privilege, the exclusivity, of Artists and their texts. Since his death, Greene reports, he has been slandered: "in my grave was I scarse layd, when Envie (no fit companion for Art) spit out her poyson, to disturbe my rest" (35). His response to the slanders is to affirm himself as a writer: "For my Bookes, of what kind soever, I refer their commendation or dispraise to those that have read them. Onely for my last labours affirming, my intent was to reprove vice, and lay open such villanies, as had beene very necessary to be made knowne, whereof my Blacke Booke, if it ever see light, can sufficiently witnesse" (35-36). Though Greene refuses to distinguish his books by kind, the last labors he especially affirms are texts like the "bills invective against abuses raigning" that Kind-hart is publishing. In responding to invective, Greene singles out his own invective texts to defend his Art. Invectives are contests in which language has been substituted for another medium of struggle. (They are, of course, a traditional form of exchange between learned men.) Mediated by print, invective marks textual space per se as a site of contest: one enters into print in order to contest what has been printed. Greene's letter to Pierce Pennilesse is an exhortation to Thomas Nashe to function as an author, to protect the text and the name he has already made, to "reply to their twofold Edition of Invectives" (37).20

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The economy of printed texts that Greene articulates is driven by personal investment in print. The author invests, not money, but labor and some aspect of his person in the text for the sake of an authorial name and a onetime payment of about two pounds. The authorial investment is not exclusive and separate from others, but complicit in the proliferation that troubles the effort to control and stabilize the circulation of printed texts: by contestation, textual space is enlarged. Greene ironically reminds Nashe that one of his early claims to textual space, Nashe's Preface to Greene's Menaphon, contested Greene's text: "Once thou commendedst immediate conceit, and gavest no great praise to excellent works of twelve yeres labour: now in the blooming of thy hopes, thou sufferest slaunder to nippe them ere they can bud: thereby approving thy selfe to be of all other most slacke, beeing in thine owne cause so remisse" (36-37). "Immediate conceit," or what Nashe in the Preface calls the "extemporall vaine," obviously makes for successful invective. It allowed Nashe to lay claim to textual space and, Greene warns, if he wants to be an author, he will have to practice his "immediate conceits" again and again. Thus understood, the economy of authorship, like that of ballad singing, requires that practice be continual, one's authority in constant circulation. At the same time, invective texts, by questioning the legitimacy of that authority, invoke the requirement of the physician's economy that circulation be cautious, always subject to the imposition of interpretive control. In the argument implied by the sequence of Kindhart's publication, Greene's letter locates his vocational practice at the intersection of the ballad singer's and the physician's economies, and suggests that the problem of authorship arises in part because of their apparently contradictory demands: free circulation on the one hand, and socially recognized forms of exclusivity on the other. Thus while the authorial position is neither that of the ballad singer nor that of the physician, it is made vulnerable by simultaneous proximity to both it desires both at once - and that vulnerability is compounded by the multiple interests which seek to promote and control the circulation of printed texts. The positioning of authorship in Kind-Hartes Dreame is thus a structural expression of the ambivalence and multiplicity that characterize the book trade. This conjunction between free and restricted circulation is also the ideological position at which Foucault locates the author as "the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning"("What is an Author?," 159). In the sequential unfolding of Kind-Hartes Dreame, the ideological components are separated out: in the pressures exerted by the ballad singer's and the physician's economies authorship emerges simultaneously as a structural position

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in the tension between guild and open economies and as a matter of personal desire and agency. If Greene's recognition of the necessity of constant circulation belies "thrift," his insistence on authorial investment in that circulation reveals how the authorial position, pursuing its own interest by a guild-like logic of special privilege (Art), nonetheless becomes complicit in the development of an open economy. Constructing a privileged position for artistic practices depends on, and proceeds by means of, other social practices. It requires a dispersal of agency. In a gesture that underscores the problem of authorial agency, following Greene's signature, Kind-hart reads himself as the addressee of Greene's letter: "Had not my name been Kind-hart, I would have sworne this had beene sent to myselfe, for in my life I was not more pennilesse than at that instant. But remembering the author of the Supplication, I laid it aside till I had leisure to seek him" (38). Kind-hart's momentary confusion of himself with Pierce Pennilesse and his identification of their shared penurious state points toward the problematic position of an authorial vocation: not only does it not bring sufficient material recompense for its labor, but the recognition of an author depends on the material evidence of the text, which offers a persona as putative author. It is as a putative author that Kind-hart complains of penury; that he is also, as a persona, an instance of the fact that the name of an author guarantees nothing about the text's authorship is an irony which belongs to the questions of authorship that Chettle's preface raises. Kind-hart's comment also calls attention to the orientation a name provides; his identification with Pierce Pennilesse is also a differentiation: he has another name. An authorial practice, Greene's invective demonstrates, involves not simply writing, but investing oneself in print. The sign of that investment is an authorial name, but the discursive figuration of that investment is an authorial persona. An authorial name thus cannot mark a secure personal investment, while at the same time it necessarily signifies some form of agency. The next paper Kind-hart publishes, Richard Tarlton's, reopens the question of what a name signifies and for whom. Richard Tarlton was an actor; his appearance suggests a response to the claim in Greenes Groatsworth of Wit that the interests of authors and players are diametrically opposed insofar as authors are repeatedly dispossessed by players ("those puppets that spake from our mouths"). In the layered analysis of KindHartes Dreame it would seem that Greene's bitter complaint is on target: an actor re-presents personae, intervening in the relation between authors and personae, displacing the author altogether. But Tarlton's invective in Kind-Hartes Dreame is more complexly situated. In 1592, when the pamphlet was published, he had been dead for four years, but

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his name was in current circulation as the putative author of ballads and pamphlets. In using Tarlton's name on pamphlets {Tarltons Toyes, Tarltons Tragical Treatises, Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie, Tarltons Jests, for example), the book trade creates a kind of "brand name" effect, for the historical Tarlton is associated specifically with the oral/aural practices of playing.21 A pamphlet bearing his name promises (to represent) such a performance and then substitutes its stories for that performance, thus indicating that the pamphlet too can entertain. Tarlton's name supplies an attested storyteller position, an agent of the entertainment a pamphlet affords.22 The book trade's appropriation of Tarlton's name ironically reverses the terms of Greene's complaint, for the figure of Tarlton as an author displaces the historical actor. In Kind-Hartes Dreame, Tarlton opens his invective by calling attention to the circulation of his name after his death: "Now Maisters, what say you to a merrie knave that for this two years day hath not beene talkt of?"(39). (In 1590 ["this two years day"] an anonymous pamphlet called The Cobler of Canterbury provoked a small scandal by challenging Tarlton's status as the author of Tarltons Newes.) By complaining that he has not been "talkt of" in two years and thus calling attention to the circulation of his name in pamphlets that offer themselves as substitutes for his performance, Tarlton reframes the question of name not as a matter of authorship but as one of multiple possible investments. His own name has come to signify a general social practice: "Sith it is thus," Tarlton says, "He be a time-pleaser" (39). Detached from the spatiotemporal locus of his practice, the name and the persona it implies become a sign for the value of the book; it too can make time pleasing. Tarlton's invective is a satiric defense of playing. More specifically, it is a dialogue with a variously designated interlocutor, but of course Tarlton plays all the parts - simultaneously a diversity of voices and a collapsing of the distinctions between them. He sequentially impersonates individuals who are or have invested in "time-pleasing" and thereby positions authors and players together, among others, in the nexus of relations within which they practice. The burden of Tarlton's invective in KindHartes Dreame is to show how varied and competing investments have entered into the space and means of entertainment. Playing had been prohibited in London in June of 1592 (due to the plague) and Tarlton notes that the prohibition was "to the no smal profit of the Bouling-allyes in Bedlam and other places" (39) and suggests that bowling alleys might "joine with the Dicing houses to make sute again for their [plays'] longer restraint, though the sicknesse cease" (40). A man with twopence to spend in an afternoon must decide where he wishes to spend it. In one place he might find ale and card games, in

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another food, drink, and music, and in a third a story performed; each place offers to make time pleasing and all are in competition for the spender's choice. But I have more to say than this; Is it not greate shame, that the houses of retaylers neare the Townes end, should be by their [plays'] continuance impoverished? Alas good hearts, they pay great rentes, and pittie it is but they be provided for. While playes are usde, halfe the day is spent by most youthes that have libertie uppon them, or at least the greatest company drawne to the places where they frequent. If they were supprest, theflockeof yoong people would bee equally parted. But now the greatest trade is brought into one street. Is it not as faire a way to Myle-end by White-chappell, as by Shorditch to Hackney? (40)

The word that describes the spender's enacted choice is "usde." The spender uses the play, that is, he passes, or spends his time by means of it. Conversely and simultaneously, it mediates or fills his time. What his twopence buys is entrance to the particular place where (the) play is available to him. The performer's "use" is also a time-filling or mediating activity like that of the spender. The player's "use" is what he has to sell and what the spender might use; their respective uses can only meet and satisfy each other and therefore themselves in a particular place, in the house of a retailer. Tarlton's speech reveals how the space of entertainment is, in fact, arranged according to the logic of the retail position. He produces an analysis of the retail trade in "time-pleasing," one that addresses the existence of competing sites (theaters, dice halls, taverns, etc.) and argues that they have a common structure - they all make people into consumers who pay to pass the time pleasantly. Tarlton details the position of the retailer by momentarily assuming it: "I am a man now as other men be . . . come up to London . . . .no other occupation have I but to be an Ale-draper, the Landlord wil have fortie pound fine, and twenty marke a year, I and mine must not lie in the street: he knowes by honest courses I can never paye the Rent" (41). The retailer's "house" is not his own and the worth of what he retails must be balanced not only against its wholesale or production cost but also against the "great rents" he pays. That is, the retail position marks the intersection of interests in a market relationship. Entertainment practices, whether they occupy the space of a bowling alley, an alehouse, a theater, or a book, are mediated by the investments of property owners, retailers and "users." The player and the author occupy a version of the retail position: they retell stories. But what they have to sell depends for its utterance on the calculations of property owners whose investment in that property - theater buildings, costumes, and "properties" (including scripts), or print shops, paper, and ink, Copy

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- determines the "worth" of the time-pleasing that a player or author offers. Not only play makers but players as well are subject, like authors, to a calculus of interests that subordinates their practices to the requirements of the retail position that mediates the "use" of performers/ producers with that of audience/consumers. Entertainment is not simply a social pursuit or mutual endeavor, but a "use" of time and space that has an exchange value determined by that calculus of interests. In his speech, Tarlton represents "time-pleasing" as a commodity or service that the marketplace offers. Tarlton marks the retail position as one of pimping and prostitution: "Quaintly concluded (Peter Pandar) somewhat yee must bee, and a bawd ye will bee. I by my troth sir, why not I as well as my neighbors, since theres no remedy" (42). Though "there is no remedy," Tarlton indicates how the interests of players and authors might be separated from the retailer's by taking up the complaint of another retailer, who resents the practices of players that "open our crosse-biting, our conny-catching, our traines, our traps, our gins, our snares, our subtilities: for no sooner have we a tricke of deceipt, but they make it common" (42). The retailer's worry that his "subtilities" are made common by the players ironically echoes Burcot's concern that printed texts make his medical knowledge common. Once again, an open economy is imagined as one of threatening proliferation that obliterates distinctions and particular forms of knowledge. But from the players' perspective, the proliferation of representations that "expose" the practices of others is the means of their livelihood. Tarlton's invective in Kind-Hartes Dreame reveals how that open economy is, in fact, intersected by particular interests arranged according to the logic of the retail position. Thus Tarlton's invective enlarges the frame within which the issues of production and distribution articulated by the ballad singer and the physician must be considered. The retail position is one of visible exchange, a position that presupposes both production and distribution, but also one that may obscure them by bringing into view the scene of consumption. From the perspective of consumption, "Tarlton" becomes a generic name, the signifier of a generalized pleasure available in a variety of commodity forms and retail venues - alehouse, theater, pamphlet.23 If the attachment of Tarlton's name to a pamphlet works in the interest of the book trade by supplying an agent for the storytelling a pamphlet affords, it also obscures both the multiple agents actually involved in the production and distribution of the pamphlet and the multiple venues of entertainment with which the pamphlet potentially competes. Like any authorial name, Tarlton's creates a fiction of individual production. But Tarlton's authorial name differs from others

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because it operates metaphorically as well as metonymically. That is, it simultaneously translates the theatricality of Tarlton's historical practice to pamphlet storytelling and stands for the collaborative labor involved in the production of the commodity-pamphlet. Moreover, it advertises the pleasures potentially available to the consumer of the commoditypamphlet. By specifically calling attention to the circulation of Tarlton's name, Kind-Hartes Dreame situates the book trade's appropriation of Tarlton's name and persona in the competitive and structural relations of the marketplace. In his defense of playing, Tarlton recalls the theatrical performances that underwrite his print persona. In voicing the multiple interests that intersect in the retail position he brings together production, distribution, and consumption. The irony of Tarlton's invective lies in its allusions to and enactment of the separation of his name and persona from the playing he defends and once practiced. The attachment of his name to a pamphlet or of his figure to an alehouse sign reveal Tarlton as an icon, the representational marker of a time and space not bound by work or necessity and the incorporation of that time and space into the structures and relations of a (proto)capitalist economy. As a mediating representation, Tarlton makes the diverse interests and agencies of production, distribution, and consumption appear as one and as "natural." In the circumstances his invective exposes, Tarlton's vocational image becomes the means of advancing other interests altogether, destroying any possibility of vocational integrity. Taken together, Greene's foregrounding of a vexed authorial position and Tarlton's exposure of the circulation of his name as a general signifier that naturalizes the commercial practices of entertainment complicate the premise I drew from Greenblatt's argument about a circulation of social energy that proceeds by negotiation and exchange. For Greene, authorial interests, however contradictory, are not negotiable. Yet Tarlton's invective reveals that an authorial name not only bears no necessary relation to the writer, but also, and more important, can be moved from site to site, in each instance offering a compelling fiction of both production and the pleasures of consumption. Tarlton's improvisation might be said to enact a circulation of social energy that proceeds by continual exchange, one in which individual moments of exchange or appropriation are effaced by the very movement of circulation. Greenblatt argues that individual moments of exchange are subsumed into a "sustained collective improvisation" (14). But Tarlton's invective demonstrates not collectivity, but a separateness of interests and their reconstruction in sutured form, in the figure of Tarlton. In Greenblatt's argument, as in English studies more generally,

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Shakespeare or Shakespearean theater provides the suture, the means by which diverse interests are joined together into collectivity or national identity. The privileged position of art and the artist rests, in turn, on a vision or articulation of that sutured collectivity. Behind "collectivity," Tarlton's invective argues, lies the crossing of interests in the marketplace. Shakespeare was exceptional in relation to that crossing of interests: writer/poet, player, shareholder (in a company that owned its playhouse), he continually exchanged with himself. Thus Shakespeare is the ideologically powerful example precisely because separating art from the other social practices in which he engaged produces neither loss nor violence but a transcendent Shakespeare and a residue that, if acknowledged, underwrites his transcendent position. Kind-Hartes Dreame sets out the challenging counterexample, a sequence of instances, beginning in relation to Greene's complaints in Groatsworth, of violence done to artistic interests in which neither art nor artist can defend successfully against the losses incurred in the marketplace. Tarlton's invective raises questions of whether or what or how order might be imposed within the marketplace itself. Kind-hart thinks Tarlton's analysis does not go far enough: "one thing I mislikte, that Tarleton stood no longer on that point of Landlords" (45). He extends the analysis of Tarlton's invective by detailing the position of the landlord, the property owner. As he closes his speech, he poses the problem of authorial investment in relation to the landlord's position: How now Kind-hartl shall we never have done with these Landlordes? It seems well thou hast as little land as witte: for while thou livest they wil not mend, and therefore its as good to make an ende, as waste winde. (98)

His wit is the analog of wealth in the form of land: it is what can be made productive by art, by the intervention of human labor and skill. Making wit analogous to land suggests that wit too is a form of property: "wit" is that which is proper to a person, one's capacity as a human actor. Like land, wit is used in order to be made more productive, but wit is the means as well as the medium of productivity, that is, wit is analogous to labor as well as to land. Kind-hart's wit enlarges "on that point of Landlords" by occupying and organizing discursive space. If his speech is not to "waste winde," it will have to take a particular embodied form. Who then is the landlord of the tenement Kind-hart enlarges? Under a regime of textual property, "wit" successively occupies all the positions in the marketplace. Though it is initially proper to the writer or performer and analogous to both land and labor, it can circulate only by being sold. Once sold, it becomes the property of the landlord (publisher, playing company) and what is or was proper to the writer/performer is

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reconfigured as labor. The first level of sale thus dispossesses the laborer of the object produced. But "wit" enters the marketplace to be sold again, to be reproduced as a commodity and to become an object of consumer desire - wit that can be bought to have as one's own. The property relations that underwrite Kind-hart's commentary are, like Kind-hart's role in the pamphlet, interstitial. That is to say, they are not the visible moments of production, distribution, and consumption but rather the infrastructure that determines each of these moments. By revealing the vested interests in publication, the sequence of presentation increasingly complicates the practices of production and distribution that Anthony Now Nowfirstdescribed. Kind-hart completes the argument implicit in his sequence of publication when he steps forward to stand "on that Point of Landlords." Whoever owns the space, marks it as his property, also thinks he can control its use and set its value. To the extent that the landlord can do so, his interest determines the limits of other vested interests, but the burden of the invectives Kindhart publishes is to demonstrate the tenacity of those other propriate but not propertied interests. Kind-hart's complaint against landlords once again interrupts the narrative he is producing. This time, however, the interruption offers material that draws together the divergent claims made about his status - that he is a publisher of others' texts and that he is a writer commemorating his dead friends. In the connection he makes between land and wit, he joins the two claims. Though the argument implied by the sequence of papers has demonstrated that writing and publishing are practices with different, often opposed interests, nonetheless authors dream they can control the publication of their work, that they are their own publishers. In the unfolding sequence of the pamphlet, however, Kind-hart becomes a kind of interloper, claiming discursive space for himself. After Burcot's invective he has something to add, after Tarlton's an emphasis to adjust. Kind-hart's first interruption draws attention to his own vocational practice. For Kind-hart, "good practice" involves preserving the teeth and thus the capacity for clear speech while knowing that wellbeing sometimes requires their extraction. His practice associates him with the orality of Anthony Now Now's world and the oral cavities (the mawe and the throat) of Burcot's stories. His benign interventions in the mouth associate him metaphorically with a decorous form of invective one that does not attack with bared teeth or leave another toothless. In the course of his invective against landlords, Kind-hart voices the literal meaning of his name: I would the hart of the Cittie were whole, for both within and without extreame cruelie causeth much beggerie, Victa iacetpietas, and with pietie pittie. Selfe love

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hath exiled charitie: and as among beastes the Lyon hunteth the Wolfe, the Wolfe devoureth the Goate, and the Goate feedeth on mountain hearbs, so among men, the great oppresse the meaner, they againe the meanest: for whom hard fare, colde lodging, thinne cloathes, and sore labour is onely allotted. (46)

Kind-hart's lament recalls his original desire to produce a historical narrative that might locate individual effort in the process of production and thereby redeem the disorder, the chaos into which production precipitates both author and text. Here the failure of that effort is figured as a nightmare of fallen history in which identities are cruelly incorporated. Kind-hart's name is also an argument, a defense of the papers he publishes that subsumes them into its spoken desire that "the hart of the Cittie were whole." Tooth-drawing metaphorically suggests a remedy for that fallen history by suggesting that a writing practice involves extracting out of "frequent public discourse" what is necessary to tell a story, and then exhibiting those distinguished voices like so many trophy teeth. Though the story is one that repeatedly demonstrates the collapse of identities and distinctions within the marketplace, the process of its telling momentarily asserts the specificity of particular vocations. If Kind-hart's interruptions make him into a kind of squatter, someone who insinuates himself into the discursive opportunities that others create and presumably control, the implications of his invective against landlords suggest that, given the vagaries of wit in the marketplace, such a practice is the only one available to writers.

Anonymity

The last paper Kind-hart publishes provides a metaphor both for a writing practice under the conditions his sequence of publication has disclosed and for the conditions that inhibit recognition of the authorial position as a privileged one: the juggler. Like "ballad singer," "juggler" identifies one who performs in an unspecified way, a successor, as Peter Burke notes, to the medieval minstrel: "the old Spanish term for minstrel, juglar - somewhat out of date by the sixteenth century reminds us that the same man might tell stories or juggle with balls, and the Latin word from which it is derived, joculator, 'joker', suggests that a minstrel was a general entertainer" (94). By manipulating objects, or words, the juggler makes an illusion. A writing practice is a juggling not only because it manipulates words, but also because, under the conditions of print, it has to juggle or be juggled with the other interests vested in its dissemination.

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The juggler whose paper Kind-hart publishes repeats his name, Cuckoe, so frequently and so often in an alliterative syntax ("coyly on old Cuckoe," "too cunning for Cuckoe," "Cuckoes counsell," "Cuckoe is out of his compasse") that its bird referent becomes unavoidable: the cuckoo bird is known for its repetitive song. It is also known for its peculiar nesting practice, or rather, its lack of a nesting practice. Not only does the cuckoo "borrow" the nests of other birds for its eggs, it then leaves the eggs to be hatched by the other birds. Cuckoo birds and songs, like print, are mimetic, repetitious, deracinated, and appropriating. A bird's-eye view of the production of books sees only lost parents, offspring at once identical and changeling, repeated song. The cuckoo's nesting practice emblematizes the technology of the printed book as though there were no personal investments. Tarlton's invective textualizes his former performance practice; Cuckoe's text addresses the very consequence of a textualized performance practice. The text circulates without a performer; hence the depersonalization thematized in the figure of Cuckoe. It is hardly surprising, then, that Cuckoe tells cony-catching stories, stories of anonymous itinerants who shift for themselves by juggling the expectations of those whom they meet. As a genre, cony-catching stories developed alongside the print marketplace. Two of the earliest English instances, Robert Copland's Highway to the Spital House (1535-36) and John Awdeley's The Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561), were "authored" by their printers. Also known as rogue pamphlets, cony-catching stories tell of vagrants - men and women displaced from their traditional geographic and social places - who scrape together a living by petty trickery and thievery.24 The writer of a cony-catching story promises to reveal hidden fraudulent practices (and thus to educate and possibly protect the reader). In both early and late instances of the genre, taxonomies of rogues and roguery and dictionaries of their language appear, parodying guild structures and "mysteries," in effect making the world of roguery an anti-guild. Obviously such stories have their origin in trickster tales of various kinds and eras, but within print culture they equally obviously allegorize the circulation of print texts. Conycatching stories parodically enact the ambivalences of the print marketplace - the simultaneous placelessness and ubiquity of printed texts, the dissemination of knowledges, the blurring or erasing of traditional social distinctions and economic practices. Cuckoe opens his discourse by calling for space and for attention to the altered conditions of his juggling practice: Roome for a craftie knave, cries William Cuckoe. Knave, nay, it will neare hande beare an action: Bones a mee my trickes are stale, and all my old companions are

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turned into Civill sutes. I perceive the worlde is all honestie, if it be no other than it lookes. Let me see, if I can see, beleeve mee theres nothing but jugling in every corner . . . Yet my maisters, though you robde me of my trade, to give recompence, after death I have borrowed tongue a little to touch their tricks. (49)

In accord with his name, Cuckoe denies his personal investment in his discourse: he only uborrow[s] tongue a little." But the denial manifests a peculiar logic. He borrows tongue because he has been robbed of his former trade, and he borrows not to compensate himself for his loss but to compensate the "maisters" who robbed him for their theft. The recompense he offers involves two extended cony-catching stories, of interest here because of the economy they imply. In each story something of value - plate, for example, or oxen - is hidden from its owner and then produced by the person who hid it and restored to its owner. The man who initiates and controls this circulation profits by it because the owner pays again for his plate or oxen. The circulation in these stories literalizes a hidden source of wealth, more specifically, a wealth that arises from the recirculation of objects that are already owned. Thus Cuckoe repays his "maisters" with vengeance by revealing the hidden source of their wealth. But Cuckoe's stories do not restore his old trade, and ironically, they implicate him in the very practices he exposes, for he "borrows tongue" to tell stories that have presumably already circulated. Cuckoe's borrowing of tongues recalls both the problem of utterance that Anthony Now Now hoped to control by the burning of tongues ("it were to be wisht... aswell the singers as their supporters were burned in the tongue that they might be utterly mute") and the continual process of appropriation by means of which utterance or "tongues" circulate. Theft, borrowing, and appropriation are all inversions of the apostolic gift of tongues, means by which the word is disseminated. But, if tongues are borrowed, it is impossible to determine whose tongue is uttering and the distinction between singers and supporters is indeed effaced: one can sing with a supporter's tongue. Cuckoe's practice answers Anthony Now Now's threat: borrowing tongue is a means of keeping utterance circulating, of insuring that it will not become utterly mute. Burning tongues would close down production altogether, a self-immolation of the guild economy. Borrowing tongues offers an open economy in which circulation is constant and distinctions constantly threatened or effaced. Cuckoe borrows tongue to tell of those who have succeeded to juggling and to substantiate his opening assertion that there is "juggling in every corner." The jugglers who have displaced Cuckoe from his former practice have done so by "having favour from Authority to seeke something to themselves beneficiall, and to the Common-wealth not prejudiciall," and "under colour of orderly dealing have hookt into their

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hands the whole living to a number poore men belonging"(55). Even his old companions have "turned into Civill sutes"(49); they dress like gentlemen and wield the law to their advantage. The tongue Cuckoe borrows is the language of petitions against monopolistic practices, whether the patents of privileged Stationers or those of other Companies or patentees. If patentees are indeed simply major league cony-catchers, then licit and illicit forms of economic activity cannot be clearly distinguished because they exist on a continuum rather than in opposition. Cuckoe is not alone in suggesting that cony-catching describes a general condition rather than petty illicit practices. The Defence of Connycatching (1592), for example, claims to prove that "there is no estate, trade, occupation, or mystery, but lives by Connycatching" (64) and criticizes Greene's cony-catching pamphlets for "strain[ing] a Gnat, and lett[ing] passe an Elephant, . . . touching] small scrapes, and lett[ing] grosse faultes passe without apprehension, . . . while other profession that bee great Conny-catchers and caterpillars make barraine the field wherein they baite" (9).25 Such insinuations reveal that the genre's frequent attempts to formulate "laws" and create taxonomies as if the world of roguery were organized along guild lines, are in fact instances of an inability to represent in "positive" terms an open economy. The world of cony-catching is not so much an underworld or subculture (though it can be and has been read as such in ideologically important ways) as an allegorization of the structural presence of capital. Cony-catching, whether great or small, figures (control of) circulation as a form of production, a means of creating wealth. The circulation figured by conycatching has no limit since it does not depend on specific trajectories of production, distribution, or exchange. Hence the ubiquity and anonymity of the cony-catching scenario - there are no identifiable agents or stable positions in this circulation, only the process itself. If, as Cuckoe's complaint suggests, the circulation spirals toward the Crown and its grants of monopoly, then no one, Crown possibly excepted, escapes being caught in the process. It would also follow that there is no position of knowledge that can counter the endless circulation and its implications. When Cuckoe gestures toward monopolistic practices, including those of the Stationers, he brings the analysis of Kind-Hartes Dreame full circle. The proliferation of texts and knowledges in the marketplace of print is a threat particularly to those who would wish some form of definitive or exclusive control over their circulation. Yet the Stationers are implicated simultaneously in proliferation and in the desire for control of circulation. What the Stationers seek to protect is not the integrity of production, but of property, of property they recirculate. Cuckoe's

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invective thus marks the limits of the analysis presented by Kind-Hartes Dreame. The careful layering of interests and positions, of vocational possibilities, cannot forestall proliferation, the endless and virtually anonymous circulation of objects and knowledges in the marketplace of print. As if to emphasize the problem, after Cuckoe's invective, Kindhart reviews, in order, the papers he has published and then presents his own story, a cony-catching story indistinguishable in kind from Cuckoe's. Indeed, it is presented as a continuation: "For Cuckoe I have somewhat to adde to his juggling" (62), and thus aligned with proliferation itself. The premise of a cony-catching story, as a kind, exemplifies the continual process of appropriation that sets the rhythm of the social relations of the printed text. Kind-hart's locution as he introduces his story characterizes the reciprocating relation that drives this process: "wee will now take her [the cony-catcher], for therefore was she taken, having first overtaken an honest simple Farmer and his Wife in this manner"(62). In a cony-catching story, not only is the cony caught by the cony-catcher, but the cony-catcher is caught by the writer of the cony-catching pamphlet, that is to say, the cony-catcher in turn becomes a cony caught. Not only does the displacement precipitate a potentially endless series, but, catching a cony-catcher is a means of exposure, laying open what would otherwise remain hidden, promoting a common knowledge. The story Kind-hart tells is a version of the publication fable found in Ovid's story of Midas's ears and a thematization of the issues at play in Chettle's pamphlet. The cony-catcher herself epitomizes the circulation of practices; she is a tape seller (whose ware ties things together), a singer, a leach (a quasimedical practitioner), and a fortune-teller. Her scam involves entrapping a farmer into Midas's position of desiring "infinite treasure" (63) and then revealing "how like an Asse he lookt" in a public courtroom (65). In a recent essay, Stephen Foley traces how elements of Kind-hart's story emerge two years later in the "documentary" account of a courtroom prosecution of an historical female rogue and then are recirculated in pamphlets, ballads, and plays.26 Common knowledge enters, exits, and reenters the marketplace, each movement, as Foley argues, reconfiguring the positions and interests at stake. At the end of Kind-Hartes Dreame Kind-hart disappears into the story he tells, promising to tell of other cony-catchers should he reappear: "a number of such there be: whom I will more narrowly search for in my next Circuit, and if my Dreame be accepted, sette them out orderly." What Kind-Hartes Dreame has already "set out orderly" are the conditions under which and through which writing practices proceed. Though produced within the nexus of interests Anthony Now Now, Burcot, Greene, and Tarlton identify and personify, the pamphlet, as a

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published thing, circulates in terms of the juggling economy Cuckoe presents. The depersonalization thematized in the figure of Cuckoe, and in the practices he describes, inserts Kind-hart, the cony-catcher's catcher, into a potentially endless series of conys and catchers. The collapse of Kind-hart's dream into a cony-catching story would seem to close down the avenues of investigation opened up by the individual invectives and their layering into an analysis. The endless and apparently ubiquitous cony-catching scenario replaces specific agents and moments, making it impossible to distinguish positions and practices in the marketplace. At the same time, however, precisely because cony-catching insistently thematizes both constant circulation and anonymity, it foregrounds important qualities of the marketplace, qualities particularly associated with an open, as opposed to a guild, economy. From the perspective at which it finally arrives, Kind-Hartes Dreame might well have been an anonymous text, for even as it presents the case for various vocational interests and agencies in the production and circulation of printed texts, it demonstrates how the relations and imperatives of the marketplace efface such agency, or rather, render it susceptible to imitation, appropriation, and betrayal. In the gap between writing and publication, the process of commodification makes an authorial name, if it appears, a metonymy for the collaborative work and multiple, sometimes conflicting, investments in production and circulation. That is, an authorial name figures an origin for the commodity-text and thus inscribes it within a communicative circuit between persons, writer, and reader. In Kind-Hartes Dreame, Kind-hart performs this function. His final transformation into a (named) cony-catcher makes it clear that the name (mis)representing the commodity-text as a singular communicative act is a fiction. But Chettle does sign himself. While the accuracy of either of his claims in the preface - that he didn't write Greenes Groatsworth of Wit and that he did write Kind-Hartes Dreame - finally cannot be determined, the presence of his signature (re)asserts the problem of authorial agency in the full complexity of its "betrayal" in the marketplace. It is Chettle's signature and his acknowledgment of "all the time of my conversing in printing" (6) that allows Kind-Hartes Dreame to be read as an allegory of the marketplace of print rather than as a random collection of topical vignettes. An initiate in the relatively new medium of print, Chettle possesses a technical knowledge that allows him to reveal the workings and implications of a system otherwise mysterious. He occupies a position where property relations, propriate interests, and the public domain intersect. Chettle's representation of the positions, processes, and structures attending print publication foregrounds the

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ways that authorial name(s) and personae can be appropriated to function as masks for the anonymity of the commodity-text. Thus, Chettle's signature is also a cautionary note. Signing one's name cannot counter the use of the name as a signifier in the interest of the book trade. Not signing, however, would surrender the writer's interest altogether. By signing his name to the pamphlet, Chettle at once represents the conditions and structures of the marketplace of print and locates himself as the agent of that representation. Chettle does not share the nostalgia of his personae. He takes the marketplace as a given and pursues the question of how individual effort and vocational interests might be recognized within the imperatives of the market. The cumulative effect of the papers published in KindHartes Dreame is to represent the changes effected by the book trade's development of the marketplace of print as a question of property. The circulation of discourses has been partially subjected to the property relations involved in the commodification of discourse. But Chettle also knows that public discourse, its existence as property and as commodity notwithstanding, always returns to the public domain. Kind-Hartes Dreame argues that the borrowing of feathers is not only the primary activity of any writing practice ("distinguishing severall voices" out of the "frequent manner of mens speech"), but also the means by which writing circulates within and beyond any market. In this regard, playmaking and pamphlet-writing are structurally identical practices, undertaken for different media. Kind-Hartes Dreame thus also provokes a rethinking of the complex symbiosis between pamphlet and stage. The elements of that symbiosis have long been acknowledged in critical commentary and scholarship: writers often wrote both plays and pamphlets; play texts were published in pamphlet form; story material circulated wholesale and piecemeal between pamphlet and stage. But the priority of theater, both its earlier presence in the marketplace (which would significantly include the years of guild-sponsored production) and what might be called its generic maturity, reinforces a sense of its dominance at the end of the sixteenth century. Moreover, and somewhat ironically, knowledge of the English book trade and print shop practices in Anglo-American scholarship is heavily indebted to textual bibliographic work done on play texts, which, because of Shakespeare's preeminence, not only affirms a privileged position for theater but also presents a case of authorship in which the structural relations of the marketplace coincide in one person. While the recent critical turn toward theater as a performance practice has rescued play texts from their burial in questions of authorial intention, a sense of play texts circulating as and among pamphlets remains elusive.

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The distinction Robert Weimann makes between "the represented locus of authority and the process of authorization on the platform stage" is useful in tracing how, in answering Greenes Groatsworth of Wit, KindHartes Dreame reopens the question of the relation between pamphlet and stage.27 Weimann argues that the platea conventions of the stage "tended to privilege the authority of what and who was representing," as opposed to the locus conventions which "privilege the authority of what and who is represented" (409). For pamphlet writers, self-authorization meant that they had first to create the discursive space of the pamphlet as a platea-like space, as a representational ground. Though the platform stage is not an established locus of authority, it is a specific and sanctioned place. In contrast, the pamphlet is a material object that occupies multiple spaces successively and simultaneously. While the representational demands of platea conventions on the stage would seem to support Greene's complaint that players betray writers by taking their place and credit, those same representational demands in Kind-Hartes Dreame position player and writer alike in a marketplace that encompasses sites of production, exchange, and consumption. In the case of the stage, JeanChristophe Agnew has argued, theater offers itself as a metaphor for the marketplace, affording a privileged space in which the social relations of a market society can be performed, or improvised. That privilege, Agnew and others, notably Steven Mullaney, argue, depends on theater's simultaneous marginality and visibility. Kind-Hartes Dreame positions pamphlet discourse in relation to the visible platform of the stage and demonstrates how its very visibility obscures the structural relations of the marketplace in which it is implicated. The platea space to which Kind-Hartes Dreame gestures is the marketplace itself. The representational demands of self-authorization in a pamphlet discourse, it might be argued, make that discourse a privileged site of the articulation into consciousness of the social relations that constitute the marketplace. I will return to that argument and to the relation between pamphlet and stage at some length in chapter 5. Here I want simply to note that Kind-Hartes Dreame suggests that the stage has neither the "neutral materiality" Weimann would claim (as the intermittent withdrawal of sanction and its implication in property relations make clear) nor a privileged position, whether that privilege be conceived as a metaphoric exchange with or a transcendence of the marketplace. Rather, pamphlet and stage are entwined not only in symbiotic relations of production but also, and especially, in being situated as discourses of the marketplace. Chettle's pamphlet is simultaneously common and idiosyncratic in ways that make its impact on contemporaries hard to trace. On the one

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hand, the figures it uses - ballad singer, physician, player, juggler, conycatcher - were in circulation as metaphors for vocation and discursive production before their deployment in Chettle's pamphlet. That they are brought together and used to address the issues of authorship that Greenes Groatsworth of Wit raises does not distinguish them out of their more general dispersal so much as offer an instance that can be circumstantially located. On the other hand, we now see that Chettle brings them together and uses them to construct an allegory of the marketplace of print in idiosyncratic ways, for Chettle himself occupies multiple positions in relation to the system he represents. Alternatively an editor, a writer of plays as well as pamphlets, a compositor, and a partner in a print shop, he is compelled to negotiate between diverse interests. Had he occupied each of these positions in a clearly serial, rather than overlapping or concurrent fashion, he might have produced a different narrative, perhaps one more particularly identified with one position or another. That he also occupied these positions serially, bringing him into repeated contact with various circles and sites of discursive production, suggests that his understanding of the book trade was not limited to its circulation in the printed pamphlet. Chettle's borrowed feathers are in turn borrowed. Twenty-two years after the publication of Kind-Hartes Dreame, Ben Jonson, among those with whom Chettle wrote for the stage, invokes Kind-hart, Tarlton, and the juggler in an "induction on the stage" before Bartholomew Fair. In the induction, a stage keeper, a book holder, and a scrivener present and discuss "articles of agreement" drawn up by the author of the play that stipulate a contract with the audience of the play. The articles of agreement specify that the play will not present the likes of Tarlton and Kind-hart but rather substitute personae of the poet's own invention, as if the play were not embedded in a public circulation of discourses. As the analysis of Kind-Hartes Dreame would have predicted, the supposedly direct relation between author and audience depends on separating author and representation from the multiple voices and practices that enable them. But the stage keeper who laments the absence of Tarlton and Kind-hart also complains that the "master-poet" kicks him around backstage. Jonson parodically stages both the desire for mastery, for control over the means by which representations are produced and circulated, and the collaborative, appropriative, and sometimes hostile relations actually involved. That the issues Chettle addresses in KindHartes Dreame are still unresolved in Bartholomew Fair is hardly surprising; that his characters are recycled, put to uses at once new and similar, is fitting because that is the writing practice Kind-Hartes Dreame describes and enacts.

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In A Knight's Conjuring (1607), Thomas Dekker, another of Chettle's sometime collaborators in writing for the stage, describes the Elysian fields of English letters, a gathering over which Chaucer and Spenser preside and whose latest arrivals are Thomas Nashe and Henry Chettle the fat Chettle of this chapter's epigraph. Questioned by Greene, among others, Nashe reports that the conflict between poets and players continues to the ongoing disadvantage of poets, for audiences appreciate only the players. As he speaks, Chettle arrives and the pamphlet comes to a close. Dekker's epitaphic notice places Chettle specifically in the context that Kind-Hartes Dreame entered, suggesting that he earned his place in the fraternity of writers because the aptness of his representation of the diverse and conflicting circumstances within which writers operate had not yet been exhausted. As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, others may have more fully articulated particular positions and interests at the intersection of the discursive field and the marketplace and thus developed models of discursive production more easily adopted by succeeding generations, but Chettle's pamphlet is unique in its effort to imagine the multiple interests and heterogeneity at that intersection.

The patrimony of learning

How many Quires (can any Stacioner tell) Were bandied then, t'wixt him and Gabriell? Who brutishly my beauty so did blot With Gaulie girds by Pens pumpt from th' inck-pot That I more ugly then a Satire seemd: Nay, for a hellish Monster was esteemd. Yet, if, in Judgment, I should spend my breath, The Doctor foyld him with his Dagger sheath. John Davies of Hereford, "Paper's Complaint" (1611) Supply

Writing in 1581, the pedagogue Richard Mulcaster describes the oversupply of educated men that was among the consequences of the "educational revolution" of the sixteenth century.1 To[o] many [learned men] burdens any state to[o] farre: for want of provision. For the rowmes which are to be supplyed by learning being within number, if they that are to supply them, grow on beyound number, how can it be but too great a burden for any state to beare? To have so many gaping for preferment, as no goulfe hath stoore enough to suffise, and to let them rome helples, whom nothing else can helpe, how can it be but that such shifters must needes shake the verie strongest piller in that state where they live, and loyter without living? (Positions, 139)

The problem, as he formulates it, arises in a sociopolitical order that allocates learning to limited sites, and yet, in allowing an expanded high literacy, creates the possibility, if not the inevitability, of sedition. Though Mulcaster's comment can be read as prescient, both in its prediction of an oversupply that was only beginning to be evident when he wrote, and in relation to the sociopolitical ferment that lead to the Civil War, I invoke it because he so clearly associates "learning" with its instrumental deployment and that deployment with a specific sense of space, "rowmes." Neither association is unusual in sixteenth-century pedagogical theory or practice. 82

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Focusing directly on Mulcaster's second treatise, The First Part of the Elementarie (1582), Jonathan Goldberg argues in Writing Matter that Mulcaster's pedagogy is implicated in an absolutist or totalizing production of literacy and the social subjects it engenders. Far from being simply protodemocratic, the extension of literacy creates what Goldberg calls a "culturally prestigious literacy . . . that comes to count as the only true literacy" (49). Without engaging Goldberg, Richard Halpern's recent discussion in The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation analyzes how the Tudor educational system produced "style," especially poetic style, not simply as a confirming marker of status, but also and more important, as a means of constructing a space of apparent (ideological) freedom from the constraints of a rhetorical education strongly geared toward juridical-political use. Halpern's argument suggests how Mulcaster's sense of crisis could be finessed by the "empty heterogeneity" (44) of style and its normalizing effects, characteristic of bourgeois civil society. By returning to Mulcaster's sense of crisis, I want to position an exemplary adaptation of rhetoric to the marketplace that operates via the claim of a supervisory relation to the heterogeneous circulation of discourses, and thus to complicate both Goldberg's and Halpern's arguments. Such a supervisory relation, at once a production of difference and its regulation, depends on an active relation to the "more spontaneous forms of popular learning" that Halpern says Tudor pedagogy suppressed (25), the literacies that, for Goldberg, do not count. Mulcaster's texts register and are troubled by an awareness of multiple literacies; to the extent that Mulcaster witnesses and produces a pedagogic apparatus allied with the early modern state, he does so in relation to alternative orders (of literacy, of pedagogic practices and possibilities, of sociopolitical organization) that he must acknowledge even as he suppresses, marginalizes, or disavows them.2 It is hardly surprising, then, that Mulcaster suggests as a solution to the proliferation of learned men the need for rigorous and judicious restriction of access to higher education, a proposal directly analogous to Christopher Barker's recommendation a few years later that the places of printing be restricted - patents protected, presses limited in number, dissemination controlled. But Mulcaster also advocates a widespread, if not universal literacy (reading and writing in English) and his emphasis on elementary education, his inclusion of girls in that education, and his disapproval of private education for all but the highest nobility are somewhat unusual. Mulcaster has a politics of literacy, a belief that literacy is a necessity "either for religion towards God, and right opinion in faith: or for civilitie towards men, and right judgment in behavior."3 It is the tension between the sociopolitical place of "learning" and the politics of

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literacy that makes Mulcaster an interesting witness to the proliferation of literate practices. What I am calling Mulcaster's politics of literacy significantly has no "place." Even the arguments for elementary education are made in the optative; the elementary ought to have the best teachers and most careful attention, but it does not and so the bulk of Mulcaster's treatise is devoted to post-elementary education.4 Mulcaster's basic literacy is a capacity whose focus is directed only toward "rightness," but "rightness" is not simply a matter of private judgment. Education is the bringing up of one, not to live alone, but amongst others, (bycause companie is our naturall cognisaunce) whereby he shall best be able to execute those doings in life, which the state of his calling shall employ him unto, whether publike abrode, or private at home, according to the direction of his countrie whereunto he is borne, and oweth his whole service. All the functions here be publike and regard everyone, even where the things do seeme to be most private, bycause the maine direction remaineth in the publike, and the private must be squared, as it will joineth with that. (Positions, 186)

The immediate context of Mulcaster's comment here is a long diatribe against private education and its tendency to separate learners and learning from a sense of duty toward the common good in the course of which he likens private education to the practice of enclosure. Nonetheless, in his efforts to "square" the private with the public, the tension between a universal literacy and the "direction of [one's] countrie" and "state of [one's] calling" can be seen once again. Is the "publike" a space indeed common to all or is it a space supervised by those who occupy the "rowmes" supplied by learning? The arguments for and educational practices of basic literacy have long been associated with the Reformation. That Mulcaster himself was among the less conforming or more radical Protestants in England (or exile) at mid-century makes his secularism all the more notable and, like John Wolfe's self-description as the Luther of the book trade, cautions against any emphatic separation of religious vectors in the shaping of the discursive field. As an exemplary case in point, this chapter takes up a nonreligious pamphlet exchange between Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe, known as the Harvey/Nashe quarrel, in which the tension between the "rowmes supplied by learning" and a politics of literacy is evident. But Harvey's and Nashe's implication in that tension predates their quarrel, for both men also participated in an earlier exchange known as the Marprelate Controversy. In that controversy a series of anonymous pamphlets, issued from a secret press, attacked episcopal forms of church government and were answered by pamphlets, also anonymous, commissioned by the bishops. Nashe is thought to have

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been among the commissioned writers and Harvey, apparently on his own initiative, wrote a piece addressing the controversy that he did not publish at the time. Written in a colloquial style, the Martin Marprelate pamphlets (Martin was the generic persona of the antiepiscopal pamphlets) clearly evidence the threat that a literacy not supervised by men of "place" poses to the established order. (The "supply" of my section heading puns on the Martins' arguments, for "supply" also means one who serves as a substitute, especially a clergyman who temporarily occupies a vacant pulpit.) Moreover, though the Marprelate pamphlets would seem to be apart from commercial considerations, their substance defining them as discourses of principle, it is the existence of the marketplace that enables their production and dissemination and serves as the only identifiable site of the discourse. Indeed, the anonymity of the pamphlets precisely coincides with the commodity relations of the marketplace. When the bishops hire writers to respond to the antiepiscopal pamphlets, they hope to make the marketplace serve a hierarchy based on noncommercial platforms - pulpit and throne - but their effort tacitly valorizes the marketplace as a site of discursive production and exchange. Thus while the Marprelate pamphlets can be positioned in relation to both the seditious potential of a "learning" not restricted to "rowmes" and the assertion that a basic literacy is necessary for "right opinion in faith," the controversy also suggests that issues of learning and literacy are fully played out neither in the schools nor in the sanctioned "rowmes" of the state apparatus, but in the marketplace. In early modern England, "the most basic form of literacy," Keith Thomas reminds us, "was the ability to read the printed word."5 Insofar as it was a discrete event, the Marprelate Controversy was over by 1590, ended by the combined efforts of Crown and Stationers. But, as I have suggested, the controversy was not only a discrete event but also a symptomatic one, in which the status of marketplace-situated discourses was at issue. While there are incidental links between the Marprelate Controversy and the subsequent Harvey/Nashe quarrel - ad hominem attacks and insinuating remarks - far more important is the general connection that contemporaries drew between the two quarrels, a connection that rests on the layered identification of marketplace, pamphlet, and a problematic discursive authority. The two exchanges crossbreed with each other. In the seventeenth century, for example, the anti-Martinist pamphlets are retrospectively attributed to Nashe on the basis of his reputation as a satirist, acquired in the exchange with Harvey. More to the point perhaps, Harvey explicitly connects the two exchanges by repeatedly linking one of Nashe's personae, Pierce Pennilesse, to the Martins and by publishing his response to the Marprelate Controversy in

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the second of his quarrel pamphlets. The ground of the connection, the matrix of crossbreeding, is the situatedness of each quarrel in the marketplace. In the Marprelate controversy, Nashe and Harvey both wrote on the side of "proper" authority. Though Nashe was a hired gun and Harvey a volunteer, they, like the bishops, had an interest in preserving a distinction between the marketplace and other traditionally recognized sites of discursive authority. Their subsequent opposition in the quarrel revisits the ambiguities of discourse situated in the marketplace. Perhaps because the quarrel was detached from pressing matters of state policy and yet engaged so many personages - commentators, both more and less learned, and the interests of nonwriters, printers, publishers, and Privy Councillors - it brought into focus the the issues of publicity and the marketplace that had been implicit in the Marprelate controversy. The Harvey/Nashe quarrel per se consists of pamphlets exchanged between 1593 and 1596.6 The final pamphlet was Nashe's Have With You to Saffron Walden, published in 1596. But of course the quarrel was not a discrete event. Its incidental provocation lies not only in the margins of the Marprelate Controversy, but also in comments made by Robert Greene and/or Nashe in pamphlets written in 1592.7 In 1599 the quarrel was recalled, as it were, in an order issued by the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury, where the following ban appears among other similar provisions: "That all NASSHES books and Doctor HARVEYES bookes be taken wheresoever they maye be found and that none of theire bookes bee ever printed hereafter" (Arber, 111:677-78). There is no evidence that any of the books was collected. By 1601 Thomas Nashe was dead; Harvey died thirty years later. The attention their quarrel attracted endured well into the seventeenth century. If Nashe was more often accorded victory, sympathy for Harvey was not lacking - the delicate balance of an ambivalent response nowhere more clearly revealed than by the fact that Pedantius, a Latin comedy pillorying Harvey which was performed at Cambridge in 1581, was not entered for publication until two days after his death. Contemporaries understood the quarrel as a fraternal one ("Cambridge make thy two children friends", William Covell writes in 1595), but responded as partisans, recapitulating the quarrel.8 Modern critics have been bedeviled by the mix of fraternity and partisanship, searching for what R. B. McKerrow called "some inherent opposition" or "a conflict of principles" (TN, V:66-67).9 Yet the search for opposition tends to collapse it, revealing instead a "narcissism of minor differences," an explosion of personality rather than principle. "It is," Freud writes, "precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each

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other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other."10 I will argue here that the quarrel emerges from ambitions, not unique to Harvey and Nashe, that derive from their common "disposition," in Pierre Bourdieu's sense of the term - that is, from the Latin rhetorical education they had received together with the range of sociocultural expectations they, and others, attached to that education.11 The issues of the quarrel respond directly and indirectly to Mulcaster's concern about the oversupply of university-educated men. Contemporaries became partisans because the quarrel symptomatically expresses contradictions in the literate culture of the late sixteenth century, particularly those contradictions faced by learned men because of the ways in which their discourse was implicated in the marketplace of print. Indeed, the scandal of the quarrel lies in the fact that it staged the agon of learned men before a general public. More to the point, the scandal of the quarrel also yielded its most important effects; the exchange provoked both men to articulate the gaps and intersections between the pedagogical reproduction of learned men, the productivity to which they aspire as learned men, and the forms of production and reproduction available to them. From the perspective of learned men, the quarrel functions as an index of humanist response to the development of print culture, a chronological successor to the exemplarity of Erasmus's career, albeit on a reduced scale.12 At stake for both Harvey and Nashe is the position of the orator, of oratory, in a discursive field no longer delimited by institutional sites of high literacy and audiences whose rank and status could be predicted. Within literary studies, the operation of that field has been described in terms of an opposition between amateur and professional writing. Amateur writing is identified with a (limited) manuscript circulation whose purpose is to attest to the writer's accomplishment, learning, and fitness for patronage-based civil service. Professional writing, in contrast, is produced and circulated in the marketplace; it is done to make a living. Since at least the late nineteeth century, critics have posited a "stigma of print" that provoked (elite) writers either to withhold their work from publication or to apologize profusely for their entrance into print. In Richard Helgerson's influential revision of the paradigm, the opposition yields a third position, that of the laureate poet, self-consciously public, like the professional, and equally, if not more self-consciously affiliated with the amateur in claiming an elevated office in relation to civic moral and political concerns.13 Building on Richard Helgerson's model, a substantial body of recent critical work has explored the complicities and antipathies between print and manuscript circulation as well as the ways in which, to borrow Wendy Wall's formulation, "writers . . .

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manipulate[d] the 'stigma of print' by encoding it in terms that allowed them other kinds of authorization . . . reproducing] this stigma in published works as a way of safeguarding class distinctions and at the same time displacing] it onto sexual ideologies that reinforced the writers' masculine authority"(Imprint of Gender, 17). Arthur Marotti's extended engagement with the category of "amateur" reveals the permeability andflexibilityof the boundary between print and manuscript, long after publication in print becomes commonplace.14 A focus on oratory shifts the terms offered by this critical history. The orator cannot restrict or withhold the publication of his discourse and still fulfill his vocational desire, for oratory presupposes a "present" and public audience. Only schoolboys, it might be argued, are "amateur" orators. At the same time, however, a pamphlet oratory is compromised by its association with the commercial interests of the print market. The shift to the marketplace provokes gestures of self-authorization that cannot be assimilated to the prevailing critical distinction between amateur and professional modes. Nor can the orator be assimilated to the position of the laureate, however indebted the poet is to oratorical masters and precepts, for poetry claims a license from or elevation above the temporal concerns that oratory proper directly addresses. Insofar as the power of oratory is related to the extent of its audience, its validation in the marketplace depends not only on the authorization of speaker and discourse but also on the legitimation of the marketplace itself as a site of discursive production. Oratory is, moreover, the discourse of the ancient marketplace, the publicity of the agora. While Renaissance and classical oratory are broadly continuous in terms of their pedagogic situation, the commodification of discourse and the accumulation of textual property in the marketplace of print reconfigured oratory's relation to the publicity of the marketplace. The case of oratory foregrounds the problem of how the relations between a literary system and the economic structures with which it intersects might be figured. In the case of the Harvey/Nashe quarrel, the marketplace-situatedness of the pamphlet forum that gave rise to the scandal becomes a given in the partisan recapitulation of the quarrel whether, like John Davies, one judged Harvey the "winner" and lamented the spoiling of paper, or like Thomas Dekker, Samuel Rowlands, John Taylor and others, one took Nashe as a model. What resulted from the quarrel and its afterlife was a recognition of the pamphlet as a site of informal learned discourse, of public dialogue. Thus the significance of the quarrel lies in its adumbration of a new discursive place crucial to the elaboration of a public sphere. If, on the one hand, the differences between Harvey and Nashe dissolve in their

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shared commitment to (or desire for) a publicity supervised by learned men; on the other, those differences afford important indices to the work of negotiating the propriate interests of learned men with the property relations of the marketplace. The patrimony and the marketplace

Because Harvey reproduced his Cambridge education as a pedagogue, and because the ways in which he tried to use it so clearly mark both his commitment to its value and the problems of adapting it to the opportunities made available by the marketplace of print, I will focus initially on his practice.15 Appointed a lecturer in Greek in 1573, and subsequently, University Praelector in Rhetoric, Harvey advocated both a purified Ciceronianism and the clarifying, if simplifying, Ramist dialectic method. Harvey not only received and gave a Latin education, he also anticipated a career in which what Lisa Jardine calls "the art of reasonable discoursing" (62) would secure him either an academic or a political place. In Harvey's terms, the vocation he desired would have been grounded in "profounde and clerkly discourses" (GH, 1:61) as his self-representation in the discourse on earthquakes in the Familiar Letters (1580) suggests.16 Yet the setting of that discourse as well as the larger setting of publication both evidence Harvey's desire that his learning find a wider audience, one not limited to the university that nonetheless recognizes the class- and gender-linked value and status of learning. Whereat the Gentleman smyling, and looking merrily on the Gentlewoomen, heere is a schoole poynt, quoth he, that by your leaves, I beleeve will poase the better scholler of you both. But is it not more than tyme, thynke ye, wee were at Supper? And if you be a hungered, Master H., you shall thanke no body but your selfe, that have holden us so long with your profounde and clerkly discourses, whereas our manner is to suppe at the least a long howre before this tyme. Beying set, and newe occasion of speeche ministered, our Supper put the Earthquake in manner out of our myndes, or at the leastwise, out of our Tongues: saving that the Gentlewoomen, nowe and then pleasantly tyhying between themselves, especially Mystresse Inquisitiva . . . repeated here, and there, a broken peece of that, which had been already sayde before Supper. With deepe judgement no doubt, and to marvellous great purpose, I warrant you after the manner of woomen Philosophers and Divines. (GH, 1:60-61)

The gentleman's smiling comment depreciates both Master H.'s discourse and the women ("heere is a schoole point... will poase the better scholler"). Harvey redeems himself by revalorizing the gentleman's patronizing remark in an antifeminist and clerkly tradition as he closes

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the episode: however closely they listen, the women acquire only "broken peece[s]." While the inquisitive women, the food-conscious gentleman, and the learned clerk can all be read as elements of light parody in Harvey's handling of the scene, in the scene itself, the women who laugh at Harvey, "tyhying between themselves" as they repeat bits of his discourse, suggest that Harvey is caught in a mesalliance between his vocational desire and his capacity to realize it. The larger setting of publication - the link to The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) and its dedicatory letter to "the most excellent and learned both orator and poete, MAYSTER GABRIELL HARVEY," and the inclusion of letters attributed to Spenser - however, belies the suggestion of mesalliance, positioning Harvey instead in exactly the position he desires as the learned producer, judge, and critic of public discourse. Yet the incompatibility between the clerkly and the mundane aspects of Harvey's vocational desire implicitly prophesied in the discourse on earthquakes is evident in all his literary remains, nowhere more so than in his marginalia.17 From the time he entered Cambridge, if not before, Harvey annotated his reading, both in the margins of texts and in notebooks of his own devising. Such a practice was entirely typical. Marginalia and commonplace books generated a supply of material and argument that could be drawn on in preparing discourses, whether written or oral. Gathered together, Harvey's marginalia present the career that his pedagogical experiences had led him to expect: that of the useful orator, the man who knows and can practice the art of discoursing. Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton's archeological investigation of Harvey's annotation of Livy reveals successive readings, over a period from the early 1570s to the mid 1580s, in contexts that approximate "public service" (49), for they are done in concert with active members of court or university governing circles.18 That service is "clerkly"; it takes place in the conversations of the study, in what Harvey would call "conference," leaving its traces in margins and letters rather than making an openly public appearance. The notebooks, roughly contemporary with Familiar Letters, present evidence of that desired, more mundane career in drafts and revisions of material for other pamphlets. In a recent essay, James Nielson argues that the draft material is at once full of gestures toward print publication revealed in cancellations, interlineal emendations and marginal notes about how material might be framed. At the same time, the draft material is literally unpublishable because Harvey's annotations are so thick and layered. The "real" Harvey, Nielson suggests, is a "manuscript Harvey" whose personality can be glimpsed between the variants in his notebook material. The career Harvey wanted, however, was emphatically public. In 1578 he was

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among the Cambridge dignitaries who disputed before Elizabeth at Audley End, an event Harvey commemorated and attempted to maximize by the preparation of manuscripts of Latin verse presented to the Queen and influential members of her court. And in 1580, with Lord Burghley's support, he unsuccessfully sought the University Oratorship at Cambridge, one of the most prestigious public positions to which an orator could aspire. In the marginalia Harvey sketched and anticipated a more public career by developing personae, some of them consistent over the years and the diverse texts he annotated, that represent the various discursive positions and interests his career might have established. The development of personae also follows a standard rhetorical precept: impersonation, or the adoption of a character in order to maximize oratorical effect. Harvey's personae - for example, Axiophilus (lover of the worthwhile), Chrysotechnus (the man with golden technical skill), Eutrapelus (the man who turns/tropes well) - are idealizations of the orator.19 Eutrapelus, for example, "scornes himself, till he teaches all other to pronounce more sensibly; to expresse more lively; to speake more effectually; to resolve & persuade more powrefully, then anie heretofore" (Stern, 177), while Angelus Furius is "the most eloquent Discourser, & most active Courser, not in this on Towne, or in that on Citty; but . . . in the whole Universal Worlde. No on so persuasively eloquent, or so incessantly industrious" (Stern, 177). Each persona implies a discursive performance, or an aspect of discursive performance, as it sets a standard. But Harvey's personae are all stillborn; they describe and name discursive performances that he does not enact. To be a good orator one must have both the assembled material, easily accessible, and the ability to call it up and frame it in a discourse at that moment.20 In his annotations to Quintilian's Institutionum oratoriarum X, vii, Harvey comments on this ability: "an extemporall Discourser upon every suddayn occasion, never unfurnished to pleade his owne or his frendes cause" {Marginalia, 118). A few pages on, he elaborates in another comment: A man, is but A chyld to speake of, and a very Cyphar in comparison, untill he hath perfitly attayned this faculty; to be of praesent liability to maintayne, and justify his owne, or his frendes Right. {Marginalia, 118) If manliness depends on proficiency in ex tempore discourse, it also awaits the advance preparation of sufficient material for "every suddayn occasion." The tension between the simplicity of the method and the extent of knowledge required to make the method viable is indicated in a note written in the endpapers of Harvey's Quintilian:

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A perfit Orator. A most excellent Pleader and singular discourser in any Civil Court, or otherwyse; not A bare Professor of any one certain faculty or A simple Artist in any one kynde: howbeit his principall Instrumentes are Rhetorique, for Elocution and Pronounciation, and Logique, for Invention, Disposition, and Memory. (Marginalia, 123)

Harvey's multiplication of personae can be seen as an attempt to enact the perfect orator who is not reducible to a single or simple expertise. At the same time, however, the fragmentation of the perfect orator into multiple personae and the (necessarily) dispersed marginalia recall the image of Master H.'s discourse on earthquakes turned into "broken peeces." What Harvey attributes to his audience, particularly his female audience, also defines his own learned practice. The marginalia suggest that Harvey's vocational training is itself a site of contradiction between the ideal of discursive authority that it accords the orator, the fragmentary practices by which it inculcates that ideal, and the occasions available for oratorical exercise. In classical rhetoric, the first step in composing an oration, invention, involves thefindingor locating of matter and argument; the second step, disposition, involves its arrangement. Both matter and argument were mentally gathered in topoi, loci, or places: one visited the places and there found the seat of one's argument (sedes argumenti). Topoi afford the mental space of oratory; "a place what it is," writes Thomas Wilson in The Art of Rhetorique (1560), "a place is called any roume, apt to receive things" (213). Place logic does not aim for certain, demonstrable truths, but for an amplitude of investigation and definition. The variety of perspectives it makes available to the orator potentially impedes strictly logical, or dialectical, rigor. Renaissance reworkings of classical rhetoric fall between two extremes in responding to the lack of methodological clarity in the notion of the places. At one extreme, as in the Ramist method, they separated invention and other issues of argumentation from rhetoric and attached it to logic, hoping thereby to achieve greater rigor of exposition. (Harvey follows Ramus in dissociating invention and disposition from rhetoric, but also simultaneously rejoins them in the definition of the perfect orator quoted above.) Or, as in the Erasmian model, they compounded the lack of clarity by overlaying invention with special attention to imitation. Erasmus's school text, De Copia, recommends the keeping of commonplace books as a storehouse, or copia, of material, mostly gleaned from one's reading, that could be used in preparing a discourse. Rather than clarifying the notion of the places, the Erasmian model implicitly generalizes it: copia is not only the storehouse, or source, but also the result - copia as a full discourse. Moreover, copia also names the discursive practice of imitation as well as the

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21

product of that practice. Erasmus's concentration on the plenitude and richness of discourse does not address problems in the rigor of exposition. In fact, the breaking of classical or other texts into pieces according to the arrangement of one's commonplace book more easily lends itself to a discourse of conjoined fragments, a problem to which both Harvey and Nashe call attention.22 The stillborn discourses of Harvey's copious marginalia and fragmented perfect orator attest to the problem of moving from invention to disposition. Harvey has a plentiful "store" but something impedes its use. The oratorical notions of both temporality (the sense of occasion and the virtuosity implied by ex tempore practice) and spatiality (the mental space of place logic and the discursive field produced and defined by learned men) are necessarily redefined by the social relations of print. Erasmus's well-known responses to the alteration produced by print include repeated apologies that he has been rushed into print and continual revisions, additions, and republications. While print allowed Erasmus's discourse to be copious and widely circulated, it also placed contradictory temporal pressures on his writing practices. On the one hand, the circulation of his writing where there were presses rushes him into print, while on the other, those presses afford him the opportunity to return and do it again, and again. For Harvey, as for Erasmus, the opportunities print affords are ones he wants to use to his advantage. The publication of Ciceronianus (1577) and Rhetor (1578) particularly advertises his ex tempore practice; Ciceronianus is, he boasts, "the sort [of speech] that I was able to fashion in aboutfivedays" (37). By the publication, two years later, of the Familiar Letters, Harvey attempts to move beyond the university to London and a wider audience. But, while publication in the vernacular increases the potential audience, it also increases the risk, as the circulation of his work beyond university and scholarly circles exposes it and him: they muste needs in all haste no remedye be sett to sale in Bartholomewe and Sturbridge fayer, with what lack ye Gentlemen? I pray you will you see any freshe new bookes? Looke, I beseeche you, for your loove and buie for your moonye. Let me yet borrowe on cracked groate of your purse for this same span new pamflett. I wisse he is a University man that made it, and yea, highlye commended unto me for a greate scholler. I marry, good syr, as you saye, so it shoulde appeare in deede by his greate worke . . . will iijd fetch it? (Letterbook, 59)

Publication entails both a commitment to a temporal sequence beyond one's control ("all haste no remedy") and the marketplace; the marketplace willy-nilly reduces a "greate scholler" to the price of his "prostituted devices" (Letterbook, 119), threepence. For Harvey, the

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ambivalence of print arises not only from the alterations it induces in the temporality of his writing, but from the relocation of his discourse in the marketplace - especially without the signifiers (such as Latin) that would mark his status as a learned man. Thus Harvey's fantasy of publication has a double movement of fear and desire; his inevitable degradation in the marketplace is compensated by his renown: the great scholar and his great work. Other draft material reframes his ambivalence: "ye have prejudiced my good name forever in thrustynge me thus on the stage to make tryall of my extemporall faculty and to play Wylsons or Tarletons parte" (Letterbook, 67). Here publication is again linked with a commercial forum that exposes Harvey; moreover, he fantasizes his degradation as an oral (and theatrical) performance that makes his learned ability in ex tempore argument indistinguishable from the improvisations of Tarlton.23 Tarlton is famous for the "extemporal faculty," which is, for Harvey, the sign of oratorical manliness. Harvey invokes Tarlton's name in an effort to keep his practice distinct from Tarlton's, but in the scene he imagines, the printed text, itself figured as a theatrical space, mediates fantasies of oral performance, thus restoring to Harvey the orator's ex tempore speech. The orator generates his ex tempore discourse out of the "store" or copia he has assembled for "suddayn occasions." The marketplace of print transforms his copia as well as the rhythm of production. To the meanings of copia as abundance, eloquence, and imitation is added that of Copy, textual property, and copy, the book in its commodity form. In the marketplace of print, the orator's copia is always, definitively, someone else's property. Unpublished, Harvey's marginalia remain his, surrounding the texts on which he exercises his proprietary claim as a learned man. Nashe's first foray into print under his own name, The Anatomy of Absurdity (1589), also announces itself as the obvious product of a rhetorical education, but without the dignifying status that the University Praelectorship gave to Harvey's published orations. The title page promises a text "compiled by T. Nash." "Compiled" makes no claim of authority; rather it suggests that Nashe's text consists of acknowledged authorities gathered together. Nashe's own description, in a puff at the end of the Preface to Menaphon, is more specific than the "compiled" of the title page: readers may "chance to meete it [The Anatomy] in Paules? he says, "shaped in a new suit of similitudes" (TN, 111:324-25). "Similitude" is an argumentative topic and "a new suit of similitudes" aptly describes The Anatomy's discourse, which proceeds by citing a classical example and then launching a comparison: "And

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even as Macedon Phillip . . . so I . . . " ; "Plautes saith . . . for my part I meane to suspende my sentence, and to let an author of late memorie be my s p e a k e r . . . " (TN, 1:13). As Nashe knew, "similitude" was considered a simplistic way of constructing an argument. The full context of the puff in the Preface to Menaphon attempts to turn his implication in what he criticizes into a strength and a sign of promise: And heere Authoritie hath made a full point: in whose reverence insisting I cease to expose to your sport the picture of those Pamphleters and Poets, that make a patrimonie of In speech, and more than a younger brothers inheritance of their Abcie. Reade favourably, to incourage me in the firstlings of my folly, and perswade your selves, I will persecute those idiots and their heirs unto the third generation, that have made Art bankerout of her ornaments, and sent Poetry a begging up and downe the Countrey. It may be, my Anatomie of Absurditie may acquaint you ere long with my skill in surgery, wherein the diseases of Art more merrily discovered may make our maimed Poets put together their blankes into the building of an Hospitall. If you chance to meete it in Paules, shaped in a new suite of Similitudes, as if, like the eloquent apprentice of Plutarch, it were propped at seven years end in double apparell, thinke his master hath fulfilled covenants, and onely cancelled the Indentures of dutie. If I please, I will thinke my ignorance indebted unto you that applaud it: if not, what rests, but that I be excluded from your courtesie, like Apocrypha from your Bibles? (77V, 111:324-25) A rhetorical education is the patrimony Nashe shares with Harvey, among others, and he introduces The Anatomy as an agent in restoring the wealth and health of that inheritance: he would that poets could build a common lodging/curing place. The very next words, however, indicate that the space poets do share is not their own, but "Paules" a churchyard, the property of landlords and the location of Stationers' Hall and many shops selling books. In the marketplace, patrimony is irrelevant: Nashe is an apprentice whose obligation to rhetorical masters is just done; he can begin his "day labor" (TN, 1:31, 33, 180, 333; 111:313). Inheritance and apprenticeship imply two different economic relations to rhetorical wealth: inheritance suggests a property owner and apprenticeship a journeyman artisan. The rhetorical masters whom Nashe served are associated with the university and inherited wealth of rhetorical plenty. He first distinguishes himself from the "pamphleters and poets" whom he criticizes by claiming to restore the patrimony of rhetoric through the persecution of "those idiots and their heirs" who have bankrupted it. "Younger brothers," it would seem, are not entitled to exploit rhetorical wealth. But this group includes Nashe. In tracing his movement from the university to the marketplace, therefore, Nashe replaces the inheritance model with an artisanal conception of discursive

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production, one that allows him to formulate a relation between his rhetorical wealth and the marketplace. Thus, the degradation of the marketplace that Harvey fears, Nashe embraces, but with an awareness of its cost. In Pierce Penilesse (1592) he stages such an embrace in several ways, most obviously by Pierce's appeal to the gold-hoarding devil, and more precisely in an exchange between the Knight of the Post and Pierce. When the Knight of the Post tells Pierce that "it is well done to practice thy witte, but (I beleeve) our Lord will cun thee little thanks for it," Pierce replies: "the worse for me . . . if my destinie be such, to lose my labour every where, but I meane to take my chance, be it good or bad" (TN, 1:217). Pierce surveys a world in which all kinds of patrimony are misspent, and wealth, if not misspent, is hoarded. The vocabulary of Pierce Penilesse's premise resonates with the vocabulary of the print shop: a "devil" is someone who takes sheets off the press and does other odd jobs without the promise of vocational training - a true day laborer, and "hell" is the pot into which worn-out type is thrown.24 Pierce's devil is a "blind Retailer" who is "a greedy purchaser of newes" and so astute in his purchases "that Hel (which at the beginning was but an obscure Village) is now become a huge Cittie, whereunto all countries are tributary" (TN, 1:161). If "hell" is also waste type, then the Retailer's purchase of news has generated sheets and sheets of printed text. (These sheets reappear, as wastepaper or the materials for making paper converted into clothing, in the descriptions of Greedinesse and Dame Niggardize at the beginning of Pierce's supplication.) The printer's devil and the Retailer who purchases news are at the bottom and the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy of the printing trade. The Knight of the Post, who promises to deliver Pierce's supplication to the devil, is also an alter ego who embodies various possible positions of the orator-in-print: a "knight of the post" is alternately one who acts as a courier, one whose words can be bought, one who is subject to the pillory for what he has said or done, or one whose image, words, or debt appear on posts.25 Pierce's understanding of the Retailer's situation spurs him to write: These manifest conjectures of Plentie, assembled in one common-place of abiliie, I determined to clawe Avarice by the elbow, till his full belly gave mee a full hande, and lette him bloud with my penne (if it might be) in the veyne of liberalitie: and so (in short time) was this Paper-monster Pierce Penilesse, begotten. (TN, 1:161) These words immediately follow the description of hell I quoted earlier. In describing the birth of the pamphlet, Pierce lays the vocabulary of rhetoric over a situation already charged with connotations of the

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printing trade. Avarice stands in for the Retailer from whom Pierce hopes to acquire gold; Avarice is also among the topics out of which Nashe develops Pierce's discourse, structured in part as a treatment of the seven deadly sins. In the image of Avarice's belly full of "plentie," Nashe conflates the "store" of rhetorical wealth with the Retailer's hoard of monetary wealth and out of that "full belly" the "Paper-monster" is born. Later Pierce offers an image of another topic, Sloth, as a Stationer whose only liveliness lies in the keeping of a full belly: If I were to paint Sloth . . . by Saint John the Evangelist I sweare, I would draw it like a Stationer that I knowe . . . who . . . ^tands stone still, and speakes not a word . . . and so all the day, gaping like a dumbe image, he sits without motion, except at such times as he goes to dinner or supper: for then he is as quicke as other three, eating six times every day. (TN, 1:209)

The wealth that allows the Stationer to eat six times a day is generated out of the Copies he owns and the copies he sells, while Pierce dines "with Duke Humphrey," that is, not at all. What Nashe's semantic play traces is the process by which the orator-in-print's copia becomes the Stationer's Copy/copies. The clawing of Avarice yields two pounds, and the Stationer, Sloth, acquires textual property as well as money out of the orator's rhetorical wealth. Sloth does not work or speak, he lives by the work and speech of others. Nashe's conflation of topics, such as Avarice and Sloth, with the material relations of the book trade begins to suggest how the orator's spatializing techniques are reoriented to produce a discourse that uses them to map the redefined field in which the orator is implicated. Harvey gives no indication that he shares or even understands Nashe's playful but serious analysis of the conditions of oration-in-print; and he has none of the awareness of the medium the graphics of the page - that Nashe repeatedly exploits. Yet evidence suggests that both men lived with and worked for their respective "printers." In the exchanges on this subject, Nashe insists that Harvey worked for John Wolfe in return for his board and that he paid Wolfe, or went into his debt, for printing his pamphlets; Harvey jeers at Nashe's association with John Danter. If both men indeed lived and worked with their "printers," they did the same sort of work: copyediting, proof-correcting, perhaps translation and utilitarian sorts of writing. They worked, however, for different kinds of businesses. By 1592 Wolfe was a publisher; he had no print shop and he derived his income from the management of his Copies, the management of City printing, and the sale of books.26 Harvey undoubtedly appreciated Wolfe's interest in the international trade (he was a regular at the Frankfurt Book Fair) as well

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as his status in the Stationers' Company. A New Letter of Notable Contents (1593) is openly addressed to "my loving friend John Wolfe, Printer to the Cittie" - as if Harvey were a latter day Erasmus with his printer. Danter was, for the most part, a job printer, though he also owned more than a quarter of the Copies he printed. The kinds of books Danter printed are also and similarly represented in Wolfe's list; the difference between them is not so much one of literary taste or judgment as one of socioeconomic status.27 Danter practiced a craft while Wolfe was a businessman, a retailer, and an investor. Neither Harvey nor Nashe directly admits his employment in the trade. I have paused over the possibility because the Wolfe/Danter story neatly exemplifies the issues of similarity and difference between Harvey and Nashe. Wolfe and Danter were members of the same Company, apprenticed in fact to the same respected founding member, John Day, though twenty years apart. They shared in the production of books and were interested in similar material; yet Wolfe was a capitalist in the trade, and Danter a worker/artisan. Harvey and Nashe also served comparable "apprenticeships" in the same place, a generation apart, and they were interested in similar issues. They each had a stake in the production of a discursive space in which their rhetorical training could be put to use. Their quarrel calls attention to the ways in which the strictly economic capital of the book trade disrupted the systems of patronage and institutional high literacy that supported learned men. For Harvey and Nashe, the issue is whether or how the value of their education might be deployed in a marketplace that had redefined their patrimony as capital - the dissemination of the texts of learned men and the texts that produced learned men was the basis on which the print trade solidly established itself. I have already traced how the accumulation and protection of textual property precipitated structural problems in the book trade and increasingly positioned printers as labor in relation to that capital. It could be argued that the book trade's accumulation of textual property had a doubling effect, reproducing the patrimony of learned men simultaneously as economic capital and as cultural capital. The attraction of such an argument arises from its suggestion of a deep connection between economic and cultural capital, one that makes cultural capital neither a metaphor nor a concept that depends on a loose notion of capital as an accumulated power of one kind or another, but an effect of economic capital, a product of its transformation of social relations. Such an argument, however, still begs the question of the relation between economic capital and the forms, signs, and values designated by cultural capital. Does cutural capital denote a parallel realm of value, one that

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simultaneously operates independently of the marketplace and has the capacity to enter it without being subsumed into its terms? Or is cultural capital to be understood as a compromise formation in which the threat of subsumption into alien terms is accommodated by a partial internalization of those terms? If these questions emerge from and pertain to the theorization and critique of a fully developed capitalism, the problem they address is evident in a conspicuously raw and open fashion in the response of learned men to the marketplace at the end of the sixteenth century. On the one hand, those responses to the pressures that the (proto)capitalist organization of the book trade exerted on the discursive field are beset by the problem that the language available to describe that organization - and the marketplace - lags behind their operative structural articulation. On the other, like the sliding lexicon of those discourses that sought to regulate the book trade, or the emphatically artisanal language of the Stationers' monopoly, the terms and tropes learned men used do succeed in laying bare the real and symbolic economies in which they find themselves. I use the term "cultural capital," whether it is taken as a metaphor, an oxymoron, or an immaterial entity, because it draws attention to the struggle over issues of labor, mastery, property, and value at the intersection of the discursive field and the marketplace. A newly freed printer's capital was money invested in press and type and available for production costs; Harvey's and Nashe's capital was intellectual, the "store" they had accumulated in their rhetorical education. Harvey spent his life accumulating a larger and larger "store;" Nashe deployed his "store" and reshaped it. Though Nashe jokes about his "durtie day labor" and Harvey repeatedly asserts his learning and judgment, they do so in identical forums. What distinguishes them is primarily their relation to their labor and their capital. The "store" of an orator, accumulated over time, is what he has to invest in his writing. The logic of capital requires the deployment of the "store," which suggests that Harvey is a miser who hoards rather than invests. But Harvey is not quite a miser; he does not so much hide his wealth from view as flash it in the hope of finding a suitable investment opportunity. In this sense, Harvey is a failed capitalist. Nashe, on the other hand, invests. In the marketplace, however, the orator's investment is redefined as labor, not capital, and both the control of the product and monetary return on the investment accrue to the Copy owner. From the beginning of his career, Nashe exploits artisanal metaphors to define his vocation and thereby acquires a means of asserting control over his investment when it is conceived as labor. There are two points to be made here. First, in the late sixteenth-century development of the

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printing trade, the artisan could be either a protocapitalist (a publisher, a retailer) or a craftsman (a printer, a compositor), or both. Second, the opposite of an artisan is not a capitalist, but a landowner. For Harvey, his rhetorical "store" is the analogue of landed wealth; he cannot surrender it to the marketplace without endangering his status as a learned man. The patrimonial model of discursive production to which both Harvey and Nashe appeal is one in which the emphasis falls on the lineal transmission of inherited learning, on cultural values whose wealth the writer receives, protects, and reproduces. This model is viable only to the extent that such discourse is also valorized at culturally privileged sites. That is, a patrimonial model depends on an analogy between discourse and inherited property (and/or the familial lineage such property implies). The estate itself does not enter the market, and often the writing is withheld, circulating privately, not subjected to the vulgarity of common access or marketplace exchange. If the fruits of the land do enter the market, the value of the estate remains intact, and the landowner/writer is thus not subjected directly to the relations of the marketplace. In a broadening of the model, patrimonial claims depend on access to a site of discursive authority not immediately or obviously implicated in the marketplace (pulpit, podium, or the networks of patronage implied by the throne). They can be staked by a dedication to a prominent (noble) person that implies patronage, by affiliation with a learned textual tradition, and by disavowal of seriousness or intent to publish, for example. That one could avow the seriousness and import of one's discourse (by making a learned claim for it) or disavow its seriousness and import (by making a claim of leisure, calling it a "trifle" and/or associating it with female readers) and yet in either case be making a claim on the patrimony suggests how powerfully patrimonial claims are anchored in conceptions of class and gender that set elite males apart from the marketplace. In contrast, an artisanal model of discursive production implies a set of economic relations in which some form of market is constitutive and emphasizes the craft, or technique, involved in the making of objects. Discourse isfiguredas the product of labor and inevitably alienated from the laborer, who is compensated for the object made. The artisanal claim is one of control over the making, of mastery in the shaping of objects. The technique of an artisan is also patrilineally transmitted, protected as the "mystery" of the guild. Thus, the patrimonial and artisanal models of discursive production are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, Renaissance writers, like their classical forebears, utilized both alternately to claim a transcendent place for discourse and to recognize its alienation from the producer. But the exchange relations and accumulating textual property

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of the book trade make the distinction between patrimonial and artisanal models weightier. Within the trade, I have argued, the artisanal model represented an alignment of the skills and materials of production with financial investment and return that no longer existed. In its figural use, the artisanal model emphasizes skill and talent because those are the qualities a writer can claim as his own. The artisanal model is strategically effective because it can overtly acknowledge the marketplace and yet figure a position of mastery for the writer. At the same time, however, it serves as the means by which patrimonial claims construct their difference, their putative independence of the market. In a patrimonial figuration, the positions Richard Helgerson distinguishes as amateur and laureate are brought together, revealing a common core interest in being apart from or above the marketplace, rather than a difference arising from the means of dissemination (manuscript or print). Correlatively, the figure of the artisan potentially habilitates the professional to a position of poetic integrity and seriousness that Helgerson reserves for the laureate. I will return to these figures and their problematic relations to the marketplace in the next chapter. For now, I want to note that neither a patrimonial nor an artisanal model provides a harmonious alignment of cultural and economic capital, for the patrimonial model disavows economic capital altogether and the artisanal position is on the verge of fracturing into the opposed interests of labor and capital, precipitating the early modern writer between those interests. What the Harvey/Nashe quarrel negotiates in an exemplary fashion is the status of cultural capital qua capital. If printers and writers alike are in the position of labor in relation to the economic capital of the book trade, the situation of writers is complicated by their access to cultural capital and authority. In the exchange between Harvey and Nashe, the faultlines in the field of discursive production clearly emerge, but they are no less contradictory for that clarity. Here again the example of Erasmus is instructive. Erasmus positioned his discourses in the marketplace by identifying himself with the patrimony, strategically shaping and presenting that wealth of inherited learning and advocating the means of reproducing it. But the very success of his effort precluded its repetition. From an artisanal perspective, we might say that Erasmus betrayed the "mystery," even as he claimed the position of patriarch-scholar. The dissemination of the patrimony of learned men in the marketplace necessarily compromised their propriate interests by making that accumulated learning generally available. For Harvey and Nashe, the issue is whether or how they might nonetheless claim a privileged position in relation to those knowledges and skills.

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In Foure Letters (1592), the first of his quarrel pamphlets, Harvey claims to be reentering "to a public view" in order to respond to an attack on his family in Greene's Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592) and Nashe's Pierce Penilesse. This rationale accords with his ideal of an ex tempore practice: one is not a man unless he is "of praesent hability to maintayne and justifye his owne, or his frendes Right." But he also suggests that he might be moved "to publish many traictes, and Discourses, that in certaine considerations I meant ever to conceale, and to Dedicate unto none, but unto obscure Darknesse, or famous Vulcane" (GH, 1:181). This readiness for publication indicates that his participation in the exchange of pamphlets with Nashe is continuous with the effort of his earlier publications to secure his reputation (and an unspecified place) as a learned man. In Foure Letters, Harvey freely engages in an invective against Robert Greene and, over Greene's dead body, as it were, attempts a reprise of his 1580 role as learned commentator and critic. He is enabled in this double move by Nashe's presence. He seeks, he says, "the good amendement of the one, by the naughty example of the other" (GH, 1:184). Greene is associated with the degradation of the marketplace of print ("Is this Greene with the running Head, and the scribling Hand, that never linnes putting-forth new, newer & newest bookes of the maker?" [GH, 1:187]), and Nashe with an effort that might be redeemed by Harvey's encouragement and "the restorative Nectar of the Gods" (GH, 1:198). In Pierce's Supererogation, the last of Harvey's quarrel pamphlets and his last published writing, Nashe joins Greene and others in irredeemable degradation as Harvey defends the honor of learning and judgment by means of an intensely charged critique of Nashe. Yet the marginalia provide evidence of a continuing interest in popular literature. His 1598 annotations of Speght's Chaucer compare Chaucer's tales to those in Thomas Deloney's books and The Cobler of Canterbury. He imagines entering print again, evidently with the lesson of his engagement with Nashe in mind, as Anonymous: "More of Chaucer & his Inglish traine in a familiar discourse of Anonymous" (Marginalia, 231). The anonymity that would protect Harvey and yet allow him to enter print is the reverse side of the ignominy he fears as the consequence of implication in vernacular print. While such a hypothetical compromise protects him from notoriety, it also denies him fame: the authority of Anonymous's text is not his. The occasion provided by the Quip and Pierce Penilesse offers another compromise solution: by attacking

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someone else for notoriety, Harvey can enter print in his own name and identify himself with the side of learning, of proper authority. The position Harvey assumes in Foure Letters is one he constructs for himself in a piece he wrote addressing the Marprelate controversy in 1589. "An Advertisement for Papp-hatchett and Martin Marprelate" begins with the question of decorum, recalling the indecorum of medieval festivals of misrule made decorous because they were supervised by the church and by a "Lord of Misrule," "a needefull governer or Dictatour to set thinges in order" (G//, 11:128). Harvey enters the indecorum of the pamphlet controversy in order to effect a transformation of misrule into rule in late-Tudor terms. He does so by developing what looks like a neutral or nonpartisan position. He grants validity to Martin's censures by acknowledging imperfections throughout church history, and he suggests that the learned men of the realm, ecclesiastical and temporal, can address those imperfections, thus both satisfying and nullifying Martin's censure. He suspects, in fact, that there are no true parties, only men jostling for place, and that if the government were to offer preferments to the Martins, their opposition would disappear (GH, 11:157). "Government," however, is precisely what is at issue in the Marprelate Controversy and Harvey's response assumes that the government is neither a party per se to the quarrel, nor subject to partisan politics, but a divinely stipulated order: "There is a God above, that heareth prayers: a Prince beneath, that tendereth supplications: Lords on both sides, that Patronize good causes: learned men, that desire Conference" (G//, 11:166). The learned men who could resolve the controversy would do so in "conference," not in print. Not surprisingly, Harvey's class model inflects his analysis of the Marprelate discourse. He associates the pamphleteers with the marketplace world of fools and ballad singers, with "Upsy-downe" (G//, 2:145) and "Universal Topsy-turvy" (G//, 11:132). Martin's discourse, he argues, arises from "a popular foundation or mechanicall plott" (G//, 11:151). By implication, it can claim no public authority: "Publique projectes become publique persons . . . but private persons, and the common crewes of Platformers, might have most use of private designements" (GH, 11:199). It is, therefore, an empty discourse: "No point of Cunning, to the Tale of the Tub: that is the profounde mysterie, and very Secret of Secrets" (GH, 11:213-14). Harvey's class logic deauthorizes Martin's discourse by means of the circular argument it allows: to have a popular foundation is to have no foundation at all, no basis from which to claim or exercise authority. Harvey's specific criticism of Martin's discourse, however, belies his effort to assert that its authority is unfounded. The Martins, he says,

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"imagin they know all, and conceit an absolute omnisufficiencie in their owne platformes" (G//, 11:138). The charge is twofold: they presume to design an ecclesiastical policy, to articulate a "platform," and they do so in pamphlets: "imagine they can in a Pamflet, or two, contrive such an omnisufficient and incorruptible Method of Ecclesiasticall government, as could not by any private meditation, or publike occasion be found-out, with the studdy or practise of fifteene hundred years" (G//, 11:134). Harvey uses "platform" most obviously in the sense of plan, design, or model. The "design" sense of "plat," however, has topographical and spatial implications that are closely allied with a material sense, "plat" or "plot" as the site on which the design could be constructed. The alliance, in fact, produces the word: a plat/plot allows something to be formed. To platform is thus not only to design, but also to build and to have the capacity to execute.28 Harvey's use of the word depends on this association with authority, but because he is arguing that the Martins pretend authority on matters of government, "platform" becomes associated with a plan that cannot be realized, that has no foundation. The restriction of meaning - a platform is only a design - is in the service of his argument that the Martin's discourse is groundless. As Harvey the learned man knows, that platform is but words, paper, and ink and thus ephemeral, unlike the "real" platforms from which authority speaks - the throne, pulpit and podium. But Harvey, who dreams of being a perfect orator, also knows that his dream depends on his capacity to construct a platform - a coherent design - out of his words. Though he scorns the Martins who claim such a position, who "importunatly affect a perfect platforme" (G//, 11:176) or "platforme the most-exquisite designes of pure Perfection" (GH, 11:197), his hyperbolic language betrays an admiration that canfindno regular expression, given his overt claim that Martin's discourse is empty and without foundation. I would argue that the Martins thrill Harvey precisely by their platforming; "their owne platformes" collectively establish a discursive field and thus the possibility of Harvey's own oratory. Harvey's understanding of his own ability to speak therefore requires that he acknowledge the Martins' self-made platform while he simultaneously denies them any other claim to authority and thus enables himself to claim the authoritative position, to assert his own comparative legitimacy. Harvey is aware of being caught in a contradictory position beyond his control only to the extent that, once again, he imagines that the arguments compelling him into print will result in his betrayal: "Why should learning be a niggard of his excellent gifts, when Impudencie is so prodigall of his rascall trish-trash? What daintie or neat Judgment beginneth

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not to hate his old loove, and loath his ancient delight, the Presse, the most-honorable Presse, the most-villainous Presse" (GH, 11:218). As an "old loove," the press is an instrument of learning, judgment, or Harvey's will; as a traitor, the instrument acquires a will of its own. Rather than understanding the press as an instrument subject to control by those other than learned men, Harvey not only anthropomorphizes it, but does so in criminalized and class-inflected terms. In Foure Letters, Harvey calls Greene and Nashe "Platformers of vaine Fantasicallity" (GH, 1:223) and the terms of his criticism are almost identical to those elaborated in the "Advertisement." "[E]very Martin Junior, and Puny Pierce, a monarch in the kingdome of his owne humour . . . will in a fantasicall Imagination, or, percase in a melancholy moode, presume farther, by infinite degrees, then the learnedest men in a civill Commonwealth, or the sagest counsellors in a Princes Court" (GH, 1:233). He criticizes Pierce Penilesse more specifically: "it is rightformally conveyed, according to the stile and tenour of Tarletons president, his famous play of the seaven Deadly sinnes" (GH, I:194).29 Leaving aside for the moment the association with Tarlton, Harvey's criticism is accurate. Pierce Penilesse is structured as a sequential examination of the seven deadly sins; like the argument by similitude that characterizes the Anatomy of Absurdity, the structure of Pierce Penilesse is unsophisticated. Harvey criticizes the rhetorical structure of Nashe's pamphlet in order that Nashe may subsequently improve his designs, as the appeal to Nashe immediately following suggests: Be a Musitian & a Poet unto thy self, that art both . . . Oh solace thy miraculous selfe, and cheere the Muses in cheering thy dainty soule, sweetlie drunken with their delitious Helicon, and the restorative Nectar of the Gods. What can I say more? . . . And so much briefly touching thy deere selfe: whome I hope never to finde so pathetically distressed, or so Tragically disguised againe. (GH, 1:198) The act of criticizing the design of Nashe's pamphlet tacitly assumes that the pamphlet is a platform, a position from which Nashe can exercise authority. At the same time, however, Harvey associates that platform with Tarlton, that is, with an abject figure of his own vocational desire. The particular charge of Harvey's identification with Tarlton inflects the analysis Harvey produces in Foure Letters when he creates the biography of Greene as a degraded author. He, they say, was the Monarch of Crossbiters, and the very Emperor of shifters. I was altogether unacquainted with the man, & never once saluted him by name: but who in London hath not heard of his dissolute and licentious living; his fonde disguising of a Master of Arte with ruffianly haire, unseemely apparrell,

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and more unseemelye Company . . . his piperly Extemporizing, and Tarletonizing . . . his fine coosening of Juglers, and finer juggling with cooseners . . . his continual shifting of lodginges . . . his obscure lurkinge in basest corners . . . his impudent pamphletting, phantasicall interluding, and desperate libelling . . . his forsaking of his owne wife . . . his contemning of Superiours, deriding of other, and defying of all good order. (G//, 1:168-69) E a c h time Harvey tells the life story, the m a n and the pamphlets are inseparable: the greene maister of the Blacke Arte . . . the father of misbegotten Infortunatus . . . the Patriarch of Shifters. (GH, 1:182) Peruse his famous bookes . . . [find] a scholler, a Discourser, a Courtier, a ruffian, a Gamester, a Lover, a Souldier, a travailler, a Merchant, a Broker, an Artificer, a Botcher, a pettifogger, a Player, a Coosener, a Rayler, a beggar, an Omnigatherum, a Gay nothing: a Stoarehouse of balde and baggage stuffe, unworth the aunswering, or reading. (G//, 1:189-90)

Harvey's account renders the author identical with the authorial personae, and with the printed discourses, the pamphlets. The man "shift[s] his lodgings," he writes about shifters, he is the "Patriarch of Shifters." Harvey uses "shift" both to suggest change and consequent unlocatability and to imply criminality. In its older senses, still current at the end of the sixteenth century, however, "shift" also refers to a legal apportioning or distribution and to the capacity to organize things or events toward a purpose, in the sense of providing for oneself. "Shift," in other words, is a floating term, its connotations caught up in the socioeconomic transformations of an emerging market economy. In 1581, Richard Mulcaster (whom Harvey read closely) used "shifter" to refer to men who could not find preferment, who had no place: "how can it be that such shifters must needes shake the very strongest piller of that State in where they live, and loyter without living." Harvey's use of "shift" and "shifter" participates in Mulcaster's concern. Within Harvey's conflation of the man and the discourse, "shifter" at once describes Greene's lack of social place - he has neither home nor position - and Greene's phantom presence in his pamphlets, now this persona in this pamphlet, now that in another: versions of Greene proliferate alarmingly. "Better an hundred Ovides were banished," Harvey suggests, "then the State of Augustus endangered, or a soveraigne Empire infected" (GH, 1:192). In Pierces Supererogation Nashe adds increased danger: "One Ovid was too-much for Roome; and one Greene too-much for London: but one Nashe more intollerable then both" (G//, 11:94). I have already argued that Harvey's use of "platform" raises the issue of authority and describes the pamphlet as a sort of platform. "Shifter" describes the

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writer of a pamphlet in accord with Harvey's unwillingness to invest a popular foundation with authority: shifters have no place, and therefore no authority. From the perspective of the marketplace of print, however, "shifting" provides a metaphor that describes the writing practices encouraged by print's ability to make and meet repeated "suddayn occasions." Writers whose only platform is that provided by the press are willy-nilly implicated in shifting in all of its senses - in making do, in repeatedly claiming and apportioning discursive places. "Shifting" also describes the circulation of discourse in pamphlet form, not easily traceable to an original place and always susceptible to relocation. The logic of Harvey's response to Greene and Nashe implies the ban order issued by the bishops in 1599, suppressing Harvey's and Nashe's pamphlets, among others. The ban, however, is in some sense counter to Harvey's desire. In 1598 Harvey is not only still planning his own discourses, but also looking for preferment. In a letter to Robert Cecil petitioning for the Mastership of Trinity Hall, Harvey links the real and metaphorical platforms he desires: "if I were setled in a place of competent maintenance, or had but a foundation to build upon," Harvey claims, "I can in one yeare publish more then anie Inglishmen hath hetherto dun" (G//, III: xxvi, xxvii). Harvey's critique is not lost on Nashe, who uses it as a prescription for authorial practice. That is, Nashe exploits the requirements imposed by the marketplace of print and the strictures that Harvey articulates by making both platforming and shifting the basis of his virtuoso performance. His concern to establish the position of an orator in relation to the marketplace of print is already present in the premise to Pierce Penilesse. Harvey's responsive articulation of abjected vocational desire sharpens Nashe's further investigation into and ambivalent defense of the conditions of pamphlet oratory. To speak again, he shifts and takes on another persona, suitable to a new occasion. Christ's Tears self-consciously borrows the platform of the pulpit; The Unfortunate Traveller invokes the throne, and punningly, the page; and Nashes Lenten Stuffe founds itself on the representation of a city, thus incorporating the full sense of platform and making the metaphorical platform coterminous with its representation of the "omni-sufficiencie" of Yarmouth. In Have With You to Saffron Walden Nashe completes his revision of Harvey's strictures by answering Harvey's story of a degraded author in kind. In the epistle to the reader, he comments on the form of his pamphlet: it is a dialogue between five literate men, "these four, with myselfe, whom I personate as the Respondent in the last place," who discuss the life and writings of Gabriel Harvey.

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Like Pierce Penilesse, Pierce Penilesse Respondent parades as an author, the author of the life of Harvey. But Pierce Penilesse Respondent is also an orator whose audience is immediately present to him and he to them. In other words, Nashe represents the author as an orator speaking ex tempore before an actively engaged audience, "exercis[ing] [his] writing tongue" (7W, 111:33). Nashe's staging brings the pamphlet oratory imagined by Harvey into further focus by representing an audience, a community of readers on whose assent the pamphlet orator's position depends. Pierce Penilesse Respondent's interlocutors are readers of Nashe's and Harvey's pamphlets and as he speaks to them he imagines his own metamorphosis into printed form: You shall see me (like a Crier, that when he hath done kire-elosoning it, puts of his cap, and cries God save the Queene, and so steps into the next ale-house) steale out of your companie, before you bee aware, and hide my selfe in a Closet no bigger than would hold a Church Bible, till the beginning of Candlemas Terme, and then, if you come into Poules Church-yard, you shall meete mee. , 111:132-33)

In a pamphlet oratory, the only evidence of the speaker is the pamphlet, the printed discourse conveyed by the personae and by the medium, the paper and ink. Thus Nashe explicitly identifies his authorial personae with the medium at the same time as he insists on his presence elsewhere and his continuing capacity to produce impersonations, to play the orator in print. In print, the orator proceeds by means of surrogates, among whom are not only the personae he fashions but also the men who materially produce his discourse. Acknowledgment of the most basic requirement imposed by the marketplace, the separation of the orator from both his audience and his personae, leads Nashe to locate his and Harvey's pamphlets among a community of readers and to identify himself among a community of producers. The wider community includes diverse practitioners and practices: playwriting, pamphlet writing, printing, even composing, as a letter ascribed to Henry Chettle in Have With You to Saffron Walden attests: / hold it no good manners (M. Nashe), being but an Artificer, to give D. Harvey the ly, though he have deserv'd it by publishing in Print you have done mee wrong, which privately I never found: yet to confirme be my Art in deed, what his calling forbids me to affirme in word, your booke being readie for the Presse, He square & set it out in Pages, that shall page and lackey his infamie after him (at least) while he lives, if no longer. Your old Compositer, Henry Chettle (7W, 111:131)

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Overtly offered to defend Nashe from the charge of abusing his friends, the letter also and more importantly addresses Harvey's argument that too close an affiliation with the popular and the marketplace results in exclusion from the fraternity of learned men and good poets. The letter characterizes Chettle's artisanal practice as enabling Nashe's answer. This move places Nashe among those entitled to answer Harvey, the fraternity of learned men, and it also places him in a fraternal relation to Chettle and his artisanal practice as a compositor. That is, the letter functions strategically to establish Nashe as a good brother simultaneously in relation to the learned man and the artisan. Chettle's practice is one of deeds, of squaring and setting pages, Nashe's one of words; together, the letter puns, they produce the pamphlet that "page[s] and lackey[s]" Harvey's infamy. My point here is not that Chettle actually composed the pages for Have With You to Saffron Walden, or even that he wrote the letter, but that by including the letter, Nashe represents the artisan and the learned man as members of a single fraternity including diverse crafts. Significantly, no mention is made of Chettle's own practice as a writer. Nashe invokes or invites the artisanal voice to affirm his authority and defend his position, but he controls the voice - the artisan affirms Nashe, not Nashe the artisan. The community of readers Nashe also invokes to defend his authority recalls the genteel company Harvey represented as his audience in the Familiar Letters. But Nashe's company is not gathered in a private house, whiling away the time before supper listening to a learned man explicate recent events. The scene of the dialogue is not located at all, or rather, the only scene is the pamphlet itself. The interlocutors begin by calling attention to the impossibility of locating Nashe, even as they call him by name: IMPORTUNO. What, Tom, thou art very welcome. Where hast thou bin this long time; walking in Saint Faiths Church under ground, that we could never see thee? Or hast thou tooke thee a chamber in Cole-harbour, where they live in a continual myst, betwixt two Brewhouses? CONCILI. Indeed we have mist you a great while, as well spiritually as corporally; that is, no lesse in the absence of your workes than the want of your companie: but now by your presence you will fully satisfie us in either. (7W, 111:25)

The punning on "mist," the playing with notions of absence and presence, and invocation of London place-names all point toward the problems of representing the discursive field. The dialogue synchronizes the field by representing the production and reception of discourse as simultaneous processes to which the reader bears witness. The London place-names indicate both where Nashe might be or might have been in

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his daily habitation of the city and the urban terrain that his pamphlet traverses. In other words, they establish representational coordinates for the discursive field he envisions and populates. The representational gesture anticipates the ensuing circulation of Nashe's pamphlet, its continuing existence in various places. Nashe envisions a community of readers, as if by multiplying readers he could insure the control he claims strategically, in the formal organization of his discourse (its dialogue plot), and ironically, in his ability to make the reader dance to the "light friskin of [his] wit," as he puts it in Lenten Stuffe. This is the dream of the perfect orator - maximum control and effect of his discourse - in a whimsically rather than nakedly authoritarian mode. In a gesture of empathic fraternity, Nashe offers the position he has constructed to Harvey. "Harvey and I (a couple of beggars) take upon us to bandie factions," he says in the preface to Have with you to Saffron Walden, because "the fire of our wit is left, as our onely last refuge to warme us" (TN, 111:19). "Bandying faction" recalls Greene's argument in Kind-Hartes Dreame; it is a means of creating discursive space, of putting wit to work so orators can stay warm. The discursive opportunity created involves interests other than oratorical ones, however, and in their bandying faction, Harvey and Nashe are each concerned to protect their interests as orators. Unlike Harvey, who claims an authority external to his pamphlet discourse (that of a learned man, standing and waiting for the call to a platform), Nashe makes his claim rest on pamphlet platforms materially and idiomatically inextricable from the marketplace. Nashe's effort to locate a privileged position for the orator-in-print requires him to master the marketplace in some fashion, so that it no longer poses a threat. Thus he represents it as a community of producers and a community of consumers (readers) both of whom affirm his authority. Moreover, he locates the communities he represents in the historical world they inhabit by means of representational gestures that establish the discursive field in relation to the material world and lived experience of its producers and consumers. These representational gestures - the place-names and urban scenarios of Nashe's discourse - are not textually derived topoi; rather they are experientially derived images that suggest a modification of the process of invention. In the marketplace of print the authority of an orator depends on his representational mastery, on his ability to adapt oratorical techniques to a project of mapping and explicating the historical world. Such an effort, however, depends less on the topoi of rhetorical wealth and more on the topography of the social and material terrain and on the topicality of the events enacted there. Thus, behind the idiosyncratic brilliance of

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Nashe's performance lies a more important and exemplary accomplishment, a freeing of oratory (understood as an accumulation of knowledges and skills) from its dependence on external markers of its status and authority - from its patrimonial connections - that allows it to become capital, that is, to be repeatedly and opportunistically deployed in creating a space of privileged commentary on the circumstances of its own production and reception. Banning

As transcribed in the Stationers' Register, the 1599 ban order that officially silenced Harvey and Nashe begins by listing nine individual titles (mostly, if not all, satires). There follow three clauses concerning genres (satires and epigrams, English histories, plays) and then the clause on Nashe and Harvey; the final clause addresses the relations between the Bishops and the Wardens in carrying out the order. Earlier I argued that the logic of Harvey's response to Nashe and Greene implies the ban order. It is also possible to imagine that Harvey instigated the process that led to the inclusion of the fourth clause by appealing to some influential man to act on his behalf. However the ban order was initiated, it underlines the impossibility of Harvey's dream of the perfect orator, for it asserts that the power to command derives from the position of the speaker, not from the content of his speech. In the calculus of publishers' interests, the economic loss resulting from the closing of the discursive field established by satires and the Harvey/Nashe exchange was an inconsequential price to pay for protection of their continued ability to develop the marketplace of print. While the Stationers are motivated by their desire to protect a market they conceive in terms of classes of books defined by their market shares (schoolbooks, prayer books, almanacs, for example) or commodity formats (folio, quarto, octavo, etc.), the Crown wants to protect itself from genres of discourse: satires, English histories, plays. Two classificatory schemes intersect in the ban order: each is concerned to define a hierarchy of authority and privilege; jointly they seek to establish the limits and control of discourse in the marketplace of print. The intersection between the Crown's interests and the Stationers' thus also concerns the alignment between cultural and economic capital. The Crown wants cultural capital to be deployed within its networks of patronage and support, under its supervision (however loose). The Stationers' patent placed the Company under the Crown's supervision even as it made the Company the Crown's agent in supervising the production and circulation of printed texts. Obviously the Stationers' strictly economic interests

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were best served by accommodating the Crown, but this should not be understood in a negative sense, as an inhibition of the trade. Rather, the economic capital - the exchange value of the individual patents and Copies - is enhanced by the link to the Crown's sanction, to privileged sites and approved uses and forms of cultural capital. At the same time, such an alignment in no way hinders the Stationers' ability to develop other areas of the market, especially perhaps those "down-market" areas involving discourses and formats that did not immediately signify in terms of cultural capital, like ballads and pamphlets. That the ban order singles out satiric discourses as those it would silence altogether is not surprising.30 An uneasy relation between satire and political authority is constitutive of satire, for satire mounts its critique from the perspective of an absent ideal, while political authority depends on representations that associate it with an embodied ideal. The defense of satire has two components: the moralizing claim that satire seeks reform and the articulation of a satiric decorum, specifically, the dictum that satire treats of common or popular figures and vices. According to the logic of this defense, since satire seeks to reform popular vice, it serves rather than challenges political authority. Writing perhaps twenty years before the ban order, George Puttenham articulates the conventional dictum that satire is a popular genre: never meddling with any Princes matters nor such high personages, but commonly marchants, souldiers, artificers, good honest householders, and also of unthrifty youthes, yong damsels, old nurses, bawds, brokers, ruffians, and parasites, with such like, in whose behaviors, lyeth in effect the whole course and trade of mans life.31 The class boundary on which satiric decorum is premised contradicts its generic aspirations, for satire treats of "the whole course and trade of mans life;" that is, it respects no boundaries. At the same time, however, the inscription of the genre within class boundaries privileges its capacity to address how relations of class are structured in and by the marketplace where all but "high personages" meet. Thus the conventional dictum reveals the coincidence between the Stationers' and the Crown's interests in relation to satire: close scrutiny of the various interests that intersect in the marketplace, especially from the pens of learned men, threatens to undermine the hierarchies of authority and privilege Crown and Stationers each seek to protect. The positions articulated by Harvey and Nashe share with satire the ambivalent project of examining the contradictions between the cultural capital and authority they claim as theirs and the circumstances that shape, allow, and disallow their discourse. Learned men can no more afford to separate themselves from

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the systems and networks that valorize their discourse than the Crown and the Stationers can afford to have their collaborative manipulation of the alignment between cultural and economic capital laid bare. For learned men, the marketplace of print affords contradictory possibilities (a wider audience but a loss of control) and a choice of affiliation (a platform legitimated by the Crown and/or a platform provided by the marketplace of print). Harvey's position in the exchange with Nashe was one widely held by contemporaries: to have only the platform afforded by the marketplace was to suffer "the stigma of print," that is, the taint of promiscuity that the marketplace implies and a consequent loss of status. Though Harvey fantasized a practice like Nashe's, preparing various personae and discourses, he could not realize it for fear of losing his identity as a learned man. The contradictions that stymied Harvey were for Nashe a complex nexus of relations he had to negotiate to establish his position as an orator-in-print. The idiosyncracy of Nashe's response should not obscure its affinity with print-personae like the Spectator that emerged a century later in the context of a familiarized marketplace. Nashe constructed a series of personae and platforms that simultaneously enacted the precepts of a rhetorical education and insinuated themselves into the conditions of dissemination the marketplace required. The Spectator and its kin were seamless variations on, improvements upon, the dispersed subjectivity Nashe effected in his pamphlets. They thematize a "safe" position for the public discourse of learned men, simultaneously in the marketplace and separated from it by their self-appointment as commentators on the behaviors and events that unfold there. As Harvey's fantasy career anticipated, that "safety" is guaranteed by anonymity. The public sphere of discourse in which publications like The Spectator participated is one that claimed a universality of access ironically congruent with that anonymity, for the universality of the public sphere is predicated on ignoring real differences in social, economic, and political position - in short, social and personal signifiers. The price of access is subscription to the ideology of the marketplace and to its corollary that cultural capital is valued independently, is valued precisely for its putative independence. But Nashe's idiosyncracy, his insistence on the association between himself, his personae, his style and his authority alternately suggests that cultural capital has value only in, or in relation to, the marketplace. In other words, cultural capital can function as capital only if it produces a self-identified distinguishing and/or individuating effect within the heterogeneous circulation of discourses.

Artisanal dispossession

Patrimonial and artisanal claims

When Nashe uses artisanal metaphors to represent his labor of writing and his mastery over the fashioning of the text, he gains a means of claiming his work as his own, its marketplace dissemination notwithstanding. In so doing, he does not differ from others, especially other learned men, who invoke such metaphors. To the extent that Nashe also represents the dissemination of his work in the marketplace and represents it as a problematic dispossession, his claim of mastery is momentarily strengthened. He achieves a tenuous position between the patrimonial and fraternal world of learned men and the potential chaos of proliferating texts in the marketplace. The figure of the artisan assumes a cohesive fraternity of producers, united around a certain quality and kind of product and the processes of its fashioning. For Nashe, as for Harvey, that fraternity was emphatically not artisanal. That is, the use of artisanal metaphors precipitates various contradictions. Insofar as they offer images of mastery, they function defensively, protecting writers and their skills from the generalized access and availability that the marketplace implies. But such a defense is adopted at a cost, for it threatens the patrimony by making technical mastery the criterion of recognition. Thus the defense isfinallyunsuccessful against the original threat because artisanal models also imply an access that, while not general, is nonetheless open and permeable relative to patrimonial models. It is no surprise, then, that Nashe would alternately be seen as a traitor or transgressor from the perspective of learned men, and as a model for emulation by others excluded from that elite fraternity. In the previous chapter I argued that the quarrel staged the ambivalent presence of learned men and their (informal) discourse in the marketplace of print. No subsequent invocation of the quarrel or its scandalousness could undo its exemplary effect, a de facto legitimation of the marketplace as a site of discursive production and dissemination. If patrimonial claims are a means by which learned men (and poets) 114

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most often construct their difference from others whose discourse also circulates in the marketplace, the recognition of the marketplace as a legitimate site of discursive production also renders such claims subject to a commercial calculus. Rather than clearly and simply securing the writer's claim of cultural status, they become signifiers of the desirability of a particular commodity-text, of the status it might convey to the purchaser. Moreover, once patrimonial claims have entered the marketplace, they are subject to imitation and parody. Such new potential significations do not cancel the old, for parody and imitation depend on recognition of an "original" and claims that advertise status reinforce the perception and social importance of status. In contrast, artisanal claims lose their strategic advantage. They can, however, be assimilated to the patrimonial model insofar as they too claim a special privilege and (technical) knowledge - marks of distinction. But there is another, larger contradiction provoked by the use of artisanal metaphors, for the figure of the artisan is already a nostalgic one at the end of the sixteenth century. Though the rhetoric of class and craft still proceeds in artisanal terms, production itself is increasingly subject to the conditions of capital that reconfigure the artisan's skill and knowledge as labor. From an artisanal perspective, such a reconfiguration is a dispossession. As KindHartes Dreame complained, the art that should be credited to those with skill and talent is instead claimed by "peddlers." In a cony-catching pamphlet called Lanthorn and Candlelight (1608) Thomas Dekker, one of those who took Thomas Nashe as a model, stages a scene that demonstrates how the marketplace disrupts both patrimonial and artisanal claims. Two traveling rogues practice a scam in which they pose as scholar and servant. They go from "goodly fair place" to "goodly house" offering pamphlets dedicated to the resident "knight" or "gentleman." 1 The hawking pamphleteer is then bid to put on, whilst his miscellane Maecenas opens a book fairly apparelled in vellum . . . The title being superficially surveyed, in the next leaf he sees that the author he hath made him one of his gossips; for the book carries his worship's name, and under it stands an epistle just the length of a henchman's grace before dinner . . . This knight . . . thanks him for his love and labour, and considering . . . what cost he hath been at, and how far he hath ridden to come to him . . . to cherish his young and tender muse, he gives him four or six angels. (335) If the securing of patronage by such means travesties the aristocratic patronage of a patrimonial model, the description of how the rogues produce the pamphlet parodies artisanal fashioning: "having scraped together certain small parings of wit, he first cuts them handsomely in pretty pieces, and of those pieces, does he patch up a book. This book he

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prints at his own charge" (336). The rogues do not work on their own, but with the active connivance of the book trade. If a gentleman seeing one of these books dedicated only to his name, suspect it to be a bastard, that hath more fathers beside himself, and, to try that, does defer the presenter for a day or two, sending in the meantime, as some have done, into Paul's Churchyard amongst the stationers, to inquire if any such work be come forth, and if they cannot tell, then to step to the printers, yet have the [rogues] a trick . . . and that is this . . . The books lie all at the printers, but not one line of an epistle to anie of them. If, then, the spy that is sent by his master ask why they have no dedications to them, Monsieur Printer tells him the author could not venture any to them all, saving only to that which was given to his master, until it was known whether he would accept of it or no. This satisfies the patron; this fetches money from him; and this cozens five hundred besides. (337) In the scenario Dekker sketches, both patrimonial and artisanal claims are suspect, for both can be easily imitated. Moreover, the gentleman's effort to ensure that he is the true father/patron reveals that the signifiers of patrimonial status function as tokens of exchange. Rather than securing the writer's claim on cultural status, they become the means by which anyone with "four or six angels" can purchase a display of ostensible elite status. The production of the pamphlet requires no writerly skill; either it is plagiarized, or in the alternate version of production Dekker presents, it is put together out of printer's overstock, whole sheets left over from other print jobs. Dekker's scene offers a parodic form of writerly control over the circumstances in which pamphlet writers are implicated. Indeed, the rogues would seem to have solved the problem of the artisanal position, for they are entrepreneurs. The figure of the entrepreneur occupies the position of capitalist and laborer simultaneously, for he controls both the conditions of his work and the distribution of the product, and hence, the profit of that labor. Dekker's rogue, moreover, "prints at his own charge" and thus defines the members of the book trade as his subordinates, his employees. By making a rogue-writer the figure whose wealth arises from the recirculation of objects/discourse, the scene obviates any position for writing not implicated in the fraudulent practices it describes. The origin of the fraud lies in the complicity between writing, publication, and sale; the rogue-writer is made the agent of all three practices. On the one hand, the artisanal position seems to disappear altogether, leaving in its wake the writer-entrepreneur and the printerworker. On the other, the parody depends on assumptions about "true" patrimonial and artisanal claims. From the perspective of those assumptions, the artisanal position is also eclipsed in Dekker's scene. While patrimonial claims continue to function as potent signifiers in the recircu-

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lation of objects, artisanal claims are overwhelmed by the ease of their imitation and the superior signifying capacity of patrimonial claims. By invoking a world in which artisanal claims of craft or mastery in discursive production are rendered irrelevant or nullified, Dekker's scene raises the question of whether is it possible to imagine any artisanal position not wholly complicit with a market calculus. The competitive edge that patrimonial models acquire in the marketplace arises because patrimonial claims simultaneously inscribe the value of the commodity-text in and for the market and locate the "origin" of that value apart from the market, implying the possibility of both production and circulation not mediated by the market. Given that artisanal production is necessarily bound to marketplace exchange, if the figure of the artisan is not to be wholly subject to a market calculus, it must be adapted to describe the effect of the market on the production and circulation of discourse, thereby claiming a kind of mastery of the process, the mediation of the marketplace and its control of the product notwithstanding. The failure of any effort to reclaim an artisanal mastery within the marketplace goes without saying. Instead, the success of artisanalfiguresdepends on the extent to which they open up representational possibilities at the intersection of the discursive field and the marketplace. At the end of the sixteenth century, the writer most conspicuously identified with the artisanal position was Thomas Deloney. Deloney was a silk weaver who, by 1592, was also recognized as London's chief contemporary ballad writer. In the quarrel with Harvey, Nashe calls on Deloney to defend the position of ballad writers and pamphleteers, making him a personified version of the ballad-makerfigureand using the figure simultaneously to upbraid Harvey for not recognizing the importance of ballad and pamphlet discourses and to degrade him by suggesting that he become a topic for ballads (TN, 1:280). Deloney emerges by implication as a commentator on the public circulation of discourse. Nashe's invocations of Deloney do not assimilate him to the culturally privileged position of learned men, but rather make him into an exemplary figure, a spokesman, in the circulation of widely accessible discourses. (That position was one Harvey came to recognize in his annotations of Speght's Chaucer with references to Thomas Deloney's books.) In a later reference, Nashe positions Deloney specifically at the intersection of his artisanal practice and ballad writing. Thomas Deloney, the Balleting Silke-weaver, hath rime inough for all myracles & wit to make a garland of good will more than the premisses . . . whereas his Muse, from the first peeping foorth, hath stood at Livery at an Alehouse wispe, never exceeding a penny a quart . . . and this deare yeare, together with the silencing of his looms, scarce that. (TN, 111:84).

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A Garland of Good Will is the title of an edition of Deloney's ballads gathered into book form, published for the first time at least by 1593 and thereafter at regular intervals until the eighteenth century. "The silencing of his looms" refers to the unrest and unemployment in the cloth trade in the mid 1590s, of which I will have more to say below. The evidence of these comments in 1596 suggests that Deloney's two practices - weaving and writing - were both concurrent and consecutive. Between 1596 and 1600 he wrote four historical fictions featuring cloth workers and shoemakers. Deloney probably wrote ballads while he worked as a weaver, but thefictionsmost likely were produced following his dispossession from the craft in which he was trained. In any case, the available evidence makes it clear that, like Henry Chettle, Deloney occupied multiple positions in the marketplace. Nashe's invocation of "the balleting silke-weaver" raises the question of how the conditions of one artisanal practice inform the other. Dispossession Because contemporaries identifed Deloney by his craft, because traces remain of his political engagement in craft issues, and because his fictions feature artisanal themes and figures, they have most often been read as artisanal (or middle-class) romances, celebrations of the rise to wealth and prominence of their craftsmen-heroes. But such readings obscure the ways in which the fictions repeatedly stage complex representations of shifting social and economic relations. Apprentices rise and become masters; masters rise into civic prominence; masters fall into economic and social disgrace and are redeemed by their brothers-in-the-trade, their wives, or luck; journeymen stay journeymen; gentlemen and princes become apprentices, a soldier becomes a gentleman; a lady becomes a servant. The men who rise to become masters or the men who are masters are no longer artisans: they are merchants - long-distance traders and protocapitalists. At the very least then, Deloney's books are about the complications of class, especially the crossing and maintenance of class boundaries. More to the point, these complications of class significantly include a fracturing of the artisanal position, for if masters become merchants, those left behind in the shops become laborers. At the same time, however, the insistence on the artisanal identification of men who are or become merchants is not a critical misreading but a fact of the fictions and their historical moment. It is also a strategy Deloney adopts precisely to examine the dispossession of the artisan that an inclusive notion of the artisan seems to efface. That is to say, like Nashe, Deloney exploits artisanal figures and models in order to

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articulate relations of property, mastery, and labor in which he is implicated - both as a weaver and as a writer. Deloney, however, does not thereby gain symbolic capital. Though he repeatedly constructs allegories of his own discursive authority, they are always compromised by his identification with the artisanal position. That identification is both a position attributed to Deloney by those who would claim greater privilege and a position he embraces. Deloney's use of an artisanal thematics, I will argue, addresses the accumulation of capital - economic and symbolic - and especially the ways in which that accumulation shapes access to the means of (re)production. Deloney's books exemplify a politics of literacy and generate an image of the public sphere that directly and indirectly challenges the claims of learning and learned men to a presiding or supervisory relation to public discourse. The image of the public sphere at which the fictions arrive is one that evolves out of Deloney's repeated encounter between his capacities as a maker - of cloth and of writing - and those circumstances that would inhibit, deny, or disqualify his making. The sharpest evidence of that encounter survives, not surprisingly, in the archives of civic authority: two letters from the Lord Mayor of London, Stephen Slany, to the Lord Treasurer of England, Lord Burghley, that frame printed writings associated with Deloney as negative instances of entry into public discourse. In 1595 the Lord Mayor wrote to the Lord Treasurer "toutching the printing of [a] pamphlet by the Company of Weavers." "The principal men that have been doers in this busynes," he reported, "are one Wellington, Muggins and Delonye . . . whom all iij together with the printer I have sent to Newgate" (318).2 About a year later, in July 1596, Deloney's name surfaced in another letter from the Lord Mayor to the Lord Treasurer, this one concerning the suppression of a printed ballad addressing the scarcity of corn. "The maker himself, who is one Delonie," the Lord Mayor lamented, "I cannot yet find" (11:462).3 The incidents the letters address form a particularly interesting matrix for considering the discursive politics of the artisanal position, for both occasions seem to make print into an explicitly political tool. The pamphlet was not actually published by the Company of Weavers per se, but by and on behalf of its yeomen, whose artisanal practices, like those of the printers in the Stationers' Company, were being undercut by the changing economic conditions at the end of the sixteenth century. Specifically, the pamphlet was a letter addressed to the ministers of the Dutch and French churches in London and to City officials complaining that foreign weavers were operating to the disadvantage of native weavers and asking that foreigners be restrained "to Charitable disposicions and conformitie of Orders" (Consitt, 317). Petitioning the

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Lord Chief Justice for their release, the imprisoned men apologize for having the pamphlet printed. "Because the writing of the said Letters seemed burdenous unto them," the prisoners said, "they unadvisedly, without any intention of malice or offence to her Majestie or her lawes, attempted for Five shillings in money to put the same in Printe, which, being perfected, were delivered to the said Ministers by their owne hands and most gentlie by them accepted" (Consitt, 317). The Lord Mayor's report, however, suggests that the decision to publish was anything but naive: I have fownd privy to the printing thereof divers persons to the number of 15 . . . the proofe of the first print was read . . . in the hearing of that whole number of weavers, whereof, notwithstanding the greater part to the number of xij shewed their mislike to have the same proceed into print, the other iij contynued on in their former purpose, and required the printer, as himself confessed, to print for them some 40 copies. (Consitt, 318)

According to the Weavers' Book, "William Muggins, Thomas Delonye and others . . . [were] afterwards enlarged by the Lords of her Majesties most honorable privye Councell with good Commendacions" (Consitt, 316). Though the incident was quickly closed, apparently without further consequences (including remedy), its traces expose a variously held understanding of the political implications of print. For the weavers, the decision to go into print was deliberate. They make it clear in the pamphlet that they had already appealed to City officials and that they had no choice but to "proceed into print." Their actions imply an understanding of print as a tool whose use is at their disposal "for five shillings in money." They can hire a printer to publish their letter as the printer might hire them to weave a cloth. Upon hearing the proof read, twelve of them reconsider the decision to proceed further and evidently decide that publishing the letter in print is not a simple economic transaction but a political risk. Yet whether the Lord Mayor accurately reports the events at the reading of the proof, or whether he repeats a retraction produced by twelve of the weavers questioned, the story of how the weavers proceeded further makes it obvious that they chose a printed platform precisely because they thought it would enhance their complaint. The weavers' apology secures their release "with good commendacions" because it confesses naivete and denies criminal intent ("unadvisedly, without any intention of malice or offense") and because its description of the printing affirms print as a simple economic and technical matter ("five shillings . . . to put the same in printe, which, being perfected ...") and thus occludes the political implications of the

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printedness of their pamphlet. Those implications include both the weavers' initial decision to use print as a political tool to advance their interests and the government's fear that the potentially wider dissemination of the weavers' complaint implied by its printed form is a threat to the public order. What prompted the mayor's second letter was once again the fear that dissemination in print would disrupt the public order. On this occasion the mayor was quite explicit: there was brought to my hand a certain ballad containing a complaint of the great want and scarcitie of corn within this realm, which, forasmuch as it containeth in it certaine vaine and presumptuous matter bringing in her Highnes to speak with her people in dialogue in a very fond and undecent sort, and prescribeth orders for the remedying of the dearth of corn, extracted (as it seemeth) out of the booke published by your Lordship the last year, but in that vaine and undiscreet manner as that thereby the poore may aggravate their grief, and take occasion of some discontentment, I thought it good to call before me the printer. (Wright, II: 462)

The mayor's worry is not about what remedies Deloney prescribed but that Deloney prescribed remedies at all. His argument for suppression derives from the construction of an audience ("the poor") who might be influenced by Deloney's ballad. Before he invokes that audience, however, he formulates a twofold objection to the ballad: discussion of the famine shifts from the Lord Treasurer's book to a ballad, and the ballad presents the queen speaking as though she were an ordinary person. In the mayor's formulation, Deloney's ballad violates both literary and social decorum. The violation of literary order (serious discussion of the famine in a ballad and informal representation of the queen) cannot be clearly separated from violation of the social order (Deloney is speaking above his place and has the queen speak below hers) and, in the mayor's argument, these violations lead inevitably to the disruption of the political order. Positing an audience whose existence he cannot prevent and whose participation in public discourse he construes as a threat, he circles around his fear of the social relations of print. Like others who would organize the discursivefieldto protect their vested interests, he is stymied by the competing and intersecting interests that constitute the field. It is no more in his interest than it is in the Stationers' to stop the circulation of ballads (or other widely disseminated printed texts) altogether and no individual act of suppression will allay the threat he imagines. The contradictions of the mayor's position are revealed in miniature in a parenthetical comment describing Deloney, the elusive "maker," as "an idle fellowe, and one noted with the like before in printing a booke

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for the silk weavers, wherein was found some like foolish and disordered matter" (Wright, II: 463). But Deloney's matter is "extracted" from Burghley's pamphlet and thus, as matter, presumably unimpeachable, and the mayor's problem is precisely that Deloney has not been idle. "Idle," "foolish," and "disordered" are all loaded, class-marked words, routine terms of degradation that function as ad hominem argument in the service of an imposed or desired authority - whether the mayor's, the Lord Treasurer's, or the learned man's. More revealingly symptomatic is the mayor's use of "the like" (entering print) as a categorical marker comparable to his use of "the poor" to designate the audience. In relation to the platform afforded by the marketplace of print, they are a matching pair: Deloney's capacity repeatedly to occupy a printed platform is prerequisite to both the formation of the audience the mayor fears and that audience's capacity to grant Deloney's discourse authority. In the case of the weavers' pamphlet, print offers an economy of scale for publicizing their distress, linking weavers and printer(s) in an instrumental use of technology. The pamphlet is not intended for general circulation. Nonetheless, its printedness - the efficient multiplication of copies - presages the possibility that the economy of scale could be marshaled by and for interests beyond the book trade, that the press could be an instrument for hire. In contrast, the ballad's publication presumably unfolds within the conventional operations of the book trade. It takes material already circulating in the book published by the Lord Treasurer and translates it to another discursive register, thereby enlarging its potential audience. The economy of scale benefits the trade while the increased circulation opens the matter of the ballad to public discussion. The multiplication of copies yields a potential multiplication of speakers, for whom, however, no channels of controlled, effective communication exist, hence the fear of riot, of social chaos. In the printedness of a ballad with political import it is possible to imagine a public sphere of discussion that is generally accessible. But that public sphere is insupportable in two senses: it contravenes the interests of those already authorized to speak in the public interest, whether they be direct agents of the state or learned men, and it would require open access to the circulation of discourse - not only a press available for hire, but a literate awareness of the sociopolitical implications of its use. I have pressed the implications of the pamphlet and ballad incidents in order to emphasize the ways in which they reveal the press as a means of production, that is, as an instrument whose capacity for multiplication can be used toward diverse ends. As we have seen, awareness of that capacity underwrites fears of proliferation as well as the various attempts

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to control the production of the press. Deloney's position in the ballad and pamphlet incidents suggests an alternative possibility that the press might serve as a means of shaping a public discourse that allows for multiple avenues of entry. In such a view, proliferation does not cease to be a consequence of print, but it becomes possible to imagine other ways of ordering and disciplining that proliferation and/or a response that simply acknowledges its polymorphous plenitude. By the time of the pamphlet and ballad incidents, Deloney was wellknown as a ballad writer. As such, the status of his words was already challenged within the discursive field. Deloney can be distinguished from other ballad writers, however, because some of his ballads were also published in book form.5 Publication in book form makes the ballad writer's discourse less ephemeral by consolidating occasional production into a different kind of object, one that claims greater authority by virtue of what "bookness" implies - at the least a resistance to the recycling of printed sheets to stop mustard pots, wrap pastries, or paper the walls of privies. The second of the ballad books, Strange Histories, appears to have been written as a book: the stories are drawn from Holinshed's Chronicles and arranged chronologically, suggesting a self-conscious effort to translate Holinshed into a more popular idiom. As their subsequent long publication history attests, the book versions of Deloney's ballads, and his identification as their author, served the interests of the trade. But the publication also achieves another effect, for the proliferation associated with ballads is disciplined by "bookness." As Strange Histories suggests, wide dissemination of such texts is less an enticement to ungodly distractions than a tool for emerging literacy. As I argued in relation to Kind-Hartes Dreame, ballads and balladmakers signal the imperatives of the marketplace of print, continual production and circulation - what I called the ballad singer's economy and come to function as a trope for the ambiguities of the book trade, bearing in their abjection the fear of proliferation and loss of distinction. Underlying the trope and its evocative power is the seemingly contradictory recognition that the audience for ballads is not only general, but enlarged by the ballad's tendency to shift between printed, written, and oral modes.6 Thus the ballad's multiple, simultaneous, and nonhierarchical modes of circulation constantly undo the stabilizing effort of the trope. In their quarrel, Nashe and Harvey identify Deloney as the heir to William Elderton and trade both men's names not only as insults but also as markers in their attempt to conceptualize the discursive field. In an anonymous pamphlet called Bacchus Bountie (1593), Elderton is listed along with Homer, Aristophanes, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Cicero, Chaucer, Lydgate, Skelton, and others "whose several names to rehearse were no

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les labour than to make a mouse piss over Paules, or a louse to leap over the high top of the Malverne Hills." Though the pamphlet is avowedly satirical, a single (and predictable) literary lineage is asserted, from which Elderton's name cannot be disentangled. The simultaneous resilience and resistance of the ballad/ballad-maker trope is further complicated by the ballad's double orientation as a discursive object. On the one hand, it is particularly suited to be topical in the modern sense of the term, well adapted to convey what the sixteenth century called "newes" or "newfangelness." On the other, it is particularly associated with a popular, anonymous, and traditional voice. If, in providing the ground in relation to which an elitist argument can be constructed, the ballad serves as an index for hierarchizing the discursive field, by its anonymity and its capacity to be both timely and timeless, the ballad also signifies the field itself as public and unowned. Both Elderton and Deloney practiced other occupations (Elderton was an actor, master of at least two boys' acting companies, and an attorney; Deloney was, of course, a weaver).7 In choosing to become known as ballad writers, Elderton and Deloney claim as their own the ballad's capacity to be topical and they make themselves the named speakers of the vox populi. By publishing (or tacitly consenting to the publication of) his ballads in book form, Deloney proceeded further. In so doing, he simultaneously asserts the importance of ballads and claims a privileged position in relation to a popular, anonymous voice. His authorship is indebted to discourses and speakers not generally considered lettered, and he repays that debt by making that ephemeral, often oral, world literate. Between 1596 (the year of the ballad incident) and 1600 (the year of his death), Deloney wrote the four historical fictions that made him a bestselling author, two books about clothiers {Jack of Newbury and Thomas of Reading) and two about shoemakers {The Gentle Craft, Parts 1 and 2). All of the books feature ballads and songs, singers and audiences. As we will see, Deloney takes the ballad/ballad-maker trope as his own, scrutinizes it and refashions it. And, in the long run, ballads take Deloney as their own: new ballads are authored upon him in the seventeenth-century editions of his ballad books and his songs become identified as traditional ones, become unauthored, in the eighteenth-century collection of ballads. So too, Deloney's stories circulate for 150 years, "newly corrected and enlarged," or reduced to 24-page chapbooks, with his name, without his name. If the pamphlet incident seems to locate Deloney as someone who thinks of print as a tool, as a means of promoting artisanal concerns, the failure of the weavers' effort to effect changes in their economic position

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makes it clear that the press and loom alike are not simple tools but ones caught up in conflicts about who is entitled to use them and under what conditions. The ballad incident similarly suggests a claim of entitlement (to corn as well as to the right to speak about the policies of its distribution) and a "lesson" in imposed limitations. But both the ballad incident and the publication of Deloney's ballads in book form also suggest a broader sense of print as a tool, as a means of promoting and shaping the concerns of those who know or could be taught how to use tools but are not in a position to control the conditions of their use. The pamphlet and ballad incidents raise the questions that Deloney's fictions pose: Is it possible to address the circumstances of artisanal dispossession without simply affirming the imposition of external control? What happens to craft and skill as well as the social relations involved in their exercise in such circumstances? The long publication history of Deloney's books suggests a compromised answer true to their origin in a compromised artisanal position, for by the late eighteenth century, they circulated in progressively simplified versions, offering simple myths about the possiblities of upward mobility.8 Yet they also circulated as Deloney's and as serious historical fictions: the last trade printing of Thomas of Reading in 1812 was published by an Edinburgh firm in which Walter Scott, another master of historical fiction, was a partner, and Jack ofNewbury was kept in print by Newbury stationers in an edition that appended a copy of its (historical) hero's will and sported the town seal.9 The complexities of the artisanal position notwithstanding, the "popularity" of a mythic understanding of the fictions makes it clear that readings characterizing them as artisanal romances are apt for stories that tell of craftsmen who rise to wealth and prominence, particularly because the positions they achieve do not challenge the values or status of aristocratic rule. John Winchcombe (Jack of Newbury) goes so far as to decline a knighthood and profess the desire to remain "a poore Clothier among [his] people"(49).10 But Deloney also makes it clear that John Winchcombe is hardly a poor clothier. In Praise and Paradox, Laura Stevenson argues that a figure like Winchcombe is idealized "in the rhetoric - and by extension, in the terms of social paradigms of the aristocracy" (6), as a "lordly clothier" or "chivalric merchant" (7), but that his princeliness cannot be directly recognized within the prevailing notions of class. Deloney does not say (and possibly had no way of saying) that Jack does not fit into the social hierarchy because his sort of power must be defined in terms of economic and political interest, not good blood, preferment and a tradition of noble action ... He perfectly exemplifies the difficulties of using the values of

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one class to appeal to the pride of another; sooner or later the hybrid figure which is created will raise questions that threaten established social ideology. (124-25)

Stevenson's argument, the strongest of the romance readings, reaches an impasse that can be resolved only by positing a contradiction between the conventions of romance and the ideological pressures that prevent "craftsmen" from being recognized as the social and moral equals of courtiers and princes. Though the artisan's assimilation into a patrimonial position cannot be fully effected, the virtues associated with the aristocracy, largesse, for example, can become those exemplified by a princely craftsman like Jack. Jack thus becomes a model of the process that simultaneously elevates the artisan to honor and dignity on the basis of his behavior and maintains the aristocracy as a kind of transcendent category protected from incursions or taint by the granted exclusivity of its membership. In this sense, the romance of Jack of Newbury and the other fictions is profoundly ideological, for it lies in their capacity to perform this double work of validating both the exclusivity of the aristocracy and the nobility of artisans. But Jack's behavior, including his refusal of a knighthood, is also cagier than the idealizations of romance allow. By remaining a clothier, Jack occupies a more powerful position than that of a new-made knight at the top of his class rather than the bottom of another into which, as Stevenson notes, he would never be fully integrated. In other words, Jack's class - and that of Deloney's other heroes - is precisely an issue. The artisans of Deloney's fictions exist within hierarchical relations of economic power and political authority that exist within craft fraternities, between guilds, and between artisanal, mercantile, and national interests. Because artisans and merchants alike were members of the same corporate bodies, their differentiated positions are not adequately described, let alone named, in the sixteenth-century discourses of class. Yet the archives of guilds and livery companies repeatedly attest to an increasing and recognized separation of interests between mercantile and manual or handicraft elements. The variety of class or class-fractional positions represented in Deloney's fictions makes "artisanal romance" an oversimplified term, both in its description of the object(s) of Deloney's representation and of its techniques. The issues so cogently gathered into Stevenson's reading can be productively reformulated by describing Deloney's project as an effort to represent a developing hegemonic order. Raymond William's notions of "dominant," "residual," and "emergent" cultural formations come closest to approximating Stevenson's argument about the contradictions of a "gentle craftsman" or "chivalric merchant."11 The merchant's

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position is one of emerging dominance, complicated by the not yet displaced aristocracy still in the dominant position. The artisan would then be understood as occupying a residual position that becomes ever more clearly identifiable as such as industry develops. In a fully capitalist world, artisan and aristocrat together mark the symbolic range and import of residual formations. The heuristic clarity of William's categories, however, runs the risk of obscuring the ways in which conflict and antagonism exist within formations and the possibility that a particular position might have characteristics of more than one formation. By hegemony, then, I mean the always shifting articulation of a social order in which certain positions become controlling ones, but not to the exclusion of conflict and challenge that would redefine positions and means of control.12 In Deloney's case, that hegemony necessitates accommodating mercantile capitalists within an apparent consensus that does not directly oppose their interests to the prevailing ideological position of Crown and aristocracy. At the same time, however, that nascent hegemony includes within it sites and positions not yet fully integrated into its order, including those that might offer resistance to the developing consensus. The artisanal thematics of Deloney's fictions thus offer a revealing counterpoint to the intensely invested symbolic formation of pastoral. Grounded simultaneously in relation to an agricultural economy, a landowning elite, and highly valued scriptural and poetic traditions, pastoral is the privileged mode of the late sixteenth century.13 Pastoral functions hegemonically in part because the naturalizing circuit it traces allows for an oppositional rhetoric (in which the shepherd's position may not coincide with the landowner's), accommodates merchants and others transformed into real or metaphoric gentlemen-landowners, and circumvents those positions and activities that cannot be figured directly in relation to the land. By focusing on what pastoral circumvents, Deloney'sfictionscomplicate the representation of class and nation. The merchant who remains a merchant and the artisan who becomes a laborer can neither be assimilated into the symbolic community of pastoral nor reconciled with each other into an alternative natural order. If the choice of an artisanal thematics is in the service of a complex representation of class, the two particular crafts offer complementary rather than identical (because artisanal) means of articulating that representation. Weaving is an obvious, if overdetermined, choice for Deloney, shoemaking only apparently less so. Thefigureof the weaver, positioned as the artisan-maker in a chain of relations that also includes the shepherd and the greater trading companies, evokes the figure of the nation, defined not so much by the Crown as by the relations of production and

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distribution (including overseas trade). As Deloney's own situation attests, the dominance of the cloth trade does not favor the artisan and his making of cloth, rather it subordinates the artisan to the organizational imperatives of mercantile capital and makes him a proto-industrial figure.14 Such is the situation Deloney represents in Jack of Newbury and Thomas of Reading. John Winchcombe's shop supposedly has 200 looms in one room. In Thomas of Reading, workmanship is defined by a contest to see who can weave the fastest, not by the quality or design of the cloth. While the shoemaker is also positioned in a network of practices, as an artisanal practice, shoemaking resists identification with the national economy. Though there was an intense struggle for control of the leather-processing trades (tanning and currying) in the middle of the sixteenth century, shoemaking remained a business of self-employed craftsmen and small shops until the late seventeenth century, organized locally at the level of the shop/household.15 That is, shoemaking is distinguished as a practice because it does not benefit by an economy of scale (as preparation of the leather did), nor can it be done by the relatively unskilled (as could the "light leather crafts," like glovemaking, that were adapted to the putting-out system in the sixteenth century). In any but the simplest shoes, fit was crucial and individual and so shoemaking remained largely, though not only, a bespoke trade. Shoemaking retains, of necessity, direct and intimate contact between producers and consumers. In The Gentle Craft, Part 1, for example, a female customer uses a complaint about fit and workmanship to pursue her interest in a prince-turned-journeyman-shoemaker, and in The Gentle Craft, Part 2, Richard Casteler makes a special last to fashion shoes for Long Meg's large foot. Between them, weaving and shoemaking establish an heuristic matrix for Deloney's storytelling in which artisanal making can be differentially positioned. If his heroes acquire their hero status because they move from the domestic economy of artisanal production to the larger mercantile economy of city and nation, the same movement separates men like John Winchcombe (initially a weaver) and Simon Eyre (initially a shoemaker) from artisanal concerns, modes of work, and values. The contrast between crafts is less important as a means of distinguishing the books into two obvious pairs than as a means of emphasizing the divergence of interests between local, domestic production and national mercantile structures. The weaver and the shoemaker also each make available a cluster of metaphors, attributes and associations that allegorize the production and reception of the stories. For example, when, in the first chapter of

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Jack of Newbury, the Master's widow begins to court Jack, still an apprentice, by telling him about her suitors, the narrator comments: "When Jacke found the favour to bee his dames Secretarie, he thought it an extraordinary kindnesse: and ghessing by the yarne it would proove a good Web, began to question with his dame in this sort" (7). Yarn and web refer most immediately to the stories Jack solicits from the eager widow. The act the narrator describes is an evaluative one: Jack guesses by the yarn (the widow's conversation with him) that what the widow wants would make a good web (both the warp on which Jack might weave his economic and social advance and the fabric of a life that might result). Thus yarn and web serve as metaphors for a network of social relations into which Jack inserts himself. The metaphors are not Jack's, however, but the narrator's. As Jack is the dame's secretary, the narrator is Deloney's: yarn and web refer finally to the story the narrator is telling and to Deloney's own secretarial transformation of his artisanry. If the figure of the weaver supplies metaphors of composition and narrative control, the figure of the shoemaker suggests metaphors of use, of the match or "fit" between the making and delivery of a story and its reception and appropriation. First, the pun on sole/soul made available by the shoemaker's practice metaphorizes the intimacy that the requirement of fitting the shoe to the foot brings to the practice, and implies a moral/didactic purpose. Second, the proverbial tag threaded throughout The Gentle Craft, "a shoemaker's son is a prince born," tacitly answers the proverb derived from Pliny's story of the painter Apelles and the shoemaker who criticized Apelles' rendering of the leg as well as the shoe and was admonished: ne sutor supra crepidam (judicaret) [a shoemaker should stick to his last]. The classical tag was a conventional and ubiquitous disclaimer or disqualifier of plebian authority at the end of the sixteenth century. An epigram published by John Harrington in 1615 recognizes both claims simultaneously: For never was the like booke sold in Poules, If so with Gentle Craft it could perswade Great Princes midst their pompe to learn a trade, Once in their lives to work, to mende their soles.16

The opening lines of the epigram tell of The Gentle Craft read aloud in Paul's Churchyard and provoking laughter by what Harrington calls its "project" of associating princes and shoemakers. The speaker intervenes and enjoins the readers: "scorne not him that writ it." The epigram not only recognizes the metaphorics of shoemaking but also marks a problematic of audience or reception, for it imagines an elite audience of

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scorners and princes that contrasts sharply with the artisanal audience implied by the book's dedication to "all the good yeomen of the Gentle Craft." If Harrington's epigram seems to value The Gentle Craft as a commentary on matters of public, indeed political, import, it does so without acknowledging Deloney: "In praise of a book cald the gentle craft written by a shoemaker." The success of the storytelling, it would seem, recapitulates the dispossession of the artisan. Repossession Only two of Deloney's historical fictions can be dated: Jack ofNewbury was entered in the Stationers' Register in March of 1597 and The Gentle Crafty Part 1 in October of the same year. Each yielded a sequel. The successful ambition in Jack ofNewbury at once concerns its eponymous hero and Deloney's own project of reweaving his position as an artisan and ballad writer whose authority to speak in print is challenged in the name of the Crown into that of the storyteller to whom even the king listens. In Jack ofNewbury Deloney "bringfs] in [his] Highness to speak with [his] people in dialogue" in the same familiar way that upset the Lord Mayor in the ballad incident. Jack seeks dialogue with the king, the king responds, the king seeks dialogue with Jack. Jack refuses a knighthood, but he counsels the king repeatedly with fables, epigrams, pageants and petitions: the book ends with a story plotted and enacted by Jack that models the king's appropriate behavior. The allegory of discursive authority apparently could not be clearer or simpler. But Jack of Newbury and the other fictions work by reweaving their figures rather than simply setting them out. The redeployment of figures and motifs - reweaving - is a technical characteristic in and of all Deloney's fictions, evidence no doubt of the transposition of one kind of artisanal practice into another. Reweaving, and its structural partner, sequence, operate both locally, in each fiction, and across the fictions. Just as shoemaking offers a slightly different perspective on the relations between the artisanal household and the national mercantile economy than does weaving, so too the multiplicity of stories and apparently tangential episodes that characterize the fictions differentially inflect the constituent elements and figures of the single complex problem of an artisanal position. By reweaving, the fictions simultaneously offer a sentimental affirmation of an artisanal world and expose the nostalgia and sentimentality of that affirmation. The argument that reweaving is the means by which Deloney's fictions represent a problematic artisanal position not only takes issue with their characterization as artisanal romances, but also impinges on critical

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arguments about their formal structure and their order of composition.17 The formal issues having to do with the loose structure of the fictions and the seemingly unrelated episodes that disrupt linear narrative are reframed by making reweaving the dominant analytic trope. Reweaving works by identifying motifs and figures and then redeploying them in altered configurations. Its logic is not linear, but recursive, and its goal is not a "life and works" plot, but multiple refractions of the object of representation. Literary historical arguments about the order of composition are closely linked to those about formal structure. That is, they founder not simply for lack of external evidence but for contradictory opinions about what might constitute the criteria for assigning priority. The notion of reweaving poses the question of order only insofar as it assumes that Deloney began twice, as it were, once in relation to each craft. As I have already suggested, each craft focus reweaves the concerns of the other and the sequels reweave the concerns of the first two books. (I have assumed, on the evidence of the dates in the Stationers' Register, that Jack ofNewbury was the first book written.) My concerns are not about formal structure but rather about the artisanal position and its use as a figure for discursive production. In this section I will concentrate on how the first two books develop and refine figures of discursive production into a sustained allegory of the positions and techniques available to the artisan storyteller. In the next two sections, I argue that the sequels reweave those figures into a representation of the relation between the production and circulation of discourse and the marketplace. In the allegory of discursive authority I sketched above for Jack of Newbury, it would seem that the storyteller's desired position coincides precisely with that of his hero, that Deloney has rewoven the effort to exclude him from public discourse into a fantasy of his inclusion. But very early on the narrative precipitates an interpretive conflict that opens an equivocal perspective on Jack. The second chapter tells of Jack's second courtship; after the widow dies, Jack woos one of his own servants after ascertaining her good government. Having decided to marry the maiden, he invites her father, "a poore man," to Newbury. In the course of a tour Jack gives to his prospective father-in-law, a song describes Jack's household. Because it is the third of six songs in the book and it is not an interruption in the matter of the narration, it seems unremarkable.18 Blending what the "poore man" sees with what he hears, presumably from Jack, as he tours, the song moves from an opening emphasis on spatial coordinates (the rooms and their occupants, the latter numbering more than 1,000) to temporal ones (the daily, weekly, and yearly events in the household). The song functions to make

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the historically specific moment of Jack's father-in-law's tour into an ahistorical, entirely synchronous representation; that is, it functions as might a ballad. Significantly, it is attributed to no one, a matter to which I will return momentarily. Among its lines are some describing how the children of Jack's household "their labors to requite, / Had every one a penny at night: / Beside their meate and drink all day" (27). In the next chapter, the king visits Newbury, also tours Jack's establishment, and views a pageant depicting the triumph of chastity over war and famine performed by the children of the household. When, in response to the king's asking about the children in the pageant, Jack says, "these are the children of poor people, having scant a good meale once in a week" (49), an interpretive problem emerges: these are the same children who ate all day and got a penny a night in the song. Immediately following Jack's description of the underfed children, the narrator picks up the story: With that the King began to tell his Gilliflowers, whereby hee found that there was 96 children. Certainely said the Queene I perceive God gives as faire children to the poore as to the rich, and fairer manie times: and though their dyet and keeping bee but simple, the blessing of God doth cherish them. Therefore sayd the Queene I will request to have two of them to wait in my Chamber. (49)

In the short paragraph that follows, the narrator describes how first the king and then "diverse nobles" of the court join the queen in providing for all the beautiful poor children - a veritable riot of instant upward mobility ensues. The disparity in the representations of the children can be understood as an instance of Jack's sense of occasion: for his fatherin-law, a version that glorifies Jack's wealth; for the king and queen, one that results in the advancement of ninety-six children. Such skilled opportunism has been presented as part of Jack's character from the beginning. But such a reading does not account for either the excess and parodic edge in the story of the children, or for Deloney's interest in setting up the interpretive problem. The song about Jack's establishment can be read as a miniature of Jack's story, the ballad version of why Jack is a hero. Indeed, as such it has proven quite convincing, appearing in economic histories to this day as evidence of possible sixteenth-century industrial practices. Its lack of attribution, then, might be read as a teasing prediction of the ideologically overdetermined investments in seeing Jack as an heroic type. Other songs are anonymous, but attributed: "the commons of England made this song," the narrator notes of a ballad about the Battle of Flodden Field, locating it as a collective act of social memorialization. The song about Jack's establishment, however, is not anonymous, but free-floating; it can be read as a redaction of Jack's

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description or of his his father-in-law's perception, or, juxtaposed to Jack's later remark, as a means by which the narrative foregrounds a gap between the process of idealization in which it is implicated and a skeptical perspective on that idealization. At the very least, the discrepancy of song and remark requires attending to the specificity of situated utterance and asking not only who speaks but also to what ends and with what support or sanction. Moreover, the skeptical response is linked to a problem of excess most clearly revealed by the courtly response to Jack's characterization of the children: is Jack's remark itself excessive, designed to provoke the response? or does the song make excessive claims about the plenitude of Jack's household? It might be argued that by simultaneously representing Jack as an idealized figure and opening a skeptical perspective on that idealization Deloney presents an allegory of his own mastery - as Jack inevitably masters his circumstances, Deloney masters Jack. But as my formulation suggests, Deloney's mastery is linked to Jack's; his interest as a storyteller remains tied to the representation of Jack's success. Deloney's mastery depends on an assent, a reception, that, unlike his hero, he cannot command. The repeated moments of parodic excess register the ambivalence of the artisanal position - caught between the desire and capacity for mastery and a commitment to representing the historical circumstances that have preempted the possibility of that mastery. Deloney cannot rewrite the rise to power of a mercantile elite; he can only chronicle its effects, an effort that depends on the stories of men like John Winchcombe.19 The reweaving of motifs and figures that works to open up equivocal perspectives can be theoretically formulated as a distinction between strategy and tactics. I use the terms "strategy" and "tactics" as they have been adapted by Michel de Certeau from Clausewitz's discussion of military action to serve as a means of theorizing the difference between empowered and weak positions in networks of power, place, and knowledge. Strategies, according to de Certeau, assume a postion of mastery from which one can rationally manipulate or manage circumstances, events, places. In contrast, tactics are situational, flashes of opportunity seized. They may yield momentary advantage, but they neither proceed from nor result in a secure position of mastery.20 The distinction, of course, is not absolute. It could be argued, for example, that Jack acquires a strategic position by tactical means in the opening chapter's account of his first courtship. As an apprentice, he occupies a disempowered position in class terms and responds tactically in relation to the widow's strategy. But from the perspective of gender, Jack already occupies a strategic position, the widow can proceed only tactically, and Jack parlays his own tactical

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responses into a position of strengthened mastery. Though one can, as Jack does, use tactics toward strategic ends, in order to do so one must begin from some strategic advantage; otherwise the accumulation of tactical successess is inevitably circumscribed or recuperated into already established networks of power. Jack rises by a consistent strategy of claiming only the position that he can comfortably occupy and defend at any given moment and then maximizing whatever benefit he can extract for himself or for paternalistic dispensation to others from that position. The earnestly made, limited claim initially seems naive, but in retrospect it is always revealed to have been exactly the right move, indeed a move calculated for long-term advantage. In relation to the narrative of Jack's success, Deloney can only operate tactically; at the very least, the givenness of the history he is telling circumscribes his effort. Yet reweaving does accumulate tactical advantages, chief among them for this argument is the elaboration of circumstantially situated figures of discursive authority and position - counsel, jest, and gossip that simultaneously identify and distinguish hero and storyteller, playing out the distinction between strategy and tactics. The sequence in which counsel, jest, and gossip are developed in Jack of Newbury begins with the king's visit to Jack's household and ends with the book's final story in which Jack's exemplary behavior sets the standard for the Crown. Thus, as I have already noted, it offers an obvious allegory of Jack's sucess as also the storyteller's. But the episode that generates tactical advantage for the storyteller is one of the most tangential and apparently gratuitous in thefictions,a story featuring the king's jester, Will Sommers. The story involves Sommers's punishment by the maidens of Winchcombe's household because he has joined them in spinning without paying the requisite forfeit (a gallon of wine) that shop rules stipulate. He saucily offers to pay in kisses, but the maidens refuse because he would be getting as well as forfeiting. They first bind and gag him ("because he let his tongue runne at randome" [50]) and wash his body with a solution of "dogs droppings" (51), then order him to serve the hogs, and finally to eat with the hogs. The connection to the biblical story of the prodigal son is explicitly made: "If thou do not (say they) eate (like the prodigall childe) with thy fellow hogs . . . "(52). The prodigal son squanders his estate; Will Sommers "lets his tongue run at random" and so squanders his speech. Sommers's initial offense, however, is not one of speech, but of entering into a domain that is not his, in both gender and class terms. In humiliating him, the women of Jack's household assert their power to enforce the standards of their community. For his part, Sommers recuperates his position by telling the story of his humiliation to the king and

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queen, who "[laugh] heartily" (52), after which he disappears from Jack of Newbury. The story would seem to be one that marks discourse in terms of its class and gender coding and inscribes a definitive separation between realms of circulation. Deloney first exploits Will Sommers's story by making the jest the centerpiece of a larger design that encompasses both Jack's speech and that of Cardinal Wolsey. Sommers's loose speech is initially established during the king's visit; he enters into and makes quips about the dialogue between Jack, the king and queen, and Cardinal Wolsey. He comments at anyone's and everyone's expense, in accord with the protected speech that belongs to the figure of the jester. Two chapters later, Jack (and a group of clothiers who join him in a written petition about foreign trade restrictions), the king, and Wolsey are again in dialogue, this time negotiating with rather than celebrating each other. The place of the jester is supplied by Wolsey's fool, Patch, who informs Jack that Wolsey will stall forever in putting into effect the clothiers' requests as approved by the king. In response to Patch's information, Jack mutters: "if my Lord Cardinals father had beene no hastier in killing of Calves then he [Wolsey] is in dispatching of poore mens sutes, I doubt he [Wolsey] had never worn a Myter" (59), and he and the clothiers are arrested. Released through the intervention of a powerful aristocrat, the clothiers meet Wolsey for the last time; he formally enacts their requests and pardons them: "as Steven forgave his enemies that stoned him, and our Saviour those sinfull men that crucified him, so doe I forgive you that high trespasse commited in disgrace of my birth" (60). Wolsey is condemned by the words placed in his own mouth as afigureof immense presumption. In telling these events, the narrator calls attention to Wolsey's "proud and aspiring mind" and "his new-built house by Westminster," thus linking him to a fable about courtly prodigality that Jack told at their first meeting, at which Wolsey had taken offense. Wolsey too is a figure of the prodigal, but unlike the son who returns to his father and is welcomed home, he denies his father and does not acknowledge or align himself with his brothers. Wolsey's position provides him with temporal and spiritual authority as well as access to the king's ear; his position is one in which the storyteller ambivalently desires. His prodigality also links him to the figure of the jester (who also has the king's ear). In contrast to the jester, whose authority is arguably self-canceling by virtue of his position, Wolsey's authority is self-enhancing: it lays others waste, imposes itself on weavers and writers alike, and can, at will, silence their looms. In the episode that exposes Wolsey, Deloney loosely rewrites the pamphlet incident. Jack momentarily replaces Wolsey at the king's ear and the

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clothiers triumph. If Jack and Wolsey are identified in relation to the king's ear, they are opposed in their class interests. Jack's position depends on recognizing and being recognized within a set of fraternal relations that Wolsey denies or otherwise disempowers. Yet within that fraternity Jack occupies a position of hierarchical authority that also allows him to occupy Wolsey's position as counsellor. Whatfinallydistinguishes Jack from Wolsey is only his good humor and his willingness to remain a clothier. If, on the one hand, Jack gains the king's ear, on the other, the king listens because Jack amuses him. The king, moreover, is predisposed to merriment; he "laughs heartily" (36, 40, 52, 87) more often than he does anything else. The king who laughs heartily and the storyteller who, by making the king laugh, can script his political behavior, are inextricably linked in Jack ofNewbury. By making counsel and jest versions of each other, Deloney operates tactically, apparently puncturing the seriousness of his own allegory, or at least revealing it as naive and excessive. The point, however, is not to collapse counsel and jest but to locate them as marked positions in the discursive field, as possessing predictable strategic advantage or limitation. A tactical understanding of the discursive field, in contrast, shifts the focus from mastery - from particular authorized positions in the discursive field - to the discursive field itself, with all positions, authorized or not, potentially available for tactical use. The figure for this version of the storyteller's authority is the storyteller at anyone's ear and anyone the storyteller - not counsel, but gossip. If counsel (or jest) depends on an order in which sites of authority are marked, gossip arises out of an indifference or resistance to those marked sites.21 And unlike the jester's speech, gossip is neither circumscribed nor marked by impunity. Because gossip requires both a teller/listener pair and the transformation of the listener into a teller-to-another-listener, it figures the constant reshaping of the discursive field. Gossip does not impose, it insinuates, and it acquires authority precisely and only by circulating. By the end of the sixteenth century, gossip is a partially feminized term, but its older ungendered meaning of godparent or sponsor remains current. Thus gossip names a social relation that is voluntary and intimate but not familial. As I will argue, Deloney is interested in both the feminization of the word and the privileged access to intimate or domestic life that it implies. In Jack ofNewbury thefigureof gossip is generated from a dialogue that opens the eighth chapter and which itself begins on a note of fecundity: Good morrow Gossip, now by my truely I am glad to see you in health. I pray you how doth Maister Winchcombel What never a great belly yet? nowfie,by my fa your husband is waxt idle.

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Trust mee Gossip, saith Mistress Winchcombe, a great belly comes sooner than a new coate, but you must consider that wee have not beene long married: but truly gossip you are welcome, I pray you sit down and we will have a morsell of something by and by. (69)

Gossip is used more than twenty times as a form of address or a designation of the interlocutors. The chapter, moreover, is about gossip: the two women talk gossip ("It is a good hearing . . . I heard say . . . But heare you Gossip . . . Shall I be so bold to aske . . . I heard say"); the visitor has obviously come to acquire gossip she can retell elsewhere; and, most important, she makes Mistress Winchcombe afraid of gossip that might be told of her. Specifically she suggests that the Winchcombes supply their table too generously, and then rehearses arguments about the proper conduct of a domestic economy. Mistress Winchcombe is taken in: she "give[s] her folks shorter commons and courser meate" and when her husband confronts her, she defends her action by saying that "the whole towne cryes for shame" at spoiling servants with "daintie" things (73). What began as dialogue evolves into gossip and then into public opinion, an endless circulation sustained, of course, by dialogue. The gossip's story is taken up again after an interlude of one chapter, which, intervening with the story of Randall Pert, a Draper fallen into hard times and redeemed by Jack's generosity, affords another indirect answer to the issue of "shorter commons." This time the narrator introduces the gossip as "mistris many-better, dame tittle-tattle, gossip pinte-pot"(78), and the chapter tells of the servants' revenge on the gossip. They get her drunk, thus loosening her tongue even further, and arrange for her to be paraded through the marketplace babbling uncontrollably. The gossip is hoist by her own petard. In the story of the gossip, the excessive, specifically feminine and oral figure of the gossip is humiliated so that gossip may be developed as a figure of discursive activity not limited to the oral and the feminine. Yet it is the gossip herself who introduces the nexus of relations that defines the figure. Not only does she indicate an endless circulation of discourse in which gossip is the activity that mediates between private dialogue and public opinion, she also articulates arguments about the proper handling of the household economy that circulate in contemporary discourses more specifically focused on economic issues and thus indicates how those arguments get woven into the dialogic relations of ordinary life (even if the mayor would proscribe "extracting" Burghley's arguments). In the intervening story of Randall Pert, the narrator implicates the reader in the circulation of discourse that the figure of gossip implies. After describing Randall Pert's distress, the narrator brings Winchcombe on to the scene with these words: "at last, master

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Winchcombee being (as you heard) chosen against the Parliament a Burgesse for the towne of Newbery"(74). The reader first heard about Winchcombe's election in the dialogue of the gossip: "I heard say your husband is chosen for our Burgesse in the Parliament house, is it true?" (70). Typically understated, the parenthetical "as you heard" makes both reading and writing into versions of gossip and the book/pamphlet itself the gossip. In the three-chapter sequence I have been discussing, various motifs are woven now this way, now that: the particular social relations of women; the marital and domestic economy of the Winchcombe household; Winchcombe's position in Newbury and the nation; the problem of imprisonment for debt; the virtue of largesse; the mentality of London as opposed to Newbury and so on. The weaving of the design does not end with the gossip's humiliation. In the next and final chapter, Jack plots and enacts a story that models the king's appropriate behavior. The story involves a soldier, George Rigley, who is knighted for his service to the Crown but not provided a peacetime means of support. Deloney places Sir George in Winchcombe's household, makes him the beneficiary of his economic largesse ("Jacke of Newbery that kept a table for all commers"), and involves him with one of the maidens of the household. When the maiden becomes pregnant, Sir George refuses to marry her and runs off. The marriage isfinallyeffected, with the bride in disguise, by means of a complicated plot that Jack initiates by retailing (false) gossip to Sir George. Only Jack's benevolent intent and his patriarchal position distinguish his behavior from the gossip's activity with his wife. When, after the true identity of the bride and her dowry of £100 are revealed, Sir George affirms the marriage, Jack offers the couple two years' residence in his household. The book closes with the following sentence: And thus they lived afterward in great joy: and our King, hearing how Jacke had matcht Sir George, laughing heartily thereat, gave him [Sir George] a living for ever, the better to maintain my Lady his wife. (87) Jack's final act of counsel (and jest) is one achieved by gossip. In scripting the king's behavior by means of a story he successfully launches into circulation as gossip, Jack sets out a wishfulfilling scenario of Deloney's storytelling project. The final story collapses together figures of discursive position - counsel, jest, gossip - and suggests that they are strategically effective in influencing the Crown and thereby securing the economic well-being of its subjects. Jack's benevolent paternalism makes his rise seem not only acceptable, but desirable. Indeed, the economy in which Jack participates does not seem to know

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scarcity. When scarcity emerges, in Jack's representation of the children, in the gossip's suggestion of "shorter commons," in the life of Randall Pert, in the Crown's treatment of foreign merchants or a disbanded soldiery, Jack provokes or manages its amendment and restores the appearance of plenty. Far from precipitating economic distress, Jack's rise seems to eliminate it. Yet by repeatedly opening an equivocal perspective on Jack - making his successes parodically easy, for example, or implying the coincidence between his self-interest and his ostensible social concern, Deloney marks the precariousness of that plenitude. The apparent elimination of scarcity depends on Jack's wilfull intervention and, by extension, on the assumption that he is not unique, that others will deploy their wealth and position in similarly benevolent ways. But Jack ofNewbury operates on the premise that Jack is unique, or at least exemplary, in his attitudes and behaviors. The story of Randall Pert presents a situation in which merchants align against one of their own, furthering rather than mitigating his economic distress, in order to underscore the singularity of Jack's response. More to the point, the arguments the gossip makes about "shorter commons" are presented and understood as what "the whole towne" and "any knight in this countrey" would do. From the perspective of the prevailing norms represented in Jack of Newbury, Jack's behavior repeatedly exceeds or violates expectations. In the larger design that is Deloney's working out of the figure of gossip as a metaphor for the circulation of discourses, Jack and the gossip become specular images of each other. In that specularity, a thematics of excess crosses with one of discursive authority. Jack's behavior and strategic use of gossip yield plenitude; his excessiveness translates into a position of discursive authority for him and economic well-being for all. In contrast, the gossip's behavior yields scarcity and her public display as a negative embodiment of excessive behavior. The specular relation between Jack and the gossip and the thematic crossings within it clearly attempt to resolve the narrative's ambivalence in favor of Jack's benevolent paternalism and its cornucopian outcome. Not to endorse Jack and his behaviors is to risk scarcity. Endorsement makes sense within the mentality of guild structures - apprentices, journeymen, and masters alike are bound together in a corporate identity. It follows logically that the female gossip should be marked as the embodied threat to that fraternal unity. But the effort of resolution or containment is tenuous at best. For one, as Jack ofNewbury represents them, the domestic establishments within which guild production takes place include women as producers, albeit within structures of patriarchal control. For another, as Deloney knew, the corporate unity of the guild

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was beset by divisions that made it increasingly difficult for journeymen to become masters; if not dispossessed altogether, some members of the fraternal body were forced into positions of relative feminization. Finally, as Deloney also knew, to speak from an emphatically artisanal position is to risk having one's speech disallowed or dismissed. Thus the figure of the gossip, as well as that of the jester also alluded to in the final story, registers the anxiety that his discourse will not be taken seriously or that it will be circumscribed within a marked and deauthorized position. Jack of Newbury remains caught between the effort to produce a harmonious resolution and the markers of its difficulty or inadequacy. But the tropes and issues it identifies, gossip as afigurefor the circulation of discourse and a thematics of excess, in particular, are rewoven in the subsequent fictions. In the last third of The Gentle Craft, Part 7, Deloney tells the story of Simon Eyre, a narrative of artisanal rise to mercantile status similar to the story of John Winchcombe and also interwoven with stories about the men and women in Eyre's establishment. Narrating Eyre's rise places Deloney in the same predicament he faces in telling of John Winchcombe's; his story is at once identified with and ambivalent about the success he represents. The end of Simon Eyre's story involves another powerful image of benevolent paternalism and plenitude. Eyre and his wife arrange a breakfast feast for all the apprentices in London in which the food is so abundant that the poor are fed from the leftovers. But in telling Eyre's story, Deloney plays out the thematics of excess in ways that yield a disjunction between the plenitude of the breakfast and the benevolence that supposedly attends Eyre's rise. That disjunction produces a space or gap in which the storyteller's position can be more clearly separated from that of the hero whose story he tells. Simon Eyre's rise is financed by a cargo of commodities that he acquires with the fortuitous assistance of a foreign journeyman of his shop and the shrewd advice of his wife, who counsels him to pose as the alderman he will later become in order to clinch the deal for the goods. Eyre is fully aware of the class shift acquisition of investment capital enables. When his wife finds him deep in thought after hearing of the available cargo, he says, "Beleeve me, wife . . . I was studying how to make myselfe Lord Maior, and thee a Lady" (142). It is, however, not his "studying" but his wife's scripting and costuming that allow him to acquire the cargo and thus appear abruptly in public as "the Gentleman that bought all the goods that came in the blacke Swan of Candy" (148). By making Eyre's wife the agent/intelligence behind his entrepreneurial coup, Deloney could be, as Laura Stevenson argues, keeping Eyre's own reputation relatively pure: "[the] naked capitalistic shrewdness is

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decently covered by attributing it to a failing in womankind: covetousness" (149).22 But displacing the entrepreneurial savvy on to Eyre's wife does not mitigate Eyre's own desire to be Lord Mayor - an office which presumes not only civic authority but also considerable wealth. Simon Eyre's rise is underwritten by an active, self-possessed woman who is then put in her place when she is repeatedly implicated in womanly "vices": endless chatter and the desire for things and status. That emphasis can also be read as "covering" the secret that his wife's intelligence (and not incidently that of a foreign journeyman, to whom I will return) enabled the purchase of the cargo. In the headnote to the first chapter of Simon Eyre's story, the story of his wife's advice is linked to another story actually told three chapters later and also involving his wife. While the first secret is an open one, the second is set up as a matter of anticipation and suspense. How Sir Simon Eyre being at first a Shoomaker, became in the end Mayor of London, through the counsell of his wife: and how he broke his fast every day on a Table that he would not sell for a thousand pounds: and how he builded Leaden Hall. (139)

Having made his fortune and become "an Adventurer at Sea" (a merchant capitalist), Eyre is called upon to assume the office of sheriff, the first of his civic dignities. He is reluctant because the expenses of the office are burdensome, but his excuses are demolished by the testimony of "a grave Commoner of the City:" I have often heard him [Eyre] say, and so have divers others also, that he hath a Table in his house, whereon he breaks his fast every day, that he will not give for a thousand pounds . . . he that is able to spare a thousand pounds in such a dead commoditie is very sufficient to be Sheriffe of London. (157)

Eyre agrees to accept the office and makes a bet whereby the mayor will supply all the wine for his tenure as sheriff if it is true, as Eyre claims, that the table he will not sell for a thousand pounds no man would buy for a thousand shillings. The "joke" is that the table is Eyre's wife's lap, which she covers with a cloth and plate and from which he eats. When Eyre asks her to do so in the presence of city dignitaries, she first objects ("what man, shall we shame ourselves?"[158]), and then acquiesces. The aldermen laugh and eat venison pastie from a platter on her lap. The wife's understandable reluctance to exhibit the intimacies of her marital relation in public underscores the "little table" as a domestic secret; Deloney presents that domestic secret as the deciding factor in Eyre's accession to the office of sheriff. What is immediately evident in the episode is the wife's feeling of shame and Eyre's imposition of his will on her. Thus the most obvious

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reading of the episode would emphasize how it demonstrates the subordination of the woman in the interest of masculine authority and position. The commodity/price terms of Eyre's boast offer another layer of interpretation: unlike the cargo he purchases, his wife is a "dead commoditie," not subject to sale. But Eyre also suggests that she would not be sellable: "my fancy to the thing is all: for doubtlesse no man here would give me a thousand shillings for it when they see it" (157). Whether Eyre here presumes the gentility of the men who would not buy another's wife or his wife's unattractiveness is irrelevant. The point is that Eyre's boast has already implicated her as his property in marketplace terms. Eyre purchases the cargo on credit. In the first chapter of his story, Deloney shows how his wife literally underwrites that credit. Here she is the "credit" that cements Eyre's access to the elite male fraternity of his desire. But the image of three men sitting on low stools eating from tableware on a woman's lap is more bizarre than the foregoing analysis allows. In the context of Eyre's boast, the invitation to the aldermen to eat at her lap suggests prostitution. The image alone implies both adult and infantile sexuality as well as maternal nourishment. In representing the settlement of London's civic affairs as a scene of three men boyishly playing around an ambivalently sexual/maternal figure, the episode offers an alternative, potentially subversive perspective on the masculine authority it so clearly sets out. Every stage of Eyre's rise depends on a domestic and feminine grounding, here represented by his wife's lap, earlier by her advice. In the episode of the table, the narrative is sympathetic to the wife's position, emphasizing her shame and her efforts to convince her husband to change his mind. Thus the second domestic secret of Eyre's rise complicates the first. If the earlier emphasis on the wife's covetousness prevents us from simply admiring her entrepreneurial savvy, the emphasis in the little table episode prevents us from simply admiring Eyre. While Eyre's dependence on his wife does not, in itself, qualify his status as a hero, the episode of the table reveals an excess in his response to that dependence. He uses his wife in ways that are not necessary to his acceptance of the office of sheriff. The symbolic violence of that use is generalized by the laughing participation of the aldermen. But the joke redounds on the men, exposing behind their manly authority the hostile pranks of boys, the offensive operations that secure their positions. In relation to the narrative of Simon Eyre's success, domestic secrets do not so much threaten his position as reveal the ways in which successive boundaries of family, household, city, nation are constructed and maintained. The narrative that takes Simon Eyre from the shoemaker's

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shop to the mayoralty has a counternarrative that remains within the shop and examines the relations that constitute its domesticity. For example, there is an extended courtship competition for a woman in Eyre's shop involving a French journeyman, a Dutch journeyman, and an English journeyman. Of these, the woman favors the Dutchman and the two chapters that tell the story are taken up with accounts of the excursions she takes with the men or with her woman friend. As the story ends, Simon Eyre forces her to marry the Englishman. Significantly, the two-chapter sequence is interrupted by the story of Eyre's election to the office of sheriff and the episode of "the little table." While the interruption reframes the courtship story as one about how political authority imposes itself in and through the household, it also exposes that imposition as one that proceeds at the expense of the negotiation of desire carried out in the courtship episodes, and particularly at the woman's and the Dutchman's expense. The foreign journeymen are prevented from marrying the Englishwoman, but not from continuing to work. Indeed, the Frenchman who first told Eyre of the cargo takes over the management of the shop when Eyre shifts to merchandizing. Later, when Eyre's new position is secure, the narrator tells us, he "put off his Shoomakers shop to one of his men" and sets up his new business at "the signe of the Blacke Swan swimming upon the Sea, in remembrance of that Ship, that first did bring him his wealth" (159). Nicholas, the Englishman who gets the woman, is given "a good stocke to begin the world withall"(166). Though we are not told whether that stock allows him to become master of his own shop, there is no doubt that he will be master of his wife. The accommodation of foreign journeymen within the artisanal economy would seem to be at odds with the xenophobia evident in the pamphlet published by the yeomen weavers. But like the women, the foreign journeymen are clearly subordinated; they remain journeymen, living in the households of other (English) men and under their rule. Making the journeymen who figure significantly in Eyre's story foreigners is a complex move on Deloney's part. On the one hand, their inclusion within the domestic economy makes that economy seem capacious, untroubled by unemployment and other forms of economic displacement. Their exclusion from potential rise can be attributed to their foreignness rather than to their status in the craft or to the status of their craft within the larger economy. On the other hand, that exclusion from potential rise and the journeymen's relative feminization is the situation many English journeymen faced in the expanding mercantile economy. The last chapter of The Gentle Craft, Part 1 tells the climax of Simon Eyre's career: "Within a few yeeres after, Alderman Eyer, being chosen

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Lord Maior of London, changing his copie, hee became one of the Worshipfull Company of Drapers, and for this yeare hee kept a most bountifull house" (167). When Eyre changes his copy he ceases to have any artisanal affiliation. Copy here means guild affiliation; such a change was called a "translation." By translating himself to the Drapers (retailers and merchants), Simon Eyre moves to the upper echelons of London's political and economic hierarchy. Rather than affirming artisanal practices, Simon Eyre's rise confirms their subordination to the interests of those who finance and develop the national market. When Simon Eyre stages a breakfast for all London apprentices, he creates for himself a public image as a wealthy merchant who has the interests of artisanal apprentices at heart. As Deloney knows, such an idealized image will work to warrant Eyre's political authority and consolidate his position as a player in the national economy: his telling of Eyre's story has been concerned to expose the domestic secrets occluded by the public image. Domestic secrets are, of course, the inevitable matter of gossip. The episode of the "little table" ends with the comment: "they [the aldermen] departed, spreading the fame of master Sheriffes little table over the whole Citie" (159). Eyre's cryptic boast, originally a means of enhancing his public image, becomes finally the public broadcasting of a bit of marital intimacy that, in its publicity, humiliates his wife. The trajectory of the domestic secret from intimacy to full publicity is emphasized, somewhat ironically, by the wife's exclusion from the assembly that chooses Eyre as sheriff. We might call that assembly a situation of "public secrecy;" its exclusivity is underscored when the wife sends a servant to eavesdrop at the assembly so that she can hear the results as soon as possible. In the working out of issues of publicity and access to knowledge and/or information that the chapter presents, a complex allegory of Deloney's storytelling project is evident. Like the wife, the reader is presumably excluded from access to the knowledge of what goes on behind the closed doors of civic assemblies. The servant whom the wife sends to eavesdrop is not only her surrogate but also the reader's. Deloney's narrative offers access to what goes on behind closed doors twice over. We hear what happens in Eyre's house and in City Hall and we see that matters of "public secrecy" are displaced on to the domestic secret of the "little table." The episode of the little table, in itself and in its positioning in the larger narrative of Eyre's rise, reveals that domestic secrets do hold the key to how men rise to positions of wealth and civic authority and how that authority imposes itself through the household on both women and journeymen. Thus it makes sense that it is the aldermen who broadcast the story of the little table and occupy the

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storyteller's position in the allegory. By this means, Deloney's storytelling becomes identified simultaneously with those in power and with the dissemination of the story about what lies behind their power. Gossip The storytelling practice at which Deloney arrives in his first two books involves juxtaposing narratives of a rise to power with narratives of domestic intimacy so that he can represent the intersecting and often conflicting social relations of individuals, families, households, industries, and nations. If, by figuring the relationship between his authorship, the book, and the reader as gossip, Deloney seems to elide the social relations of print into which his stories in fact enter, by gossiping about Simon Eyre he indicates what is at stake in that elision. Retailers and merchants, the Drapers not only exercised significant control over the artisanal practices of the cloth trade, but, at the end of the sixteenth century, were involved in a drawn-out skirmish with the Stationers over the Stationers' proprietary interest in the book trade. Drapers had been involved in bookselling and publishing at least since the formation of the Stationers' Company. By the 1580s the number and status of the bookselling Drapers was one of the issues intersecting in the crisis over patents and privileges within the Stationers' Company. In chapter 1 I described how the long struggle over proprietary rights and privileges in relation to print technology eventually produced Copy as a form of property. Following the increased protection of their monopoly in 1586, the Stationers attempted to restrict non-Stationers' rights to enter Copies in the Register and to prevent members of the Stationers from printing for Draper-publishers. The skirmish finally ended in 1600 when the offending Drapers were translated into the Stationers' Company. As Gerald Johnson, to whose account I am indebted, argues, in forcing the translation, the Stationers were protecting their capacity to control the marketplace of print, both as the government's agents in controlling printed discourse and in their own interest of controlling the profit of print.23 That they could force the translation, which was counter to the "custom of the city" allowing citizens to practice any trade regardless of their guild affiliation, attests to the Crown's interests in controlling the dissemination of print. From the perspective of the Drapers' Company, it was a diminution in their estate, lost, moreover, to a company with less accumulated wealth and prestige. For the individual drapers involved, the translation protected their economic interests. The draper-publishers' willingness to be translated (and the increasing number of apprentices in the Stationers' Company

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whose fathers were gentlemen or members of more prestigious companies) suggests how compelling the profits of print were, for a few. The shift Eyre undergoes from producer to wholesaler/retailer was effected internally in the Stationers' Company as publishers became dominant. If Eyre's rise confirms the subordination of artisanal practices to the developing national market, the Stationers' consolidation of control over the marketplace of print adumbrates the fully developed capitalist economy in which producers are dispossessed of their control over the means of production. Print is neither the author's tool, nor the printer's, but the publisher's. Deloney's decision to tell Simon Eyre's story is thus situated in a complicated fashion, for by it he reveals the nexus of relations that motivates and controls his artisanal practices. In charting Eyre's rise, he is also exploring the circumstances that make it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for him to practice his artisanal skills. (The cargo that launches Eyre as a retailer is, of course, imported cloth.) When Deloney makes writing rather than weaving his practice, he in effect changes his copy, but unlike Simon Eyre (and the translated Drapers), he remains the dispossessed artisan. He cannot evade the Stationers' control of the book trade; in telling the story of Simon Eyre he reveals his own domestic secret as well, the circumstances within which he must operate as a storyteller in print. In his Survey, Stowe records Simon Eyre as having been "sometime an Upholster, and then a Draper."24 If, in making Simon Eyre a shoemaker Deloney leaves his mark on the story, when he returns Eyre's story to the facts of the chronicles, the history Deloney is telling and the historical situation from which he tells it converge: the fate of Deloney's stories depends not on his artisanal skill or his fraternal relations, but on the good will and investment decisions of a bookseller/publisher who might be, like Simon Eyre, a Draper. The men who owned the Copy of more than half of Deloney's texts for the first quarter of the seventeenth century had, in fact, been trained as Drapers.25 Yet by figuring his storytelling as gossip, Deloney simultaneously acknowledges his dispossession and preempts any other claim to ownership of his stories by declaring them commonly available - public, not private, property. Gossip supplies a metaphor not only for what Deloney does in his fictions but also for the manner in which he produces them. The multiple narratives are drawn from a variety of sources and traditions, oral as well as printed, verbal as well as mute. Deloney's characteristic move is to provide a story that situates a name, a place, a song, a proverb, or another story in a network of specific relations of his invention. Anything in the public domain might serve. John Winchcombe's story can

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illustrate the point for it survives in no chronicle history of the period, yet two John Winchcombes, father and son, were prominent clothiers in Newbury; the son, like Deloney's Jack, served in parliament in the mid-sixteenth century. A story told in the first chapter about Jack's marriage to the widow is drawn from Boccaccio's Decameron; a story told about Jack's service at Flodden Field is accurate in the details of the battle, but Jack's presence at the battle and his conversations with the queen there are invented. In the story of Sir George Rigley, both the Rigley family name and the problem of a disbanded soldiery can be found in the chronicles; the story of Sir George, his misfortunes, his seduction of and coerced marriage to one of Jack's servants are Deloney's invention. Nominal heroes like John Winchcombe and Simon Eyre function as guarantors, as it were, of Deloney's storytelling, anchoring it in a world already recorded. What their stories reveal, however, is that establishing a record more often than not occludes the means by which it gets made. The figure of gossip and the domestic secrets it implies become a kind of compensatory gesture, one that provides the story behind the record. In the sequels, nominal heroes are multiplied and decentered, resulting in representations that implicate the formation of a hegemonic order without focusing on the rise to power of individual merchants. That is, the sequels often represent events and relations distinguished precisely by their apparent unremarkability in any larger scheme of things. Yet many of the stories Deloney tells do represent the integration of peripheral, local, and ordinary acts into the complex order of the marketplace and the nation. Deloney's interest in domestic relations is continuous with his appropriation of the figure of gossip: what is at stake for him are those practices that reveal the continuous making and remaking of a social world as the product of situated choices. He locates that making primarily in the household and identifies it with figures of women and journeymen, a gender coding that once again associates artisanal making with the feminine. Yet, as in the figuration of gossip, the gender coding that attends the representations of domestic relations is not simply a means of marking a loss of power and control, but also a means of examining the structures and conditions that both enable and resist the more formal operations of that power and control. In shifting attention from putatively heroic figures and stories to "unremarkable" ones, Deloney maps out the shifting relations that constitute a social order and construct individual and collective identities. If, as gossip, Deloney's storytelling begins with appropriation from the public domain, it ends in the public domain as well - available for appropriation. Such mastery as Deloney exercises is transitory; a tactical

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intervention, it can only shape what reenters the public domain. But like gossip, such momentary mastery is powerful in informal ways, for it tacitly sets an agenda and demands attention. Deloney's fictions do not simply embroider stories already on record and launch them into renewed circulation; they also alter the registers in which stories circulate and the kinds of stories that get told. In so doing they enact and represent an opening up of a public sphere, for gossip thematizes a circulation of discourse that is contingent rather than controlled. Access to print whether the writer's or the reader's - is one of the shaping forces of that contingency. By repeatedly suggesting the incompleteness and interestedness of the printed record, Deloney at once reshapes the record and demonstrates its provisionality. He makes print into a tool by means of which the record can be reworked, situations of "public secrecy" disrupted, and matters of private relations opened to public view and comment - print as one of the instruments of gossip. Yet, as Deloney knows, access to print is not free, universal, or even contingent; rather, it is controlled by the disciplinary operations of the state, the trade, and literacy. Figuring print as gossip affords a compensatory gesture because it makes the technical and socioeconomic machinery of print into a kind of valve, a point of control that momentarily directs the flow of material at either side of that point. Access to print may be limited, but print is only a moment in the circulation of discourse. Yet the question of access remains an important one because some shapings of the record accumulate force, become dams of a sort (to continue the hydraulic metaphor). Unlike gossip, which humanizes the circulation of discourse, implying multiple agents even as it suggests their anonymity, print mechanizes that circulation, making anonymity also a dehumanization. In Thomas of Reading, Deloney tells a story that brings together the machine, the public record, and the question of human agency. Hodgekins, a merchant of Halifax, wins for the town which "lived altogether upon clothing" (285) the privilege of summarily executing cloth thieves, but no one in Halifax will perform the act, not even those poor enough to need the dead man's clothing they would thereby gain. "When I have the skil to make a man," says one, "I will hang a man, if it chance my workmanship do not like me" (309), suggesting an artisanal ethos of mastery circumscribed by an awareness of its appropriate limits. So, "the office of Hangman was poasted off" and the thieves (Robin Hood-like figures) argue for and take their freedom from the gallows. "Poast" means, among other things, both to officially convey or carry the Crown's (written) word and to delegate, transfer, or assign a duty or responsibility. In "poasting off" the office of hangman, the citizens of Halifax are in fact accepting responsibility, for the office

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(and the privilege) is suspended by their moral dilemma: they are interested in protecting their profits but not willing to kill for it. The two meanings of "poast" are rendered dysfunctional, the chain of command and responsibility disrupted because no agents can be found to execute the privilege that is the privilege of execution. The clothiersfinallysecure their privilege by means of "a gin, that shal cut off their heads without mans helpe"(310). The device is essentially a guillotine. The friar who offers the machine does so, he says, "not so much in respect of your profit, as for the desire I have to upholde justice, and seeing Ifindyou and the rest so womanish, that you could notfindin your hearts to hang a theefe" (310). Not only does the friar's device assume that artisanal making is simply a technical matter, in this case, a matter of finding "a Carpenter to frame it out of hand," his comment redefines the clothiers' moral dilemma as a threat to their masculine authority that they must redeem in the name of an abstract justice. Hodgekins is quite delighted; he "poast[s] up to the Court" and secures permission for the machine whose operation occludes human agency. In acquiesing to the use of the gin, the merchant citizens of Halifax transfer responsibility to the device and thereby indicate that the protection of their wealth depends on a denial of human effort and agency, and the subordination of artisanal making to the securing of wealth. Halifax's gin is one of Deloney's appropriations from the public domain. In an already circulating record, the gin is described as an expression of the collective will: "everie man there present dooth either take hold of the rope or putteth foorth his arme so neere to the same as he can get, in token that he is willing to see true justice executed."26 In the story Deloney supplies, the machine simultaneously embodies and replaces the collective will. The gin solves the merchants' dilemma precisely because it allows them not to put their hands on the rope; it will, Hodgekins tells the king, "without the hand of man cut off the cragges of all such Carles"(311). In telling his version of the story, Deloney not only marks the ambivalence of the machine - at once expressing and contravening agency, he also demystifies the operation of "true justice," revealing the secret that it is, in fact, the operation of privilege. Exposing the vested interests in the operation of the gin and the artisanal ethos that, if followed, would prevent its use, does not, however, alter the fact of its operation or the logic that makes property and its relations more valuable than life: "till this day, it is observed in Halifax, that such as are taken stealing of their cloth have their heads chopt off with the same gin"(311). In the allegory I am suggesting, the machinery of print the machine itself and the disciplinary apparatuses that shape access to it - appears as the expression of a "collective voice" even as it effaces the

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multiple, competing, intersecting, and contradictory positions involved in the circulation of discourse. Print as gossip, then, offers a figure of potential resistance to the machinery of print, for gossip, while also an expression of a "collective voice" and one having a disciplinary effect, is unruly, not subject to an externally imposed order and/or set of property relations (even if it might informally reproduce the conditions of that order and those relations). As a master trope, gossip sets out a polymorphic, if not hypermorphic, model of the circulation of discourse. Gossip has no identifiable site of origin, multiple trajectories and registers, and a constant susceptibility to transformation. No sooner has Deloney told the story of Halifax's gin than he begins to reweave its elements - issues of property, exchange/theft, agency, the circulation and use of discourse into a design that ends in a figure of hypermorphic gossip, a talking horse. At stake in the reweaving is a recognition of the limitations of gossip as a figure for the circulation of discourses. As the story of Halifax's gin suggests, exposing the "secrets" behind the machine does not affect the operation of that machine. Gossip is a powerful figure for the circulation of discourse precisely because it does not yield to the economic and social relations invested in making this or that story the official one. But by the same token, gossip cannot account for the ways in which the circulation of discourse is structured by the operations of the marketplace and the property relations involved in the deployment of print technology. Interwoven with thefigureof gossip, therefore, is another figure - song - that at once reiterates the wide and common circulation gossip implies and positions that circulation in economic terms. In the chapter following the story of Hodgekins and Halifax's privilege, Deloney takes up the same issues of how mercantile power is promulgated and protected in the name of the Crown by discussing the difficulty of filling the office of catchpole (men authorized to pursue and arrest debtors) and telling the story of Tom Dove, a clothier down on his luck, who is (temporarily) saved from imprisonment for debt. Thomas Dove loses his wealth "through a free heart, and a liberall mind" (337); he is known for his jollity, good fellowship, and willingness to hire musicians. Dove's love of song and his extravagant spending to provide song link him to recurrent motifs and figures in the fictions. In his story mercantile wealth and its vice, prodigality, are implicated in an economy of spending without material gain whose purpose is pleasure in the shared passing of time. Saved from the catchpoles sent by his London creditors, Dove finally falls captive to an "Officer" sent by one of the servants of his household to whom he owes back wages. An extended

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dialogue between Dove and his servants exposes the contradiction within his domestic establishment between the cash nexus of wages and labor and the affective relations of extended intimacy. The good fellowship he provides by hiring musicians is achieved at the expense of those whose labor affords the basis of his wealth. His arrest, at the servant's behest but sanctioned by the Crown's authority, links the contradictions within the household to those without that Deloney represents in the exchanges between his nominal heroes and the Crown, such as the story of Hodgekins and Halifax's privilege. Dove's extravagance is a leak in the system of circulation and as such analogous to the theft that troubles the merchants of Halifax. Neither the state nor those who labor can afford an economy in which accumulated wealth is expended without material gain or lost by theft. Yet Dove also stands for a set of values good fellowship and pleasure - that are or may be lost in a strictly economic calculus. Accordingly, in the story Deloney tells, he is redeemed from prison by a letter from another Thomas, the eponymous Thomas of Reading (Thomas Cole) bequeathing him 200 pounds, a letter written in a fit of melancholy on the night before Thomas Cole is murdered. Cole is a frequent traveler to London whose murder is plotted for months by the hosts of an inn where he customarily breaks his journey. The reader is made privy to the plot and to the way it will be executed from the beginning, making the murder itself an anticlimax, preempted by its foretelling and by the representation of the melancholic fit that causes Cole to wish for the solace of Tom Dove's presence and thus to write the letter that unwittingly anticipates his death. The bedstead at the inn is a platform "most cunningly carved, and faire to the eye . . . made in such sort that by the pulling out of two iron pinnes below in the kitchen, it was to be let downe and taken up by a draw bridge or in the maner of a trappe door"(321). The murders (Cole's is the sixtieth) are effected by "plucking out the fore said iron pinnes" and dropping the bedstead, causing its occupant to fall into a cauldron of boiling water. Like the gin that enables the merchant citizens of Halifax to enact their privilege, the bedstead is the product of artisanal skill: the innkeeper "being a carpenter made that false falling floore, and... his wife devised it" (327). The innkeepers' making presents an image of artisanal rise to wealth run amok: the only motive offered for the murders is "covetousnes." If Halifax's gin elides human agency, the innkeepers' platform, by its explicit criminality, exposes it. The innkeepers are discovered in Cole's murder because their usual provision for the victim's horse fails in the case of Cole's "lustie stout horse" (326), which escapes confinement and so reveals Cole's

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disappearance. The next chapter opens on the scene of a baptismal party for Sutton's wife and child in Salisbury, where the gathered women and journeymen "drive out the time" by telling tales. The story of Cole's murder emerges as gossip: "he was rosted alive . . . he was sodden at an Inholders house and served into the ghests instead of porke . . . the inholder made pies of him, and penny pasties, yea, and made his owne servant eate a piece of him . . . some say that a horse revealed it . . . a certaine horse did speake, and told great things .. ."(328-30). Gossip's circulation ends when Sutton enters, offers an authoritative version ("he was scalded to death in a boyling caldron, and afterward throwne into a running river that is hard by"), and, when asked, "how was it knowne," responds, "by his horse." Here, once again Deloney figures gossip as oral, excessive, and feminine while at the same time using it to draw attention to his storytelling position. Sutton's is not, after all, the authoritative version of the story of Cole's murder, for the true story of the "talking" horse is known only to the narrator and his privy companion, the reader. Gossip is a deeply ambivalent figure for Deloney, simultaneously a representation and acknowledgment of his dispossession as an artisan and the only means of addressing, though not redressing, that dispossession. The feminization of the figure would seem to map the ambivalence along gender lines. If dispossession feminizes the artisan, then the association of excess and credulity with a feminized gossip reasserts the storyteller's mastery and skill. Yet for Deloney the excesses of gossip also figure a resistance to the machinery of print by indicating a multiplicity and diversity that keeps open the possibility of multiple sites of production and dissemination in the circulation of discourses. Moreover, masculinity offers no simple solution to the ambivalence, for it is repeatedly associated with thefiguresand machinery of dispossession. Gossip is simultaneously a metaphor for the circulation of discourses in which print participates and the name for "unauthorized" and unruly discourses in relation to which those who enter print would claim an authoritative position. In either case, gossip signals an excess in relation to print. In the story of Thomas Cole, the excesses that attend gossip are juxtaposed to the excess or extravagance associated with Tom Dove's hiring of musicians. Music and song, like gossip, "drive out the time." "Driving out the time" creates a noneconomic form of plenitude, one in which the present is extended, capacious, unpunctuated. Economic accumulation, in contrast, depends on processes necessarily bound to temporality and punctual events of production and exchange. Significantly, the phrase, "driving out the time," occurs in relation to a punctual event of socio-

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biological (re)production - a baptismal party. In the intertwining of Thomas Cole's story and that of Thomas Dove, three levels of social (re)production - discursive, biological, economic - coincide with each other and with two versions of "non-productive" excess. The innkeepers who murder Thomas Cole engage in an obviously excessive, destructive behavior that, as "covetousnes," is identified as the desire for accumulation itself, its purest form. But the innkeepers' accumulation yields no gain: "they prospered not but at their death were found very farre in debt" (327). The irrationality of the innkeepers' behavior and the absence of a coherent explanation reemerges in the displaced and condensed image of the talking horse. The displacement shifts the problems of irrationality, excess, and coherence from the economic level to the discursive. The talking horse signifies a form of discursive practice that cannot produce an account of what it seeks to explain. Whether figured as a talking horse or as the narrator's account of Cole's murder, gossip imitates the economy of the innkeepers' desire: it is the desire for story itself, repeatedly enacted, but it yields no gain, accumulates no explanatory edge. Rather, it produces a plenitude that has no economic calculus, a plenitude endlessly enacted alongside the punctual events of biological and economic life. Yet at the same time gossip weaves together the punctual events of the murder and the baptism; it is the discursive matrix within which they unfold. In the second version of "non-productive" excess, the case of Tom Dove's extravagance, economic surplus - accumulated wealth - is expended in the passing of time and the pleasures of the extended moment. Here a noneconomic form of plenitude has economic consequences; the expenses of song produce a situation of scarcity within his household. At the same time, as I noted earlier, Dove's redemption by Cole's will implies that an economic calculus is insufficient, that extravagance in the interest of song belongs to another order of necessity. The redemption of song also posits a relation between discursive forms of social interaction and economic practices. Song figures a discourse that is shaped and then shared or exchanged in that particular, relatively constant form. This is not to say that song is immutable, only that song is a discursive object as well as a process. As the case of Tom Dove makes clear, song is implicated in relations of the marketplace; its production and circulation can involve economic investment and expenditure. But song is not circumscribed by market relations, for it also exists, like gossip, in the public domain. If gossip figures the discursive matrix within which social and economic life unfolds, song figures the possibility of producing out of that matrix objects that register both economic and noneconomic forms of value. In thefigureof song, an

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economic calculus coincides with noneconomic forms of plenitude. Thus the necessity of song operates on two levels. Like gossip, it figures a production and circulation of discourse that is widely accessible, necessary to, and constitutive of social experience. But song also figures the implication of discursive practices in market relations without thereby reducing those practices to the imperatives of the marketplace. The excess(es) of print In specifically focusing on the circulation of discourses - record, story, proverb, gossip, song - and locating that circulation in particular acts of agency and exchange that link, say, parliamentarians like Jack of Newbury to the village gossip, Deloney represents a public sphere of discourse. The public sphere that emerges from Deloney's fictions is crucially different from that tacitly envisioned in the Harvey/Nashe quarrel precisely because it includes women and journeymen as participants. Moreover, the public sphere in Deloney is not necessarily tied to empowered or rational positions and discourses, hence the necessity of the figure of gossip and its excesses. As the polymorphic figure of gossip suggests, the public sphere is a spatiotemporality intersected by relations of power, prestige, property, and personality and interwoven by the circulation of discourse. In bringing together representations of a national mercantile order, geographically dispersed households and the circulation of discourses in and between them, Deloney extends the representational gestures of Nashe's urban scenarios to formulate an ensemble of subject positions differentially marked and yet mutually articulating the parameters of their coexistence. In the second part of The Gentle Craft Deloney tells a long, intricately woven story that explicitly links his representations to Nashe's and the excesses of gossip to those of an economic calculus. The immediate focus of the story is a courtship competition for a young widow that recapitulates and revises the courtship tale told at the beginning of Jack of Newbury, In the romance between Mistress Farmer and William, the apprentice who at first keeps the account books and then is demoted to water bearer and kitchen drudge to test his commitment, Deloney presents the kind of fable of artisanal rise with which his storytelling is associated - reward and happiness come to those who restrain themselves and keep careful accounts. Among Mistress Farmer's other suitors are "a grave and wealthy Alderman," a young gentleman, Harry Nevell, and Dr. Burcot, "the cunningest Physition in London." William the apprentice emerges as the winner because he does not, indeed cannot, act on prerogatives of status or gender. He confesses his love before he is

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out of his apprenticeship, thus linking his eventual rise to his ability to express himself directly in speech and his willingness to take risks by doing so. If William is feminized by his subordination to his mistress's commands, he is also figured as chivalric and in time made wealthy by the same means. At the wedding he is "daintily trickt up" so that "all those which beheld him confesst him he was a most comely, trim and proper man"(254). The pointed contrast between William and the more conventionally desirable and masculinized suitors recuperates a relative feminization for masculine identity formation. While the story of William's rise offers a compensatory fantasy for artisanal dispossession in class and gender terms, Deloney also deploys it in an allegory of the circulation of discourse and his own discursive position in particular. The courtship story links the allegory to an originary moment in the fictions (the courtship story that opens Jack ofNewbury), but, like Deloney's own discursive production, the allegory begins before the courtship story. In an earlier episode, the young gentleman, Harry Nevell, having wasted his fortune, is rescued by "Thomas Drum, or Tom Drum" a journeyman shoemaker known for his boasting and tall tales. The prodigal is a figure that circulates not only in Deloney's fictions but also in the work of university-educated men as a figure for the writer, signifying the waste or loss of authority consequent to their implication in the marketplace of print and holding out the retrograde fantasy of a return to a prior order.27 The boaster is an opposite figure of excess who recasts the prodigal's shame as shamelessness. In Deloney's fiction, the two swear blood brotherhood and Nevell sojourns among the shoemakers. Tom, or rather, Jack, Drum is the proverbial name of an unwelcome guest, a circumstance for which Deloney duly provides an illustrative story and a psychological motivation. It is Tom Drum's habit of boasting and insisting on the truth of his tall tales that makes him an unwelcome guest (and situates him as an answer to the mayor's perception of Deloney as an unwelcome guest in the discursive field). Tom Drum is the third of Deloney's Thomases (Thomas Dove who spends his wealth on music and song and Thomas Cole whose alternate name, Thomas of Reading, is a visual if not aural pun, are the others), and in making him a figure of irrepressible wit and humor, Deloney acknowledges his debt to Thomas Nashe. Like the proverbial status of Tom Drum's name, the connection between the Thomases Nashe and Deloney is a matter of record. Harvey links the two in Pierces Supererogation: "Surely Thomas, it were pollicy to boast lesse with Thomas Delone, or to achieve more with Thomas More"(G//, 11:280). Tom Drum boasts that he can command Mistress Farmer's favor for Harry Nevell and thus introduces him to the courtship competition.

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In order to get Burcot out of the way, Nevell devises a plan that sends the doctor off on a mission to administer to one Lady Swinborne who is "wondrous sick." In Kind-Hartes Dreame, Burcot wants to maintain the strictures that separate learned men from the imperatives of the marketplace of print. In The Gentle Craft, his story makes him simultaneously the victim of his desire for status and coin and the means by which Deloney marks his own position in relation to the strictures articulated in Burcot's invective in Kind-Hartes Dreame and the Harvey/Nashe quarrel. I have at least ridden a hundred miles with an arrant knave that carried me I knew not whether: he rode with me out of Bishopsgate foorth right as far as Ware, and than compassing all Suffolke and Norfolke, he brought me backe againe through Essex, and so conducted me to Black-wall in Middlesex to seeke out my Lady Swinborne, my good lady and Mistris: at last I saw it was no such matter, but the villaine being disposed to mocke me, brought me to a woman Egyptian, as blacke as the great Divell, who lay in child-bed and was but delivered of a child of her owne colour: to the which in despite of my beard they made me to be Godfather, where it cost me three crownes, and I was glad I so escaped, and who was the author of all this deceipt but Master Nevelll but if ever I come to give him Phisicke, if I make him not have the squirts for five days, count me the veriest dunce that ever wore velvet cap. (247-48)

Burcot's unwilling journey literalizes the learned man's anxiety about the circulation of his discourse in the marketplace; his becoming godfather to the Egyptian woman's child reveals his necessary, if coerced, participation. Burcot may lose whatever dignity and status he wants to protect by the revenge he plans (giving Nevell "the squirts"), but by that revenge Deloney parodically suggests the circulating invective that sustains and defines the authorial investment of learned men in the discursive field. More to the point, the "author of all this deceipt" is Harry Nevell, a figure linked to men like Greene and Nashe. Though Nevell sends Burcot off because he wants to "disburden the house of the Doctor" so that he can have time alone with the desirable widow, he also knows that the Egyptian woman "had such a hard labour, that she was lamented among all the wives that dwelt thereabout"(241). From Deloney's perspective, NevelFs plan is a "fit matter to imploy" (241) Burcot as the guarantor of the survival of the woman and her child whom he would not have deigned to see voluntarily for more than humanitarian reasons. In allying Nevell with Tom Drum and opposing him to Burcot, Deloney's allegory separates Nashe's accomplishment from its restriction within or by the claims of patrimonial position and puts it to work in the service of a discursive circulation that benefits those who are not only marginalized but excluded altogether from the public sphere as

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learned men or even native speakers would define it. The Egyptian woman, "blacke as the great Divel" in Burcot's description, is linked in turn to the kitchen drudge William, who stands a "black man by her [Mistress Farmer's] white side" (253) as the widow announces her choice. The compensatory fantasy of artisanal rise is linked to a vision of inclusion that protects itself from Utopian illusion by figuring appropriation and extortion as the means of its achievement. If an embryonic version of Deloney's project can already be seen in the ballad incident's use of the Lord Treasurer's pamphlet and Strange Histories' popularization of Holinshed, the extortion of money and services from Burcot more aggressively and pointedly figures the appropriations that underwrite the fictions. Such appropriations symbolically effect a reversal of dispossession, reclaiming and redistributing wealth and knowledge. By making boasting Tom Drum the indirect instigator of Nevell's action (both because he introduces Nevell to Mistress Farmer and because Nevell's plan is indebted to the audacity Tom Drum repeatedly demonstrates), Deloney marks an awareness of the limits of such a reversal. Yet by interweaving the allegory into the extended courtship tale, which, like the gossip's conversation with Jack's second wife in Jack of Newbury, repeatedly stages quotidian exchanges drawn from, indebted to, supported by, and finally indistinguishable from those discourses that circulate in print (conduct manuals and treatises on economy and the social order, for example), Deloney figures the audience of print as an active, shaping force, as users, transformers, and reproducers of public discourse. Print may be a technology controlled and/or supervised by propertied and propriate (male) interests, but the discourses it reproduces are incorporated into the trajectories of gossip. And as gossip, print generates a public sphere of discourse that both includes and traverses institutional, marketplace, and domestic sites and yields an excess that cannot be subsumed into a rational political or economic calculus of exchange. One final story, yet another tactical intervention that, while it cannot represent a dislodging of those interests accumulated at strategic positions in the discursive field, nonetheless refines the representation of those positions in relation to a plenitude that always exceeds accumulation. At the end of the second part of The Gentle Craft, boasting Tom comes to live in the household of the Greene king, where he continues his "daily vaunts" of "attributing] other mens deeds to himselfe" until "his lies were so manifest that he could no longer stand in them" (264). The Greene king's story recapitulates Tom Dove's; he loses his fortune and renders his household vulnerable because he spends his wealth on merriment. As his name suggests and his story demonstrates, the Greene

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king is a mythical version of the notion that life/liveliness cannot be contained within a restricted economy. When the Greene king's household decays, his brothers-in-the-trade do not succor him, so he resolves "to walke a mile or twaine" and goes to seek his fortune in Flanders, commending his shop to his wife's care. On his way he meets with "Anthony now now, the firkin Fidler of Frenchlane," who makes a song for him, saying: "whether you have money or no, you shall have musick, I doe not airways request coyne of my friends for my cunning: what, you are not every body, and seeing you are going beyond the sea, I will bestow a pint of wine on you at the Salutation" (258). When the Greene king returns, his wife has redeemed his estate by her diligent management and Anthony now now's song has become "even as common as a printed Ballad" (262) "that thereby he purchast a name which he never lost till his dying day, for ever after men called him Anthony now now" (259). In Chettle's pamphlet Anthony now now figures the necessary implication of an authorial vocation in the marketplace of print. In Deloney's representation, Anthony now now articulates three positions in relation to the marketplace: a fraternity apart from the market (when he makes the song for the Greene king); an artisanal position (when he requests coin for his cunning); and a commodity relation (when his song circulates as a printed ballad and purchases him [only] a name). What is crucial in Deloney's representation of Anthony now now is that none of these three positions precludes the others. Anthony now now's elision of the marketplace is a knowing one ("whether you have money or no, you shall have music"); he puts his labor into the form of a gift. Both the Greene king's prodigality and Anthony now now's gift belong to an economy of expenditure without gain. Unlike the Greene king, whose prodigality implicates the livelihood of others, Anthony now now's gesture belongs to a realm of "pure" gift, one without cost or anticipated return. Such a gift defines song as an act of solace and as a necessity. Though it does not directly challenge other modes of exchange, the gift locates freedom on the side of excess and thus defines both artisanal and capitalized modes of exchange as comparatively unfree, confined. In the final episode of the Greene king's story, his wife complains that she has been confined to the household, to the work of production, and thus deprived of pleasure and recreation. The Greene king promises to take her walking to St. James Fair and to "bestow a fat Pig upon [her]." In the meantime, he meets up with other shoemakers and invites their participation, securing their commitment to the plan by bonds of twenty pounds made out by a scrivener. Anthony now now joins the party, which the Greene king "merrily" escorts not to the St. James Fair close

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by in Westminster, but to that at Bristow, several days' journey and some 100 miles from London. The men who have invested and the woman who wants release from domestic confinement are kept to their commitments; only Anthony now now and the Greene king walk by habit and for the sport it affords. The Greene king's wife is made so tired by their walk, the narrator tells us, that "she never intreated her husband to walke with her againe" (264). In the figure of the Greene king the excesses that attend Jack of Newbury's and Simon Eyre's rise in parodic or hostile forms as well as the excess associated with Thomas Dove are made into a mythic principle of excess and "correctively" associated with the ballad singer. The proliferation troped by the figure of the ballad singer is also a form of excess, here reconfigured on multiple levels - as gift, as necessity, and as implicated in forms of marketplace mediation. The very multiplicity associated with Anthony now now in Deloney's representation indicates that excess always accompanies the circulation of discourse, whether that excess takes the form of resistance to forms of control, or the profit generated by the capitalization and commodification of discourses, or the largesse of the gift that is granted from a position not marked by privileged status or power. The excesses figured in and by the alliance of the Greene king and the ballad singer (re)locate the excess implied by the figure of gossip specifically in relation to production and the marketplace. In the story of the Greene king's perambulation, the excess is imposed on the woman's desire for recreation and the fraternal relations of the shoemaker-investors. The perambulation itself exceeds the desires of its participants and disciplines them into participation and a qualified endorsement of the principle of excess. If the investors are not to lose the twenty pounds of their bonds, that is, not to become implicated in an economy of loss, they must participate in a circulation or perambulation beyond the expected limit or boundary. The woman, in contrast, "be[comes] so weary" that she chooses henceforth to remain within domestic confinement. But that confinement to the household does not condemn her to the alternate weariness of endless production, for Tom Drum comes to reside within that domesticity, bringing with him "other mens deeds" and endless "daily vaunts" that become (or take the place of other) forms of recreation. The circulation figured in the story of the Greene king's perambulation is motivated simultaneously by the desire for pleasure and by the economic imperative of securing an investment made in the prospect of that circulation. Pleasure, and the excess toward which it tends, subordinates the economic calculus, while at the same time the economic calculus is firmly implicated in the seeking/provision of pleasure.

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Anthony now now's presence affords the pleasure of song at every point en route and the audience for that song is not limited to those who walk with the Greene king. Thus, the circulation of song in the story of the Greene king works like the figure of gossip to suggest a process that exceeds any effort of control or containment and affords multiple points of entry, effect, and affect. But the story of the Greene king also figures that circulation as one that can produce containment - that of the wife within domesticity - precisely because the circulation itself is uncontained. That is, the circulation traverses not only geographic space but also, more specifically, the boundary between domestic and public spaces. In so doing, the circulation of song, like gossip, foregrounds a public sphere of discourse that weaves together multiple sites and modes of production, reception, and dissemination. But the circulation in the story of the Greene king differs from that implied by the figure of gossip because it includes the economic interest of the investors in that circulation. If the circulation exceeds their original intent, they not only have "no remedy" but also, according to the story, no cause for alarm. Their economic interests remain secure, indeed, are secured by, the unanticipated extended circulation. The story of the Greene king, considered in relation to the stories that yield the figure of gossip as a means countering the dispossession of the artisan, produces an allegory of the excessess of print. First, as a technology, print enables the generation of an excess, a surplus, in the form of surplus value. That surplus historically dispossesses the artisan whether printer or writer. At the same time, however, the mechanical (re)production of disourses generates other forms of excess or surplus, the proliferation of texts, knowledges, and potential interactions that so trouble those who would control the circulation of discourse. As the story of the Greene king makes clear, those who worry about proliferation are also those who stand to profit by increased circulation. Second, the key question is whether or how the economic and noneconomic forms of excess or surplus can be aligned. In Deloney's allegories, the excesses generated by print are simultaneously in the public domain and available for exploitation by private interests. And print affords alternately a means of exploitation and a means of countering that exploitation. If the stories of Jack of Newbury and Simon Eyre suggest that economic surplus can be translated and consolidated into a position of control over the circulation of stories and public images, other figurations of gossip and song resist any imposition of control and insist on an open-ended and uneconomic circulation. By repeatedly foregrounding the ambivalences of print and its excesses, Deloney produces a model of the public circulation of discourse that is constituted by the simultaneity

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of efforts of control and the impossibility of their success. Both the figure of gossip and the story of the Greene king locate excess beyond print and beyond the question of who controls the mechanical means of (re)production. In constructing those figures, among others, Deloney suggests that the economic and noneconomic forms of excess are finally incommensurable. The space or gap of that incommensurability reproduces the ambivalence of print as the space, time, and personnel of a public sphere of discourse. The public sphere of discourse that emerges in Deloney'sfictionsdoes so in response to the efforts, interests, and forces that would exclude men like Deloney and discourses like that of the ballad singer from legitimized participation in public dialogue. The particulars of Deloney's fictions respond not only to this a priori exclusion but also to the dispossession that attends the artisanal position in the developing capitalist marketplace. In articulating his response to exclusion and dispossession, Deloney produces a result that, I would argue, he did not anticipate. The case for inclusion can be made only by reproducing the dispossession of the artisan on another level in the interest of a fully public and accessible circulation. Such a circulation necessarily includes women and it does not preempt the commercial or political exploitation of the discourses, images and relations represented in and by the fictions.28 If the public sphere that emerges in Deloney'sfictionsis inclusive in its representation of multiple sites and avenues of entry and various forms of exchange, it is also crisscrossed by complex and contradictory interests that would, if they could, close down, limit, or exploit access. The excesses figured in gossip and in invocations of an economy of expenditure or loss function as a defense against the potential control of access even as they implicate the artisan-storyteller in a loss of control. But by implying a circulation of discourse that finally cannot be contained, the fictions also keep open the potentiality of a public sphere not reducible to any single or concatenated effort of control.

The public sphere and the marketplace

The difference print makes The classic or liberal public sphere is separated out of a larger private realm defined in opposition to the early modern state and its public authority. Within the realm that was the preserve of private people we therefore distinguish again between private and public spheres. The private sphere comprised civil society in the narrower sense, that is to say, the realm of commodity exchange and social labor; imbedded in it was the family with its interior domain ["intimate sphere"]. (Habermas, Structural Transformation, 30)

By means of this simultaneous separation from the state, the marketplace, and the "intimate sphere," the public sphere, as Habermas formulates it, can negotiate and express "the general interest" in a "rational" fashion ("Encyclopedia," 53). In the first chapter I argued that the problem Habermas identifies as an incursion of commercial interests into the public sphere is present from the moment a public sphere becomes imaginable. Assessing that assertion and the arguments and evidence I have drawn from late sixteenth-century pamphlets requires closer attention to the ways in which Habermas describes the marketplace simultaneously as separate from the early public sphere and as its enabling condition. The "general interest," he argues, was "guaranteed according to the presuppositions of a society of free commodity exchange, when the activities of private individuals were freed from social compulsion and from political pressure in the public sphere" ("Encyclopedia," 53). The condition of formal or abstract equality in turn secures "the general interest" and, most important for Habermas, the possibility of a rational collective consensus within the public sphere. Given how fully the notion of a public sphere is inscribed within an explicitly bourgeois socioeconomic formation and a narrative of bourgeois emancipation from feudal power relations, it is not surprising to find Habermas suggesting in recent informal remarks that he has "some doubts about how far back we can push the very notion of the public 162

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sphere into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries without somehow changing the very concept of the public sphere to such a degree that it becomes something else."1 My argument that a public sphere indeed emerges in and around pamphlets in the late sixteenth century as they articulate a variety of intersecting and conflicting interests challenges not the concept of the public sphere but that which, I venture, Habermas would protect with the doubled "very" - the universalizing claims to a general interest and a rational consensus. The terms in which he concisely describes the structural transformation and potential disintegration of the public sphere reveal how important the status of "interests" is to his model. Conflicts hitherto restricted to the private sphere now intrude into the public sphere. Group needs which can expect no satisfaction from a self-regulating market now tend toward regulation by the state. The public sphere, which must now mediate those demands, becomes a field for the competition of interests, competitions which assume the form of violent conflict. Laws which obviously have come about under "the pressure of the street" can scarcely still be understood as arising from the consensus of private individuals engaged in public discussion. They correspond in a more or less unconcealed manner to the compromise of conflicting private interests. ("Encyclopedia," 54) In other words, the general interest is linked to a neutral market, in which either no particular interests intrude or the play of interests cancels their differences and effectively eliminates their particularity ("self-regulating"). If, however, pace Habermas, the market is posited not as indifferent or "free" but rather as promoting certain interests and hostile to others, then the premise of a separation between state, market, and public sphere breaks down. The public sphere of necessity mediates a conflict of interests between those whom the market might satisfy or serve and those who are excluded from its satisfactions or service, and only the intervention of the state, in the form of "laws," can mitigate the potential violence. I have been arguing that the development of the marketplace of print simultaneously opens up the possibility of general access to public discourse, one that would include "pressures of the street," and generates a set of property relations that precipitate conflicts of interest within the marketplace and in relation to discursive formations that preexist the market. In chapter 1 I suggested that the articulation of a regime of copyright comprising codified relations between author, textual property, and public domain stabilizes the intersection between the discursive field and the marketplace but does not resolve the conflicts of interest. In borrowed Habermasian terms, the regime of copyright rationalizes and conceals the conflicts of interest. It affords a telling

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instance of the intervention of "laws" coincident with the classic liberal public sphere whose inception Habermas locates in the eighteenth century. Like copyright, "the very notion of the public sphere" neutralizes or naturalizes the effects of the marketplace and in so doing suppresses the history of its making. But in the claims that commercial interests precipitate a structural transformation and that breakdown requires the intervention of "laws" to manage conflict, Habermas rehearses in a narrative of loss those events that were in fact constitutive of the public sphere. Pushing the notion of a public sphere back into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries does not so much reveal the bourgeois grounding of the classic liberal model, for that is assumed, but challenges its normative status and the "innocence of the principle of publicity" that Habermas associates with it ("Further Reflections," 437). As the pamphlets I have discussed repeatedly demonstrate, the circumstances of their economic production are written into their discourse. Indeed, they are focused on, if not obsessed with, the situatedness of their discourse in the marketplace. Hence, of course, my particular choices, but I argue that the problems identified in or arrived at in those pamphlets are indices rather than aberrations, or rather, that perceived as aberrations, they function as indices of problems endemic in the effects of print on the production and circulation of discourses. When Nashe characterizes Pierce Penilesse as the birth of a "paper-monster" out of a confrontation between the circumstances of publication available to him and the personified tropes of (learned) discourse, he marks his text as grotesque, as an aberration from the perspective of his training. But that aberrational quality quickly dissipates into the hybrid figure of Pierce Pennilesse/P/erce Penilesse, and its resonance for contemporaries. Chettle's effort, in Kind-Hartes Dreame, to locate an authorial position for discourses that circulate in the marketplace collapses into allegories of the marketplace itself, calling attention to the abstractness of "marketplace," which describes neither a specific place nor a series of identifiable transactions. What emerges from the impossibility of representing the place or the transactions of the marketplace is a series of metaphoric and metonymic markers of discursive production that can yield only partial - incomplete and interested perspectives. Each and any of these might be said to mark a position of agency in the production and circulation of printed discourse, but they do not, serially or collectively, account for the agency that gets attributed either to print itself or to the "public opinion" it is said to generate. In the Harvey/Nashe quarrel, the marketplace emerges as a specific site not because it can be or is represented but because its operations disrupt the discursive practices and formations already established at the

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institutional sites of high literacy, particularly the university, but also the church and the court/state apparatus. Print is, from its inception, allied with those sites and practices of high literacy, but the capital of the book trade effects a change in the alignment between those discursive formations and the socioeconomic order. Capital accumulates the value generated by the production and exchange of discourse as a commodity, a value that cannot be generated in the unlimited fashion which capital desires if discourse is accumulated and valued only at particular sites. From the perspective of learned men, the capitalization and commodification of their discourse by the book trade produces a split both in the conception of its value and in its modes of dissemination. While it continues to be valorized at traditional sites and in terms of traditional discursive formations, it also produces exchange value and property value - but not for learned men - and it is more widely dispersed. That wider dispersal attracts and binds learned men to the operations of the marketplace even as those operations displace their propriate interests. The Harvey/Nashe quarrel evidences the effort to manage the split by inscribing markers of traditional value and authority into the emergent conditions of dissemination. In so doing it effects a recognition of the marketplace as a legitimate site of discursive production and authority. I would emphasize, however, that it does so without representing the marketplace per se, but rather by figuring it in analogical and supplemental relation to the traditional sites of discursive authority - throne, pulpit, and podium - as if it simply afforded another platform. The classic liberal model of the public sphere is predicated on a (mis)recognition of the marketplace such as that produced in the Harvey/Nashe quarrel. Proliferation and commodification produce a dedifferentiating effect on established discursive formations by offering discourse in a venue (the marketplace and the commodity-object) that seems to dissolve social differences. The Harvey/Nashe quarrel serves to specify that effect. As self-authorizing gestures (re)locate traditional markers of discursive authority within the marketplace, the dissemination and imitation of those markers causes them, on the one hand, to lose their distinguishing capacity, and on the other, to be reiterated and complicated so as to renew distinction. At the same time, pamphlet discourses are denigrated by virtue of their association with the marketplace in order to (defensively) mark a terrain of discourse supposedly uncontaminated by the marketplace. By claiming a privileged place simultaneously within the market and apart from the market, the discourse of the quarrel not only attempts to counter the dedifferentiating effect of the market but also to police the emergent public sphere, to define what counts as public opinion. The victory of that effort is

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evident in the "very notion of the public sphere." When Habermas posits the marketplace as merely the enabling condition of a public sphere that articulates a rational and general interest, he might be said to fulfill the dream of late sixteenth-century learned men that the authority of their discourse could translate itself, unscathed, into the conditions of marketplace dissemination. But the elision of both the marketplace and the effects of the capitalization and commodification of discourse in Habermas's account of the public sphere comes at a high price, for the marketplace belatedly enters into his narrative as a determining and degrading force, transforming both the public sphere and the private into a single sphere of cultural consumption. Habermas's English translators tellingly choose "transmogrify" (162) to render his language describing the process whereby mass media influences are "smuggled in" ("eingeschleusten") to the interiority of family life, transforming it. To transmogrify something is not simply to change its form but especially to make it grotesque.2 That a sense of the grotesque or monstrous should attend learned men's perception of the intersection between the marketplace (of print/media) and the discursive field both at the inception of a public sphere and at the proclamation of its decline attests, once more, to the problem of representing the marketplace and its effects on the circulation of discourse. As other critics have noted, the "public" posited by the classic notion of the public sphere is an abstract, collective social and political agent. Theoretical equality of access to or in the public sphere is achieved by ignoring issues and qualifications that (might) affect agency, such as status, gender, economic position, social and personal identity (36).3 Thus in Habermas's narrative, the initial abstraction of agency also produces its transformed reappearance in a media-state apparatus that arrogates agency to itself and manipulates the situated identities and desires of the "public" - now deprived of agency - into conformity. If the primary difference print makes arises from the capitalization and commodification of discourse, that difference unfolds historically in the existence of a public sphere inextricably related to the marketplace. Yet the public sphere and the marketplace are not identical. It is the question of their commensuration that shapes the problem of agency as a theoretical and representational issue. Insofar as it is the site of exchange, the marketplace alone involves complicated questions of agency, for exchange presupposes multiple agencies of production and distribution as well as the simple act of purchase and the unpredictable consequences of that act. However, production and distribution are governed by an economic calculus only from the perspective of those whose investment lies in the commodity production of the objects

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offered for sale. And consumption merely begins with an economic calculation; its unfolding rehearses and creates social meanings not necessarily susceptible to economic rationale. The question of commensuration asks how the economic agencies and interests involved in the production and circulation of discourse as a commodity are to be related to the social relations that discourse constructs, enters, and makes possible. One approach to the question of commensuration is to consider discourse as a means of production rather than as a product. The plenitude and iterability that abstractly and materially characterize discourse make it an ideal object for the operations of capital - a limitless resource on which capital draws to produce textual property. Discourse in the form of textual property is the means by which discourse-as-acommodity is produced and the capital of the book trade accumulated. As a finished commodity, however, discourse circulates with functional attributes (author names, for example, or other signifiers of its situatedness in the discursive field) that, insofar as they designate positions of agency in the production and circulation of discourse, efface the operations of capital. The results of commodified discourse are thus ideological in that the circulation of discourse as a commodity mystifies the market relations in which discourse has become entangled and which that same circulation serves to naturalize. In this sense the marketplace of print and the public sphere could be considered coextensive as well as mutually constitutive. At the same time, however, because of its plenitude and iterability, discourse always remains available as a means of (re)production, always exceeding its accumulation in the form of textual property and its circulation as a commodity. Moreover, capital itself is implicated in that availability, for within a capitalist logic discourse must be dispersed as widely as possible, its iteration accelerated. From the perspective of capital, the tension between the indefinite dispersal of discourse and its concentration as a form of property produces a split between discourse as a finished commodity and discourse as a means of production. The finished commodity participates in a dissemination that reveals discourse as a resource - a means of (re)production - beyond the reach of capital. Though the marketplace of print calls a public sphere into being, it can neither exhaust nor control the production and dispersal of discourses within that publicity. From this perspective the marketplace and the public sphere are mutually constitutive but not coextensive. But the fact that they are mutually constitutive makes their incommensurability difficult to apprehend, especially because the circulation of discourse as a commodity effaces the operations of capital. The agencies implied

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by the finished commodity become insignificant if agency is potentially anywhere and everywhere - hence the phobic or monstrous conception of the audience of widely circulated discourses. Thus the question, or problem, of the public sphere becomes one of locating the commercial/ marketplace interests in relation to the effects they produce, the agencies they require, imply or efface, the discourses they do or do not mediate, and the noncommercial interests with which they intersect or conflict. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the pamphlets I have discussed is the insistent particularity of their effort to represent the conditions of their production and dissemination. That particularity might be read as an inversion of the resistance abstractions like "marketplace" and "public sphere" offer to representation. From this perspective, the effort to mark or claim positions of agency notwithstanding, particularity becomes a specular enforcer of the process of abstraction.4 Thus, for example, the detailed scenarios of cony-catching pamphlets yield a pervasive sense of amorphous unlocatability, ubiquity, anonymity, and an endless, unspecifiable series of conys and catchers. The Harvey/Nashe quarrel offers a slightly different example in its invocations of patrimonial models and traditional sites and figures of discursive authority whose specificity serves to modulate a transfer of learned men's privilege and status into the conditions of marketplace impersonality, making them into the privileged spokesmen of its rationality. Thus while the strategic maneuvers of learned men seem to secure their specific agency rather than to efface it, the result places them in an endlessly problematic relation to the marketplace. Gestures that claim a transcendent position for certain discourses find themselves increasingly beleaguered by the continued proliferation in the marketplace of print, as the despairing or exhausted form of the gesture in the twentieth-century debate on mass culture attests. But the particularities of the pamphlets I have discussed can also be read as an insistence on particularity itself, not an inversion of abstraction so much as a refusal to be taken up within its processes. Even the Harvey/Nashe quarrel can be read as an instance of what Raymond Williams called residual formations in a developing hegemonic order. From this perspective, the agency claimed by learned men is a reservation of the possibility of critique, of imagining other sites and modes than those of the marketplace. But a residual position is a weak response to the attraction and force of an emergent formation - as Harvey's case in particular attests - and it cannot, by definition, overtake the emergent or the dominant. Deloney's historical fictions offer a more compelling example of how an insistent particularity can open up and populate, as it were, the processes of abstraction. The marketplace is a given in the

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fictions: the opening image of Thomas of Reading, in which clothiers' carts literally force the royal entourage against the wall, makes it clear that the market hegemony is at stake. By focusing on various market operations - production, finance, wholesale, and retail trade - and their consequences for specific individuals or groups, thefictionsrepresent not the marketplace per se but a heterogeneity of positions and transactions within it. To put it more precisely, the fictions represent various market operations embedded in particular locales, social relations, individual and group interests. The resultant heterogeneity inhibits abstraction even as it traces the formation of a hegemonic order. (In a story like that of Halifax's gin, the process of abstraction itself becomes the focus.) Moreover, by specifying the machinery and operations of accumulation, and their embeddedness in networks of social and discursive relations, not only are questions about their origin and consequences exposed but also questions about the commensurability between an economic calculus and a heterogeneous social order. In figuring the discursive networks of that social heterogeneity as gossip, the fictions set out a version of the constitutive ambivalence of the public sphere, for gossip's mutability and multiplicity simultaneously express and exceed the articulation of a hegemonic order. On the one hand, as an informal mode of social (re)production, gossip participates in securing hegemonic practices and positions. It is, moreover, always susceptible to appropriation, to an economic calculus that operates in the service of particular interests. On the other hand, gossip also figures a general condition of propertylessness in relation to discourse - a discursive commons. As such, gossip situates and socializes the plenitude and iterability that characterize discourse without necessarily bringing discourse into a regime of property or rationality. Thus the public sphere that can be extrapolated from Deloney's fictions is characterized by formal and informal discursive modes, legitimized and trivialized discursive positions, rational and irrational forms of expenditure, and a constant marking and traversing of boundaries between public and private spaces and interests. Not only is the public sphere inseparable from state, market, and "intimate sphere," it is the medium of their interweaving. Bringing these realms into some kind of accord is at once the defining problem of the public sphere and its impossible task, for once irrationality - however it is figured (gossip, nonproductive expenditure, monstrosity) - has been acknowledged as a constituent element of the public sphere, it can no longer be projected outward as that which threatens disintegration or breakdown. Admitting a constitutive irrationality in the public sphere does not resolve the question of the specific relations it has to the marketplace.

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Commodities, Marx wrote in Capital, are "social things" in which "a definite social relation between men . . . assumes . . . the fantastic form of a relation between things." Phobicfigurationsof irrationality might be said to reverse the process, finding the "fantastic" in relations between persons or in the social relations of certain discourses and thereby naturalizing the general commodification of discourse. The emergence of an explicit problem of commensuration in the thesis of a structural transformation and breakdown in the public sphere reveals the failure of that effort of rationalization. Attending instead to a "fantastic" social thingness requires asking what the social meaning of a commodity is and how it acquires that meaning. In Capital, Marx does not pose these questions; he wants to account for the accumulation of capital and so focuses on production, a labor theory of value, and a distinction between use value and exchange value. In notebooks he wrote prior to Capital, however, he sketches the relations between production and consumption in a way that allows further investigation of the social thingness of commodities. Production mediates consumption; it creates the latter's material; without it consumption would lack an object. But consumption also mediates production, in that it alone creates for the products the subjects for whom they are products.5

In other words, the commodity-object is poised between the capacity to produce it and the possibility of its uselessness, its rejection or nonrecognition as an object. Here, it might be argued, Marx anticipates the more general critique of use value, that it too is a socially constructed category. But that would be to argue only one side of Marx's formulation - that production creates consumption, creates both the need for the object and its exchange value. The other side of Marx's formulation, however, suggests that consumption is itself a form of production, that only consumption can make the commodity into an object that has social meaning. Not surprisingly, questions of commensuration between the marketplace and the public sphere emerge most intensely in efforts to imagine the scene of consumption and the relations between production and consumption. In Habermas's account of breakdown, as in mass culture arguments, (corporate) production controls consumption and the resulting mindless consumption enervates, if not destroys, the public sphere. The remaining sections of this chapter turn to three seventeenthcentury scenes of consumption and analyze how each configures the relations between production and consumption. None of the configurations replicates the others. Yet in their points of contact with each other and with the instances of pamphlet production I have already discussed,

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the question of commensuration becomes susceptible to a reading that allows for a constitutive ambivalence in the public sphere without thereby reducing the discursive field to the operations of capital. The commodity-pamphlet

In the preface to a pamphlet called Tis Merrie When Gossips Meete (1602), Samuel Rowlands sets a scene in the marketplace of print that reveals the extent to which the discursive territory mapped by the pamphlets at the end of the sixteenth century could be taken for granted in 1602. An apprentice manning a bookseller's shop calls out his wares exactly as Gabriel Harvey feared: "What lacke you Gentle-man? see a new Booke come foorth, sir, buy a new Booke sir"(5). The gentleman, however, is resistant: "there are some old Bookes that I have more delight in then your new, if thou couldst helpe me to them . . . Cans't helpe me to all Greenes Bookes in one Volume? But I will have them every one, not any wanting"(5). Only after the apprentice promises to gather all of Greene's books and another pamphlet "with Nashes name to it" turns out to be Pierce Penilesse, a book the gentleman already "know[s] passing well"(6), is he willing to listen to the apprentice's account of the new book. "Nashe" and "Greene" indicate an authorfunction and the naming of specific titles would seem to reiiiforce that function as one that connects a (putative) writer to his discourse. But Rowlands, who signs the pamphlet only with his initials, is not so much interested in claiming an authorial name for himself as in establishing an aura of legitimacy that he can then exploit. (Another pamphlet he wrote and published anonymously the same year, Greenes Ghost Haunting Coniecatchers (1602), offers itself as Greene's.) The invocation of "Nashe" and "Greene" functions to advertise the kind of commodity being offered for sale. In the preface to Tis Merrie, as in the pamphlets attributed to Tarlton and Greene and in Chettle's foregrounding of the problem of authorial signature, the author-function preemptively responds to the anonymity of the commodity form. But in Rowland's preface, the author-function does not ascribe productive agency; it is borrowed from certain other pamphlets to distinguish a pamphlet that itself remains basically anonymous. Indeed, it could be argued that Nashe's name can only be invoked as an explicit borrowing, for his strategies of self-promotion insist on the identification between his functioning as an author and the particular discourses he fashions. Rowland's borrowing of author-function, in contrast, underscores its status as a marketing tool. Detached from any necessary relation to the writer, it differentiates the market sectors into

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which the commodity-pamphlet enters. In bypassing the author-function's capacity to ascribe or metonymically indicate productive agency and using it instead to mark a category of potential consumption, the preface to Tis Merrie shifts the problem of agency across the nexus of relations involved in the commodity: the key issue becomes one of motivating consumers. Tis Merrie When Gossips Meete is a dialogue between three women as they drink and eat in a London tavern. The apprentice makes his sale by sexualizing the pamphlet discourse: For I am sure you are in Love, or at least will bee, with one of these three: or say you deale but with two, The Widdow and the Mayde; because the Wife is another mans commoditie: is it not a prettie thing to carry Wife, Mayde, and Widdow in your pocket, when you may as it were conferre and heare them talke togither when you will? . . . GENTLEMAN. Thou say'st well, be-like thy Booke is a conjuring kinde of Booke for the Femenine Spirits, when a man may rayse three at once out of his pocket. PRENTICE. Truely sir, He assure you, you may make vertious use of this Booke divers wayes, if you have the grace to use it kindly; as for ensample: sit alone privately in your Chamber reading of it, and peradventure the time you bestow in viewing it, will keepe you from Dice, Taverne, Bawdyhouse, and so foorth. GENTLEMAN. Nay, if your Booke be of such excellent qualitie and rare operation, wee must needs have some Traffique together. (7-8)

PRENTICE.

In contrast to the wife, who is "another man's commoditie" and therefore "dead" (as Simon Eyre put it in The Gentle Craft) for the purposes of exchange ("Traffique"), the widow and the maid are still circulating and available; they figure the field of desire within which gentleman and bookseller meet. If the bookseller's cry, "what lack you Gentle-man?," plays on the boundary between necessity and desire, his promise of privatized sexual pleasure, in pocket or in chamber, suggests that satisfaction can be had without sacrifice or loss. More precisely, for a onetime investment it offers manifold returns, "divers ways . . . to use it kindly," that, moreover, function as a prophylactic against the wasteful expenses of seeking pleasure in "Dice, Taverne, Bawdy-house, and so forth." The exchange transaction that the dialogue presents is a public event, but the exchange is secured by promising private pleasures. Commenting on the abstractness of the commodity form, Alfred Sohn-Rethel emphasizes the mutual exclusivity of exchange and use, their separation in time and space. "Because use occupies the imagination," he argues, "the abstractness of exchange escapes the minds of the people performing it. In exchange the action is social the minds are private."6

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In the scene between the apprentice and the gentleman, what SohnRethel calls the "time-and-space-bound vacuum" (29) of the marketplace is filled and the act of exchange concretized by the imagined pleasures of reading the pamphlet. The position offered to and accepted by the gentleman is simultaneously that of a cognoscente, acquainted with the "best" pamphlets and thus possessed of "the grace to use [them] kindly," and that of a voyeur: he can have even the wife, for what he buys is indeed another man's commodity. The voyeuristic gentleman reader is not, however, the only audience that Tis Merrie constructs in its prefatory apparatus. Immediately following the "conference between a Gentleman and a Prentice" is a formal dedication "to all the pleasaunt conceited London Gentle-women, that are friends to mirth, and enemies to dull melancholy"^). In contrast to the vision of the male reader in the privacy of his chamber, the dedication disdains female readers who "keepe [to] their chamber and their dyet, / And looke as pale as any Parris plaster"(10). Instead, it encourages women to imitate the example of the three gossips, to go out and to claim the space of consumption as their own, that is, to hire a room in the public space of the tavern and there to drink and talk regardless of the strictures against such behavior: "It is well knowne to be your owne you spend / To every foole account you need not make, / You pay for that you have and there an end"(ll). For the female audience, the pleasures that the dedication promises are those of imagining oneself as being an independent actor/consumer in the marketplace; the sociability of exchange is offered as a private fantasy. The gendering of the audience allows a divided image of the pamphlet as a commodity: the gentleman buys a pamphlet that generates value, whether that of repeated private pleasures or the potentially enduring value of Nashe's or Greene's pamphlets, while the gossips buy drink and food, "consumables" whose value is used up in the act of consumption. Both images are crucial to the creation and motivation of an audience of consumers, for male-identified notions of ownership and stock in cultural signs establish the "necessity" and value of the purchase, while the female-identified notion of ephemeral pleasure insures continued purchases. Identifying ephemerality with the feminized behaviors the pamphlet represents rather than with the pamphlet itself removes the threat of potential valuelessness for male readers, while associating the pamphlet with the established value of Nashe's and Greene's pamphlets promises to enhance the position of all readers.7 Tis Merrie constructs its audience as consumers in the marketplace; its prefatory material works hard to secure the idea of commodity transaction. The gendering of the audience is a strategy of engendering an

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audience: the male-identified reader must be seduced from the public, oral sphere of "Paul's walk," "tavernes, bawdy-houses and so foorth," while the female-identified reader must be legitimated in seeking pleasures outside of the domestic, in leaving the household and directly pursuing public interactions. In both cases the pamphlet is interposed as the means of satisfaction, offered as a substitute for public dialogue. The implied purchase of the pamphlet collapses the strategic gendering of its audience, returning both male and female readers to the privacy of their chambers. In the final episode of the pamphlet, moreover, the masculine superiority offered to the gentleman reader also collapses. The women, one of them rather drunk, discover that an apprentice has been eavesdropping on their conversation, discuss the inappropriateness of his behavior with the vintner who supervises him, and assert not only their capacity to take their business elsewhere but also their social superiority to those who serve them in the tavern. The eavesdropping apprentice approximates the position of the male reader in degraded terms; only by reasoning along the lines of the women can the gentleman reader (re)construct his difference from the apprentice. But the gentleman's superiority to apprentices cannot be sustained, for he is retrospectively revealed as the gull of the first apprentice and his implied promise of a book of "excellent quality and rare operation." Yet even a pamphlet as circumscribed by its commodity status as Tis Merrie is implicated in the ambivalence of the public sphere, for as it promotes the commodity transaction it also habituates consumption and thus the possibility of subsequent reentry into the public spaces of tavern and/or bookshop. The problem of representing consumption, like that of representing production, arises from the opacity of the social relations as mediated by the commodity. As Rowland's pamphlet demonstrates, purchase can be directly represented and consumption allegorized by metaphors of drink and food. But the "mysteriousness" of the commodity arises from its mystification of the relations between production and consumption. Representations or allegorizations of only one side or the other of that relation address the relation of an agent to the object, not the relations between agents mediated by the object, and thus perpetuate the "fantastic" status of the object. Nashe's extravagant authorial personae and style present from the side of production the same fantasy of omnipotence over the object that the apprentice's sexualized sales pitch offers to the gentleman purchaser of Tis Merrie. In what is perhaps the fullest attempt to represent the problem of consumption, Thomas Dekker's The Gulls Hornbook (1609) locates the commodity-pamphlet in a social matrix that includes both production and consumption. Like

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Rowlands, Dekker draws attention to the reader's position in the marketplace. Unlike Rowlands, Dekker attempts to distinguish the buying of a pamphlet from other forms of consuming activity, and he calls attention to his own production. The Gulls Hornbook is at once a reworking of a mid-sixteenth-century poem (Frederick Dedekind's Grobianus) - an appropriation Dekker acknowledges ("It hath a relish of Grobianism" [3]) - a product of his artisanal making ("I altered the shape, and of a Dutchman fashioned a mere Englishman" [3]), and entirely his own creation ("A hornbook have I invented because I would have you well schooled" [1]). The Gulls Hornbook details a day in the life of a gull, from his rising in the morning to how he "is to behave himself passing through the City, at all hours of the night, and how to pass by any Watch" (63); each chapter details behaviors appropriate to a particular scene, thus mapping the paths from the privacy of the gull's chamber to the public and retail spaces of the city. "Paul's is your walk, but this your guide," Dekker writes, "if it lead you right, thank me; if astray, men will bear with your errors, because you are Gulls"(l). While gulls are the audience the pamphlet's title and dedication ("To all Gulls in general") imply, Dekker also creates another position, that of the presumably not-gulled reader in a second dedication "To the reader." In relation to that reader, he laments the necessity of his project: "I could willingly be content that thou shouldst neither be at cost to buy this book, nor at the labour to read it"(3). Dekker formulates the reader's choice as one of simple consumption (the gull's position, emphasized in the pamphlet by metaphors of feasting), or one of expense and labor. Yet the choice Dekker offers is a false one, for if the gull's position is that of the consumer in the marketplace (wigmaker's, tailor's, ordinary, tavern, playhouse, stationer's), every reader is at first a gull, and only then possibly something else. As a gull, the reader is one of those whose "errors" "men will bear with" precisely because they fit and fuel the transactions of the marketplace. The book he buys is of no more use to him than the tobacco he smokes: planting yourself in a stationer's shop, many instructions are to be given you, what books to call for, how to censure of new books, how to mew at the old, how to look in your tables and inquire for such and such Greek, French, Italian or Spanish authors, whose names you have there, but whom your mother for pity would not give you so much wit as to understand. From thence you should blow yourself into the tobacco ordinary. (66) In order not to be a gull, the reader must separate himself from the act of consumption, thus becoming a voyeur, after the fact, to the transactions

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of the marketplace. Rowland's voyeur is promised sexual pleasure in commodity purchase; Dekker's voyeur is invited to contemplate the behaviors the marketplace induces. Moreover, to claim his interest, the reader must labor, that is, make the act of consumption into a tool he can use in traveling the paths that Dekker's pamphlet traces. (Dekker's gull is unquestionably masculine and his reader implicitly so, though the pamphlet's satiric stance might well make it attractive to female readers.) In other words, the reader's labor is predicated on, but not completed by, consumption. The reader "lead right" is the reader who reenters the public and retail spaces of the city equipped to distinguish between what he needs or wants and can use and what the marketplace offers. Only reentry into the marketplace is inevitable. And in the marketplace, the reader is again a gull - willing or forced to choose from what the marketplace offers. What initially looks like a division in the audience collapses: all readers are consumers. The only alternative eliminates both Dekker's labor and the reader's, as Dekker indicates when he tells the "right" reader that "[he] could willingly be content that thou shouldst neither be at cost to buy this book, nor at labor to read it." Of course, if both producer and consumer are eliminated, there is no marketplace; Dekker indirectly urges the necessity of his pamphlet even as he apologizes for making the reader into a consumer. He collapses the proferred division of the audience so that he can focus on the act of consumption. In particular, he wants to make explicit a split, not within the audience but within the act of consumption: the separation of purchase from enjoyment/use. What Dekker represents is a gull whose daily life consists of endless purchases, which he professes not to enjoy (plays), or cannot use (books), or uses up immediately (food, drink, tobacco). At the same time, however, Dekker calls attention to the reader's position, both as a consumer and as a voyeur on the gull's transactions and the path he traces from room to marketplace. The reader's trajectory reverses the gull's, moving from the marketplace to the room. Unlike the gull, the reader's enjoyment/use is removed from the marketplace in time and space and is thus separated from purchase. The position Dekker offers to the "right" reader foregrounds the private judgment of the cognoscente, as if bearing witness to the mindlessness or petty interestedness of exchange would exempt one from implication in its logic. But that private mind is nonetheless constructed by its relation to the social act of exchange; its intellectual superiority is contingent on imagining the discriminations exchange generates, especially the distinction of being apparently above or apart from exchange.

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To call attention to the reader's liminal position, however, does not forestall the inevitable return to the marketplace and its terms of control. But the marking of a liminal position does shift focus from the commodity status of the object to its social relations: the platform afforded by the pamphlet is not in the marketplace; rather it is an unanchored moment in space and time, removed from the marketplace and thus always momentarily capable of viewing rather than living its logic. Dekker's focus on the act of consumption reveals the platform to be poised in and as a mediatory space that, like the marketplace, is not described by stable temporal or spatial coordinates and yet necessarily depends on repeated, always situated acts of consumption. The marketplace Sohn-Rethel describes as a "time-and-space-bound vacuum" is never empty but always filled with those qualities attributed to the objects to be found there, what Sohn-Rethel calls "the contents of purely human significance connected with the social status of people and things" (48). "Consumption," Marx wrote in his notebook, "creates for the products the subjects for whom they are products." When Dekker situates the pamphlet platform as a liminal space and positions the reader as a voyeur to the marketplace, he is raising the question of whether (or how) consumption can be seen as or transformed into a form of production. The representation of the daily life of the gull supplies an answer whose obvious satire does not mitigate the aptness of its recognition of the impact of the marketplace. The gull distinguishes himself by his patterns of consumption; he finds himself in commodities and uses them to construct his (desired) social position. More to the point, Dekker's pamphlet is itself a commodity by means of which the reader can distinguish himself from the gull. "The theater is your poets' Royal Exchange," Dekker writes, acknowledging his implication in the problem, and "their [poets'] Muses . . . are now turned to merchants"(49). His own pamphlet is a "comic theater" (7). It would seem, then, that consumption (re)produces consumption, that the circulation of commodities in the marketplace inscribes producer and consumer alike in a signifying system mediated by commodities. If both the pamphlet and the world it represents are figured as theaters of commodity exchange, then the pamphlet platform can only be an alcove within that theater, a site whose significance lies in the illusion of being apart. From a strictly literary perspective, the collapse of constructed difference in Dekker's satire evinces the constitutive problem of satire, the implication of the satirist in what he criticizes. From the perspective of a public sphere inextricably interrelated with the marketplace, the problematic liminality of the pamphlet platform bespeaks the ambivalence of that interrelatedness. The retreat to a

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position putatively apart and thus capable of rationally apprehending the scene one views defines the stance of alleged disinterest on which the classic liberal public sphere depends. It would seem possible and important to distinguish Dekker's representation of the reader as consumer from Rowland's because Dekker's reader is asked to think critically about the process of consumption. But such an understanding obscures an equally important similarity: both pamphlets conflate consumption with reading. In Habermas's description of the eighteenth-century public sphere, we recall, the marketplace is elided so that the transition between the privatized act of reading and the public exercise of opinion or debate seems to be a matter of "one and the same discussion transposed to a different medium"(42). "Transposition" conceals an act of displacement: purchase, the entry into the marketplace, is suppressed and reading becomes the valorized term, a metaphor for consumption. In their respective representations of the reader as consumer, Rowlands and Dekker reverse the transposition; reading is the suppressed act and consumption becomes a metaphor for reading. That the reader/consumer is constructed as a voyeur in both pamphlets underscores the import of the reversal between tenor and vehicle. Though Rowland's voyeur is promised sexualized pleasures and Dekker's the illusion of superiority, both are spectators to the fantastic liveliness of the commodities they behold. In both pamphlets, however, spectatorship - whether it offers sexualized or reflective pleasures - is crucially separated from the publicness of consumption; the commoditypamphlet brings the problem of consumption out of the market and into chambers. Tis Merrie and The Gulls Hornbook reveal that the public sphere can be theorized neither from a focus on the commodity status of pamphlets nor without such a focus. Transposition indeed holds the key, but not the transposition of one discursive mode to another. Rather, it is the repeated transpositioning of public and private that the commodity effects as it moves into and out of circulation. In this sense, the liminality Dekker associates with the pamphlet is important, for it allows the commodity-pamphlet to be considered not simply as an object but as an object whose social meaning changes as it moves through space and time. The paper stage

When Dekker likens his pamphlet to a "comic theater," he avails himself of a commonplace - metaphors of space and performance that figure the "liveliness" of his discourse. At the same time, by representing the playhouse as one of the specific sites of gullish consumption in the marketplace and distinguishing the pamphlet by its liminality, he intro-

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duces a third term - the market - that identifies the ground on which analogies between stage and pamphlet/book are constructed. Pamphlet and stage are the venues of marketplace-situated discourse, but they are not identical as such. In accounts of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century publicity, the stage is considered to be the most important and inclusive site at which the heterogeneity of English interests and identities are represented and negotiated. Without disputing the priority of theater, in the institutional and generic sense I noted in chapter 2 and in terms of its impact on a population significantly aural/oral, I want to scrutinize the notion of the preeminence of the stage as the site of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century publicity. Dekker's comment that "the theatre is your poets' Royal Exchange" is frequently cited in discussions of the commercialization of the stage.8 Its aptness is clear. But it is worth pausing over what Dekker predicates on theater: not simply a dramatic practice, but a more general poetic one, and a market specifically identified with the financing of national mercantile trade as well as the retail sale of luxury goods available in London. Theater metonymically occupies the intersection of a general discursive field and a market site at once abstract (national, financial) and local (retail).9 Moreover, Dekker unfolds his remark into a complex material and symbolic economy. The theater is your poets' Royal Exchange, upon which their muses, that are now turned to merchants, meeting, barter away that light commodity of words for a lighter ware than words - plaudites, and the breath of the great beast, which, like the threatenings of two cowards, vanish all into air. Players are their factors, who put away the stuff, and make the best of it they possibly can, as indeed 'tis their parts so to do. Your gallant, your courtier, and your captain had wont to be the soundest paymasters, and I think, are still the surest chapmen: and these, by means that their heads are well stocked, deal upon this comical freight by the gross; when your groundling, and gallery-commoner buys his sport by the penny, and like a hagler, is glad to utter it again by retailing. (49) Once words become a "light commodity" poets, players, and audiences alike are implicated in their commerciality, but their roles are also differentiated. For "players and their factors," words become a form of capital ("stuff" that gets put away) invested in the means of production.10 Gallants, courtiers, and captains function alternately as paymasters, affording players their wages, and as chapmen. Either role makes them into agents of the processes of production and distribution/circulation. Moreover, as chapmen, wholesale traders who stockpile comical freight and deal it by the gross, gallants and their cohorts establish the criteria of vendibility. Their consumption is figured as a commercial form of patronage. The consumption of "groundlings and gallery-commoners,"

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in contrast, results in immediate circulation as opposed to an accumulated value or recognition. Mapping an economy of stage production onto the social status of its audience members reproduces social relations as an effect of commercialization. The descent of the socioeconomic scale in the unfolding of the passage seems to promote the commercial devaluation of the poet's words. Bought at a penny's worth, "comical freight" becomes "sport"; it confers no status on its purchasers and they, in turn, are not patrons, but "haglers." Like the penny of its purchase, the "light commodity of words" becomes a common currency. But in identifying those who are "glad to utter it again by retailing," Dekker also ironically reclaims a link between poet-producer and consumer, for the words are not vanished into air but, once purchased at a penny's worth, launched into utterance outside the commercial space of the theater. That retelling might function as a kind of advertising, in which case it would bring indirect profit, but it also makes consumers into storytellers and stories available without requiring entrance into the theater. "Uttering it again" indeed promotes the commercial devaluation of the poet's words, but for different reasons than those first suggested by the descent of the socioeconomic scale, for as common currency words have no commercial value. More specifically, as their circulation widens, "players and their factors" are forced to issue more "stuff" in order to bring audiences back into the theater. Theater as the "poets' Royal Exchange" not only increases the wealth of players and their factors and the status of gallants as bearers of literary value, but also, and perhaps more importantly, imposes a rhythm on the circulation of discourse. When the limit of diffusion is reached, the system contracts and begins a new cycle of production; the theater is an identifiable site of control in the regulation of the system. By invoking the theater as the poets' Royal Exchange, Dekker calls attention to its representational function at the intersection of the discursive field and the marketplace. What makes the theater such a useful exemplar for the production and circulation of discourse is thefinitudeof its reach: the audience is contained within the walls of the theater and the maximal audience within the city and its environs. Bound by time, place, and a relatively limited audience, theatrical discourse has a short diastole, making both the factors and the periodicity of production conspicuous. Moreover, the commodification of discourse that theater effects, far from simply disrupting social status categories, (re)produces them in the structural conditions of its production as well as in the differentiation of its audiences. The various forms of patronage exercised over acting companies make players into liveried servants, officially members

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of great aristocratic or royal households and thus supposedly acting on their behalf or within their interests. The commercial structures of the theater (real estate, buildings, shareholding entities, "properties") also produce a set of tacit social relations and impose control through the price(s) that property relations impose. In transposing patronage, theoretically prior to production, into an effect of consumption (the gallants as patrons), Dekker's passage calls attention to how patronage provided a legal structure, a fiction on which the commercial viability and success of theater depended. That legal fiction was also crucial to theater's representational function. The theater is a necessary exemplar for the commodification and circulation of discourse because it affords images of enclosure, of rhythmic circulation, of discourse tamed by the operation of the marketplace and the supervision of highly placed patrons and thus subject to control. The forms of hostility to the theater which identify it as the site of lost control assume its susceptibility to control: the demand to close or more rigorously regulate the theaters presupposes a locatable institution that can be closed or regulated. Of course, acting companies and hence the theater were not so much fixed in their location as by the patronage that inscribed them as dependents of great households. Like the commodity-pamphlet, actors and the theater were vagrant. Indeed, the routes of playing companies on tour and the established distribution channels of the book trade probably coincided significantly. In contrast to actors, however, pamphlets are "unliveried," or rather the question of livery is radically different.11 Within the institutional structure of the guild, to be free meant - in theory - freedom to enter the marketplace as a producer and seller of goods, and to be liveried meant to acquire a position of influence and control within the guild and hence, the marketplace. While the Stationers' Company is an identifiable institutional structure in the production and circulation of commercialized discourses and, like the playing companies, under royal patronage, I have argued that it can neither control the production it oversees within the restricted terms of a guild economy nor reconcile the divergence of interests between its liveried and unliveried members. Pamphlets occupy a different symbolic space of freedom in that they imply (and enact) an open economy of production and a circulation of chapmen and hagglers who, though not necessarily tied to the guild or established channels of distribution (of books or literate practices), nonetheless complete the trajectory of production on which the corporate interest of the Stationers depends. In short, pamphlets are vagrant in that both their production and their circulation resist efforts of supervision. Moreover, insofar as they are

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potentially everywhere successively and at once, they cannot be located at all. Attention drawn to the theater - by the Crown, by civic and religious authorities, by poets, players, and audiences - foregrounds the commercialization of discourse as an event, as a time-bound activity that occurs in a specific, public, retail space. Insofar as the rhetorics of efforts to control press and stage as venues of commercialized discourse are quite similar, that similarity allows theater to become metonymically identified as the site of public discourse and hence the primary focus for concerns about the use, moral value, and social consequences of marketplace-situated discourses. On the one hand, the identification of theater with publicity implies not only that production and consumption can be located but that they occur as a single conjoined act - a publicity identical with presence, with visible sites in the marketplace. On the other hand, at the end of the sixteenth century, that identification also produces a series of binary distinctions - between supervised and unsupervised circulation, performance and book, eventness and thingness, public and private spaces - that play off each other and allow publicity to be distinguished from presence, to become abstracted from specific circumstances of production and consumption. In other words, theater functions as a kind of lightning rod in the emergence of a public sphere, simultaneously an originary figure of its ambivalence and a figure around which questions of commensuration are organized. Is theater morally dubious, if not dangerous, or are its licensed and supervised pleasures politically and socially useful? Can its publicity be marshaled in the interests of articulating and securing consent to the prevailing order or is the conjunction of pleasure and profit-seeking disruptive, anarchic, and threatening to that order? Is theater shaped by a concern for the common good or is it the creature of particular commercial interests? If we recall Harvey's anxiety that, in entering print, he would be mistaken for Tarlton or Wilson, and the arguments Tarlton makes in Kind-Hartes Dreame that pamphlet, stage, and alehouse alike are venues of "time-pleasing," we see evidence of a phobic or opportunistic collapse between publicity and the marketplace. Tis Merrie and The Gulls Hornbook offer an alternative but also opportunistic claim that the pamphlet offers superior pleasures or insights precisely because it is not bound to specific sites or events in the marketplace. In late sixteenth- and early seventeeth-century discourses of publicity and the marketplace, eventness operates as a crux in the interplay between pamphlet and stage and pamphlet and book. The case of the paper stage affords a particularly strong example of how the commercialization of discourse is differentially inflected and perceived. I want to

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position the crux of eventness by examining two brief citations from the archive of discourse on theater that foreground the event and its time-pleasing qualities. In an address to female readers at the end of his antitheatrical pamphlet, School of Abuse (1579), Stephen Gosson suggests that women can maintain and defend their "credite" by avoiding the theater and instead seeking an antidote to their "greeving" by "pass[ing] the time with your neighboures in sober conference, or, if you can read, let[ting] Bookes bee your comforte"(H7). Gosson's concern that "greeving" women would seek distraction and pleasure in the theater anticipates, in phobic terms, the female readers of Tis Merrie who are inscribed opportunistically as "enemies to melancholy" when they enter the marketplace. Though Gosson would no doubt recommend books of sermons or moral conduct, he is not so much interested in denying women lighter pleasures as in drawing a distinction between the dangerous publicness of the theater and the private domesticity of reading or gossip.12 Some sixty years later, the parliamentary order of 1642 that closed the theaters emphasizes a rhetoric of pleasure where one would expect to find concerns about publicity - whether related to the political import of stage plays or to public congregation. Publike sports doe not well agree with publike Calamities, nor publike stage playes with Seasons of Humiliation, this being an Exercise of sad and pious solemnity, and the other being Spectacles of pleasure, too commonly expressing lacivious Mirth and Levitie.13 What is particularly striking about both Gosson's text and the parliamentary order is that the event itself is elided by a focus on its public pleasures, as if the public nature of those pleasures rather than the dissemination of stage representations were the issue. The effect of the elision, however, is to make the theatrical event all the more important, to make it the problem and the site at which control might be exercised. Indeed, Martin Butler, arguing in Theater and Crisis that the parliamentary order is in fact concerned with the discursive activity the stage generates, suggests that the closing of the theaters was intended to foreclose their potential as "dangerously volatile and articulate institutions . . . and, as areas where gentry of parliamentary status were accustomed to meet and discuss affairs, rather like the conventicles which were later presumed to be hotbeds of secret radicalism, they were places where debate was suspiciously free and association uncontrolled" (136). The closing of the theaters, he suggests, was a "typical precautionary measure" that governments take when they wish "to disperse the people and maintain law and order" (136).

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Gosson, the parliamentary order, and Butler all assume the importance of the theatrical event - a specificity of time, place, and personnel whose threat could be "dispersed" by canceling or avoiding the event. But the sixty-odd years between Gosson's pamphlet and the parliamentary order also saw the publication - and dispersal - of some 600 plays. Yet the dispersal of printed plays attracted far less attention. Why? The argument I have been making about pamphlets suggests that print dispersal was understood in terms of an association between literate discourses and established sites of power and authority. If pamphlets threatened that association by implying an unsituated discourse, that threat could be tamed or managed by making the pamphlet a platform analogous to those of the throne, pulpit, and podium, thus situating pamphlet discourse in comprehensible ways. Because plays are presented on a visible, situated platform, they too afford analogic possibilities for situating pamphlet discourse. But precisely because the danger of plays was understood in terms of their eventness and their platform was seen as susceptible to control, it was also possible to understand the paper stage as participating in a manageable, relatively innocuous circulation. Even those who lamented the printing of plays did not denounce them in the terms used for their public performance. Writing in 1633, William Prynne (a vociferous antitheatricalist and not incidentally lawyer to the Stationer's Company) claimed that "above forty thousand play-bookes [have been] printed within these two years (as Stationers inform me), they are now more vendible than the choicest sermons."14 My point here is not that the dispersal of play texts matched or surpassed attendance at the theater in any empirical sense, but rather that attention to theater as an event or to the material conditions and institutional structures constituting that event takes for granted or misrecognizes theater's participation in the transforming of discursive activity from an event into an object. We have an increasingly sophisticated and theorized conception of theater as an event - an altogether salutary rescue of the performance of theater from a skewed sense of its literariness - but one that risks once again conflating the event with the publicity that theatrical discourse generates. The vendibility of sermon and play text alike depends on the pamphlet's capacity to mimic the event, to present itself as an infinitely reiterable substitute. But that mimicry of the event transforms the eventness of discourse, returns it, one might argue, to the general condition of writing as Derrida would define it. But any such argument needs also to account for the marketplace mediation of that transformation and for the commodity status of the pamphlet. Attention to the theater foregrounds the event and

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thereby misrecognizes the marketplace as a specific site. Similarly, the opprobrium attached to pamphlets that identifies their discourse with the commodity that is its venue misrecognizes the fact that print effected a general commodification of discourse. Thus my point is directed neither toward a notion of endless dissemination nor one of Utopian "free play" but toward the effects of commodification. As textual property, discourse can be rendered productive by materially embodying it on stage or in a book. Disseminated from the stage, discourse remains in public. Embodied in the commodity-book, discourse enters into private spaces, indeed helps define them as private, as places where one might have privileged access to public events without having to enter into public space. We have returned to the liminality of the pamphlet platform posited in The Gulls Hornbook, but now with a difference. Both the analogy to the theater and the actual printing of plays mark that platform as a simulacrum of the event, that is, as a platform having a temporal as well as a spatial dimension. The pamphlet playbook presents itself simultaneously as the equivalent of the event and as its alternative. That similarity/difference could be turned to a claim for the superiority of the event, making print publication an ostensibly regrettable matter, as in John Marston's preface "To the Reader" in The Malcontent (1604), in which he complains that "scenes invented, meerely to be spoken, should be inforcively published to be read," thereby losing "the soule of lively action." But that same publication also enables him to put to rest "ill rumors," to allow "every worthy minde" to judge his work, and to dedicate the play to Ben Jonson, "POETiE ELEGANTISSIMO GRAVISSIMO."15 Print publication presents the play in purified, rarified form. The tacit doubled promise of simple repetition/equivalence and putative transcendence offers the liveliness of participation and the detachment of judgment or contemplation. (The doubleness of the claim collapses the distinction between enthusiastic and critical forms of consumption, the same distinction that seemed to mark a difference between readers of Tis Merrie and those of Gulls Hornbook but in fact revealed both as occupying a privatized spectatorial position.) Precisely because participation is not compromised by the "palmes of the vulgar" or the "smoky breath of the multitude," as the preface to the quarto edition of Troilus and Cressida famously puts it, detached observation becomes possible. The printer's preface to Marlowe's Tamburlaine offers an earlier and better example of how the apparent contradiction between equivalence and difference is managed to the benefit of print. Jones initially offers the plays in the "hope that... they will be now no less acceptable with you to

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read after your serious affairs and studies than they have been lately delightful for many of you to see when the same were shewed in London upon the stages" (587), in other words, as the equivalent of the entertainment found at the theater. But the very next sentences go on to state that he has omitted "some fond and frivolous gestures . . . though haply they have been of some vain conceited fondlings greatly gaped at" because they "would prove a great disgrace to so honourable and stately a history" (587). It is not the gestures alone, but the interaction between actors who make them and those who gape, that is, the public interaction between actor and audience, that compromises the serious matter of the play, a seriousness that print delivers. So Jones's claim for the pamphletplaybook isfinallynot one of diversion and entertainment after "serious affairs and studies", but in fact one of study and "learned censures." The crucial point is that both claims are necessary; the assertion of eventness and its denial work together to distinguish the pamphlet-playbook from the publicness of the stage. It is a commonplace of critical history that as the seventeenth century unfolded the publication of plays became increasingly respectable. Because plays were recognized as a commercial discourse, the terms and trajectory of their habilitation into relative respectability are instructive. Sermons, to take the obvious counterexample, traced a similar trajectory from eventness to abstraction from spatiotemporal specificity via their commodification, but attracted no negative attention for doing so.16 Indeed, Prynne has them lamentably losing in a competition with playbooks for market share. The case of the paper stage is important because it so clearly exposes the ways in which the marketplace mediation of discourse can be effaced and a virtual and virtuous form of publicity constructed within privacy. Plays are or become respectable to the extent that they are distinguished from the stage as a specific and variously threatening site of commercialized discourse. The stage bears the burden of (partially) visible exchange practices and the promiscuity they imply as well as that of potentially dangerous or disruptive publicity, while the playbook circulates not as a dangerously commercialized or promiscuously available discourse, but as a text for study and reflection. But the increased respectability of plays, even when printed in small formats, in no way affects the use either of "pamphlet" as a floating signifier in the heterogeneity of the marketplace of print or of "theater" to signal the ambivalence of publicity. That is to say, pamphlets function in relation to books as stage does in relation to the commercialization of discourse. The use of "pamphlet" as a term to signal the commerciality of a given discourse and thus imply that it has little or no cultural value works like the attention drawn to the stage as a specific site of commercialized

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discourse to mystify the commodification of discourse by seemingly restricting its range. Such distinctions are, of course, invidious. They work to establish and/or maintain hierarchies of status, power, and knowledge. Even the most neutral term applied to pamphlets - ephemerality - more often than not carries a value judgment. Pamphlets are "not worth the binding" because their value is quickly exhausted and/or minimal. But it is precisely pamphlets' capacity to embody ephemerality that produces their import and impact. Playbooks, sermons, and newsbooks alike make events available in a form that belies their transient moment and their spatiotemporal specificity, or rather, that refashions that specificity into an abstraction at once removed from identifiable coordinates and reproduced at multiple, simultaneous, and successive sites. That abstraction is embodied in the commodity and dispersed by means of the object's circulation and consumption. From the perspective of capital and a developing commodity economy, the "suspension" of time and place achieved by abstraction constitutes the gap between production and consumption; it is the liminal spatiotemporality of commodity circulation. Consumption and reading reproduce spatiotemporal specificity as a dislocated effect of the marketplace, as a publicity that cannot be seen. That is, the publicity that results from the circulation of pamphlets is not only an effect of the marketplace, but also its imaginary form. Considering the public sphere as an imaginary construct offers another way of thinking about the question of commensuration. The mutual constitutiveness of the marketplace and the public sphere can be seen as a specular relationship, one in which the public sphere provides a "unified" image of the separated and fragmented processes and acts of the market. Understanding the mutual constitutiveness of marketplace and public sphere in specular terms can account for both the elision of the marketplace in the classic liberal public sphere and its threatening or phobic return in the premise of that sphere's breakdown or degradation. In the former instance, only one of the doubled images is acknowledged, while in the latter, the other emerges with almost hallucinatory force. But both the marketplace and the public sphere also are shaped by symbolic formations - relations of prestige, status, power, and authority - that disrupt their specular relation. Pamphlets, however, are not valued in or by those symbolic formations. Thus, even as they might be said to function as the vehicles of specular identification, they mark that specularity as an insufficient account of the relation between the marketplace and the public sphere.17 I have been arguing that it is specifically pamphlets - marked as ephemeral and commercial - whose circulation produces the publicity

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that comes to form a public sphere. On an empirical level, by entering into private spaces, the pamphlet diffuses the influence of the marketplace. Indeed, the discursive territory articulated by pamphlet writers runs ahead of the marketplace: pamphlets make colonial schemes into attractive investments and French hoods a sign of social status where they are not to be found but only desired. (This capacity to project a quotidian, object-filled world with a sense of spatiotemporal specificity and immediacy and thus to induce identification with it is another sense in which pamphlets can be said to be the vehicles of an imaginary relation between public sphere and marketplace.) The theoretical point, however, is more complicated, for I have also argued that pamphlets exemplify the general case of the commodification of discourse that print effected. Discourses "worth the binding" would seem to be opposite to pamphlets in their spatiotemporal implications. A folio, for example, implies and demands a certain kind of space - a table and/or a shelf, if not a library. Its discourse is marked as a permanent one, as an embodiment that arrests or transcends time. Such discourses emerge from, affiliate with and/or receive the support of established literate traditions and institutions. But their circulation is by no means limited to those institutions, for they too circulate in the marketplace and become generally available, subject only to the qualifications of literacy and purchase price. (The restriction imposed by purchase price is recognized as early as the 1536 injunction to supply an English Bible and other key texts in all churches. By the late sixteenth century libraries open to the public begin to appear, either affiliated with a church or grammar school or independently established by testamentary bequest, or both.) Within the publicity created by the circulation of pamphlets, such discourses and the folios and libraries that housed them stand out as monuments. Indeed, their transcendence of time and commerce would seem to be all the more emphatic in contrast to pamphlet circulation. They are not ephemeral but permanent. But the claim of permanence, or at least of a congealed historicity, is also an abstraction of spatiotemporal specificity. Had print developed as a technology in exclusive affiliation with sites and institutions of high literacy, its public would have remained specific and locatable in terms of those sites and institutions and the abstraction of spatiotemporal specificity would have functioned to maintain a transhistoric elite who shaped and controlled publicity. But because the economic implications of print did not develop within a restricted economy, "monumentalized" discourses necessarily participated in a publicity whose coordinates and widest potentialities are established (though not exhausted) by the marketplace. And their putative transcendence of the market is instead

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a misrecognition as well as a means of reproducing social status/distinction as an effect of commercialization. Here, once again, we note that the distinction between ephemeral, devalued discourses and transcendent, valued ones is always unstable, always susceptible to economic and ideological exploitation. If the imaginary relation of the marketplace and the public sphere is secured by the publicity that results from the widest possible circulation of commodified discourse - the case of pamphlets - it is symbolically ordered by the circulation of those discourses that claim to be apart from the marketplace and thereby make the marketplace seem incidental to the values it disseminates. So too copyright subjects the specular relation between the market and the public sphere to the symbolic order of the law, taking the property status of discourse for granted and splitting its ownership between the author and the public domain. But the incommensurability remains, for discourse is and is not property, is and is not susceptible to rational ordering or description, is and is not bound to spatiotemporal specificity. The entrepreneurial pamphlet

In the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century epithets that attach to pamphlets such as "idle" and "trivial," the consumption of pamphlet discourse is figured as a non-productive use of time, an assumption that gets easily and frequently class-coded as surplus (leisure) or lost (stolen) time. But a thematics of surplus and loss is by no means limited to pamphlet consumption. As I discussed in the first chapter, an ambivalent invocation of surplus and loss characterizes the earliest stories learned men told about print and its (re)productive potential. In those stories print eliminates scarcity and enables a plenitude of discourse, which seems to express the hope and potential of "civilization" - a dispersed learning. But that very dispersal is also potentially a threat, implying a loss of control dimly perceived at first and then, as we have seen, focused onto the promiscuity of marketplace circulation exemplified by pamphlets. In the stories told about the invention of the technology, loss emerges first. The "secret" is stolen from its inventor and deployed elsewhere, enabling production at multiple sites. Loss, that is, enables surplus. Though the potential generation of an economic surplus, profit, is implicit in the motive for the theft, the surplus explicitly remarked is linked to learning. From the perspective of learned men, symbolic forms of capital can be seen as an effort to counter a perceived loss (of control, of presumed distinction) with a claim of surplus, an accumulation that transcends the market. Though symbolic capital is subject to loss by the processes of imitation and dispersal in the market-

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place, which convert it to economic capital, it is not exhausted by the conversion but rather remains as a marker of distinction and surplus, and hence, of the incommensurability between the market and the public sphere. An artisanal perspective, however, orients the thematics of surplus and loss differently. The artisanal position - whether that invoked in the rhetoric of the Stationers' Company or that represented in Deloney's fictions - affords a locus from which economic accumulation understandably and ethically proceeds. As such, it presents an ideological defense of surplus by associating it not only with making and technical mastery but with specific behaviors such as careful accounting and fraternalistic generosity. The absence of those behaviors produces economic distress and explains loss without recourse to a distinction between capital and labor. We might recall here the language of Christopher Barker's report on the crisis in the book trade: "evell paper, evell workmanship, and such like faults" are held to cause the crisis, and moreover, to be the responsibility of those who complain about privilege. In Deloney's fictions, economic surplus is almost always associated with the mercantile position and economic distress or loss - whether that of Harry Nevell, the prodigal gentleman; Randall Pert, the bankrupt merchant; or Margaret, the banished earl's daughter - precipitates the wage-laborer (shoemaker, porter, and household servant, respectively). But an affirmation of the corporate or guild mentality inhibits recognition of class positions specific to the processes of capital; the distressed are rescued by the paternalistic generosity or mutual aid of other corporate or household members. But such artisanal rhetoric also produces a contradiction, for it often identifies a second "bad" form of surplus, a surplus located outside the corporate structures and processes of accumulation and identified as that which resists and/or exceeds efforts of control - as ballad singing, for example, or gossip (or unregulated economic activity). Within a logic of accumulation, it seems counterintuitive to describe these activities as a surplus, for such a logic claims as a loss whatever exceeds its immediate effort of control. At the simplest level, gossip and ballads mark the limit of that effort. Nonetheless, they remain susceptible to both economic and symbolic capital; they can be exploited by both, becoming the material of capital accumulation and differentiation (as the case of tabloid journalism makes particularly clear). So from the perspective of accumulation, they are in fact not loss but future surplus. At the same time, like symbolic capital, they remain as afiguresof a noneconomic surplus. From the perspective of the surplusfiguredby ballad singing or gossip, economic and symbolic capital alike are processes of accumulation that

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work together in the endeavor to control the production and circulation of discourses. Thus the surplus figured by ballad singing or gossip differs from symbolic capital because it marks not an accumulated surplus but a continually dispersed one. The surplus of symbolic capital could be said to figure the incommensurability between market and public sphere in spatial terms. Valued both within and apart from the market, the surplus of symbolic capital can be represented within a Venn diagram of two spheres overlapping, one sphere designating symbolic capital and the other economic capital; the space of their overlap indicates their convertibility and the diagram as a whole presents a model of the public sphere. In contrast, the surplus of gossip and ballad could be said to figure incommensurability as a process which cannot be represented by a Venn diagram because as process it is unbounded. And though that process might be expressed algebraically, no such equation would replace the Venn diagram model of the public sphere, its inadequacies notwithstanding. These figurations expose the question of commensuration as a restless opposition between the attempt to stabilize the relation between the market and the public sphere and the impossibility of doing so. My final illustration of the question of commensuration takes up a thematics of surplus and loss articulated in pamphlets by John Taylor in ways that not only attempt to link economic and cultural forms of surplus and loss but also to explain and rationalize loss as the necessary condition of surplus. Taylor, who wrote some 200 pamphlets between 1612 and 1653 on a range of topics that defies classification, is a spectacular example of the proliferation print enabled.18 He is most often invoked as a protojournalistic figure and as such he might be said singularly to anticipate a public sphere identified with journalism proper. I want to focus, however, on the fact that over the years he repeatedly stages what I will call a subscription scenario in which he claims that many people promised to pay him directly upon a pamphlet's appearance and have not done so. The subscription scenario appears in Taylor's pamphlets as early as 1619 and intermittently until the end of his writing life. It must be said immediately that it is not at all clear whether the subscription scenario is fact or fiction. Only two of Taylor's pamphlets printed before 1640 bear an imprint ("printed at the author's charge") that explicitly supports the claim of subscription publication, and one of these titles is nonetheless entered in the Stationers' Register as the Copy of Henry Gosson, the publisher involved with a significant number of Taylor's pamphlets.19 In the early seventeenth century, subscription publication was an unusual occurrence, Taylor being the ubiquitous example and the only pamphleteer cited in literary or publishing

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histories.20 Subscription publication is generally taken to imply that members of the book trade were unsure of the profitability of publishing the work. That understanding puts the subscription scenario at odds with the most widely known literary historical fact about Taylor, the publication in 1630 of his previously published pamphlets in a folio edition, The Workes of John Taylor, The Water-Poet, for folio publication suggests both significant capital investment and inter-shop cooperation on the part of the trade. The subscription scenario is thus at once possible and implausible. On the one hand, the positive evidence arises entirely from claims Taylor makes in his published writings, while on the other, no "documentary" evidence (subscription lists, qualified entrances in the Stationers' Register, transfers of Copy, etc.) survives to make the publication history of Taylor's work transparent. The question of fact or fiction is less interesting than the effect of the scenario, which is to envision the possibility of a direct exchange between writer/producer and reader/consumer. But the most intriguing aspect of the subscription scenario is that it breaks down, revealing a problem in commensurating production and consumption. Successful subscription might be said to literalize the second half of Marx's formulation that "consumption . . . mediates production, in that it alone creates for the products the subjects for whom they are products." Subscribers invest in the prospect of production, signing on as the subjects for whom the pamphlet is produced and thus insuring that the commodity will not languish between production and consumption. But how can we read unsuccessful subscription, and especially, repeated unsuccessful subscription? If only consumption can make the commodity into an object that has social meaning, what social meaning is carried by a commodity for which subjects have signed on but declined to pay? The subscription scenario is most extensively developed in relation to Taylor's journey pamphlets. In late instances, he attaches a "bill" setting forth the conditions of the journey he will undertake in order to make good on the payment the subscriber promises or gives. Subscribers receive an account of the journey in pamphlet form. I want to begin, however, by focusing on Taylor's comments in two other pamphlets. In the preface to Taylors Travels and Circular Perambulations (1636), Taylor directly addresses the writer's position in the book trade:21 I doe request as many as doe receive this small Pamphlet to take into their Consideration, that I do expect they shall pay me for it. I am sure there hath beene within these 30. yeares more than 200. impressions of Bookes in my name; For though I have not written above 80. yet some of them hath been printed 10. or 12. times over, 1500. or 2000. every time. Amongst which number

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of Pamphlets, I am sure that (first and last) I have given freely for nothing (never expecting anything but thankes) above 30000. Bookes (besides those I have been Rewarded for). (Workes, 3rd collection, 3-4) The pamphlet itself contains an alphabetical listing of tavern signs and their locations in London, interspersed with epigrams on the symbols used in the signs. The request in the preface that receivers of the pamphlet pay him for it coexists with the recognition that "books in [his] name" are produced and sold far more often without his participation. The preface to Taylors Travels envisions a direct monetary exchange between writer and reader, but not, explicitly, subscription. A similar request in a companion pamphlet (listing taverns in the surrounding shires, by town) to those "that are to pay me money, upon the receiving, or this my publishing this small book" and thereby might "worke a piece of a wonder, (which is, to make a Rich Poet)" more strongly suggests a scenario of subscription together with an ironic recognition of its impossibility.22 It could be argued that Taylor's invocation of a direct monetary exchange between reader and writer functions as a reminder of the material relations and positions obscured by the channels of production and distribution in the marketplace, which usually preclude any direct contact between writer and reader. I am arguing inter alia that this is indeed the case, that Taylor repeatedly addresses the marketplacesituatedness of his writing and that a certain range of his writing is devoted to describing what might be called the infrastructure of a market-based economy. A pamphlet like A shilling, or travailes of twelve-pence (1621), for example, addresses not only the mediating function of the coin - figuring the process of endless exchange in the marketplace - but also thematizes the circulation of discourse as an exchange value. Similarly, the pamphlet describing London tavern signs performs a mapping function, gathering the dispersed sites of drink and conversation into the pamphlet, which then circulates, its own conversational exchange figured in the epigrams commenting on the signs. The subscription scenario, however, is not simply a direct exchange between reader and writer, a payment of money for the book. Not only does the exchange take place outside of the marketplace, as it were, but also the money promised or paid exceeds the market value of the book. The writer solicits from the subscriber an investment in the process of production. What Taylor's subscription scenario specifically suggests, then, is an entrepreneurial model of discursive production. Unlike Dekker, whose writer-entrepreneur is a parodic figure, Taylor sets himself up as a serious entrepreneur: he undertakes a certain labor and risk and expects a return on his investment of time and energy (labor).

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His emphasis falls neither on mastery nor on the object produced, but on the time and energy spent, on what might be called an existential loss.23 For the entrepreneur, discourse is not simply a thing, but an investment of labor whose result - the book - is not something the entrepreneur brings to the marketplace but something he returns to those who invested in (or recognize) the prospect of his labor. What he loses as a laborer, he hopes to recoup in the form of profit as a capitalist. In the completion of the exchange imagined by the subscription scenario, the reader's task becomes the mirror and continuation of the writer's (traveling from tavern to tavern, engaging time and energy in conversation). Discourse itself becomes a form of labor, a matter of time and energy endlessly reproducing itself, a continual process of loss and surplus. We might say, then, that the subscription scenario affords a means of converting exchange into a relation of continuity between writer and reader in which the reader fulfills and extends the implications of the writer's effort. Yet Taylor is certainly aware that the recognized entrepreneurs of the book trade were the Stationers, those who make "impressions of Bookes in [his] name," and thus place him in the position of "[giving] freely for nothing." The fact that Taylor's subscription scenarios always include a breakdown in the desired relation between writer/producer and reader/consumer might be read as an indirect acknowledgment of the Stationers' role. To do so, however, would foreclose the ways in which making the reader's task a continuation of the writer's suggests that the reader, too, is an entrepreneur. At the end of a pamphlet called Kicksey-Winsey: or a Lerry cometwang: wherein J. Taylor hath satyrically suited 800. of his bad debtors (1619), Taylor appends a "Defence of Adventures upon Returnes" in which he argues that "all men in the world are Adventurers upon Returne" (Workes, 202). As its full title might suggest, Kicksey-Winsey is the pamphlet most heavily entangled in the question of Taylor's subscription publication and the attempt to unfold the entrepreneurial position of the reader as well as the writer. In the pamphlet he expostulates with those who "will not pay him for his return of his journey from Scotland" (Workes, 196). The journey referred to is detailed in A Pennilesse Pilgrimage (1618). Taylor undertook to travel from London to Edinburgh without money, depending on the hospitality of those he encountered on his way for subsistence, lodging, and entertainment. That is, the journey consisted of an endless exchange of conversation for the means that would allow continued conversation. According to the pamphlet, the journey was successfully completed in the summer and early fall of 1618. No mention is made in Pennilesse Pilgrimage of prepublication subscription. The bad debtors listed in Kicksey-Winsey

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are not named but described by category ("those that have paid," "those that would pay if they could," "those that are fled," etc.). In a second edition of Kicksey-Winsey called Scourge of Baseness, published in 1624 and reprinted in the 1630 folio, Taylor brings a number of his other travel pamphlets under its address to bad debtors, pamphlets detailing voyages to Germany, Bohemia, Yorke, Salisbury, and a voyage down the Thames in a boat made of brown paper. None of these pamphlets refers to prepublication subscribers. Nor do any "bills" survive. Indeed, in the preface to Taylors Travels to Prague in Bohemia (1621), Taylor addresses his reader in a scenario implying that his books were marketed in a bookshop: I have not given my book a swelling bumbasted title, or a promising inside of newes; therefore if you look for such matter from hence, take this warning, hold fast your money, and lay the booke down (Workes, 574). It is, of course, entirely possible that all (or most) of Taylor's travel pamphlets were printed at his charge and the fact that only two so specify results from an absence of standardized procedures.24 The "bills" would logically have been printed as separate objects, making their survival unlikely. It is also possible that the money supposedly paid or promised to Taylor before his journeys was not a subscription per se, but a wager laid on the probability of his completing journey according to the particulars set forth in his "bill."25 Such a wager implicates the potential reader in the speculative venture of the entrepreneur, that is, implicates the reader in the outcome of time and event, in the performance of the writer's labor. The subscription is then not an exchange so much as an elaborate game, for which the minimum cost of entry is something above the price of a pamphlet and greater investments are encouraged. Taylor always "wins" the wager. The subscriber also "wins," for the wagering game is itself a pleasure and, for the subscriber, risk-free. Reading the subscription as a bet would allow us to account for both the publication of Pennilesse Pilgrimage at the author's charge and for the trade's apparent sponsorship of some of the other titles among Taylor's travel books. Taylor's primary entrepreneurial activity would then consist in setting up the "wagering journey," and the publication of the pamphlet would be a separate but intertwined activity, subject to the usual marketplace practices of buying and selling. If we look at the launching of Taylor's writing practice, a doubled reading of his economic engagement with his writing gathers force. Taylor's first publication, The sculler, rowing from Tiber to Thames (1612), puns his "translation" from one trade to another. The sculler

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identifies Taylor's writing with his prior vocation as a waterman, making the equation between book and boat, between writing/reading and traveling, have a particularly pragmatic edge. And Taylor's travel pamphlets repeatedly address the conditions of travel: the need to make this or that river navigable, the pity of a town not having a channel to the sea, the dangers involved in the currents and shoals of the Thames. The waterman's trade thus supplies for Taylor a range of interests and metaphors (as it later did for Mark Twain). But the waterman's trade also precipitated Taylor's practice as a writer. One of his early pieces is a pamphlet describing a petition on behalf of the waterman (The Watermans Suit Concerning the Players [1614?]), asking that the Players be restrained from having or building playhouses on the north side of the Thames because of the harm done to the livings of the watermen. The watermen's plight was a complexly determined one, resulting not only from the shift in the location of the playhouses, but also from a decrease in naval activity and the statutory control of fees. Far too many watermen existed for the amount of available work, and the allowable fee was itself insufficient. So watermen lived, as cabbies do today, in expectation of tips. As Taylor puts it: "he that goes with me shall have my labor, and I am in hope for his money" (Workes, 337). The waterman provides a service for a fee; his "worst fault is, that like a Lawyer, he will take more than his fee (if anybody will give it to him) very thankfully" (Workes, 336). From the perspective of Taylor's practice as a waterman, an entrepreneurial model of writing makes perfect analogical sense. He provides a service/he labors, and for that service/labor he expects a fee. His journeys are an "adventure upon return," the wager of promised payments, the tip that acknowledges the insufficiency of the prevailing standard fee. It is also possible to understand the money supposedly paid or promised to Taylor before his journeys specifically in relation to the economy of travel, to the need for an "expense account." Even the "penniless pilgrimage" involved an outlay of cash: Taylor began the journey with a pack animal and a knapsack of provisions. Later journeys involved the expenses of horses, coaches, and boats as well as food and lodging. The money is thus given to enable the journey; those who pay are "sponsors" of the trip, to borrow Bernard Capp's term.26 Subscribers provide the cash outlay the journey requires and receive in exchange an account of the journey. In this reading, subscription becomes a form of patronage and it is once again possible to separate Taylor's entrepreneurial activity from the publication of the pamphlet. Reading along these lines and taking Taylor's claims in Kicksey-Winsey at face value, Bernard Capp estimates that the publication of Pennilesse Pilgrimage

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brought Taylor a profit of £450, despite the default of a large number of subscribers (65). If the subscription is seen as a bet or as a cash fund enabling Taylor's journeys, the money implied by the subscription scenario is not functioning as a means of exchange, for it exists in a disproportionate relation to the value for which it is exchanged. It functions, then, as a signifier of Taylor's desire to capitalize on his travels, on his work. And both a wagering game and a patronage situation suggest that the capital at stake for Taylor is not simply economic, for he gains as well fame and gentlemanly acquaintance, if not companionship. In Pennilesse Pilgrimage he reports at length on his inclusion in aristocratic hunting parties, for example, and his meeting with Ben Jonson outside of Edinburgh. An understanding of the money in the subscription scenario as signifying both economic and cultural capital makes sense of the fact that Taylor may well have received a considerable economic surplus from his subscription ventures and yet made an issue of the unpaid balance, for in advertising the failure of gentlemen to honor their agreements, Taylor keeps his cultural capital in circulation. But these readings account primarily for the side of production and they do not account at all for Taylor's insistence that production has netted him loss rather than surplus. In the premise of subscription as a cash fund enabling the journey, Taylor travels and then writes his travels. On the way he meets local dignitaries and is often wellentertained. In what then does Taylor's labor consist? In the traveling or in the writing? Taylor gets to take the trip and claim it as work. Is the journey itself a perquisite? Or is the doubled claim of labor traveling and writing - a justification of his claim for payment in excess of the usual compensation to writers? Is the surplus figured by the excess in his claim for payment a means of exposing the surplus value that, Marx would later argue, is masked in the commodity? In his complaints about unpaid subscription, Taylor repeatedly asserts the effort and discomfort of travel, its existential cost to him. The only adequate recompense, he insists, would be all the subscription monies. We can read Taylor's insistence in Marx's terms: the pamphlet is the commodified form of the labor expended, both the outcome of that labor and the means by which the writer is compensated not only for his labor (direct exchange) but also for the value created by the commodity (surplus value). Though I would argue that the subscription scenario does advance an economistic understanding of surplus along the lines Marx later develops, it is not wholly convincing as an explanation of the reiteration of the subscription scenario. So we are left with Taylor's insistence on his losses - losses represented by the unpaid subscription

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monies and presumably materially present in a surplus of pamphlets available for sale. We can now begin to see why the subscription scenario always breaks down, indeed, must break down. Taylor's claim that his labor results in a loss tacitly argues that his labor has produced a surplus. That is, the effect of the breakdown is to expose the existence of a surplus. And only the breakdown can expose the side of consumption. At least some readers acquire information or pleasure without having to compensate the writer for the full extent of his effort and without having to work to organize or acquire that information or pleasure. Whether readers subscribe or not, whether or not subscribers pay as promised, from the side of consumption, readers are the beneficiaries of a condition of surplus created by the writer. Thus the subscription scenario calls attention to a doubled surplus conveyed by the commodity-pamphlet. The producer's loss of time and energy produces both the economic surplus of profit and a cultural one of accumulated information or pleasure and the leisure it implies. In this reading, Taylor becomes an enthusiastic apologist for a developing commodity economy. The subscription scenario indeed converts exchange into a relation of continuity between writer/ producer and reader/consumer, but the continuity is not as simple as I suggested earlier. Rather, the producer labors in order to free his readers from the necessity of labor; that is, labor is converted in a form of liberation from labor by means of the commodity. Here the money in the subscription scenario is significant because it is unpaid. It marks a surplus that is not immediately economic. But if, as I suggested earlier, the subscription scenario works to implicate both writer and reader in an entrepreneurial logic, the unpaid money must be susceptible to an economic reading as well. In the late pamphlets whose surviving exemplars include a "bill," the bill is an integral part of the pamphlet. Not only does it function as a preface or part of a preface, but it is sometimes a continuous part of the object, printed on the same sheet as the title page and the first few pages of text. Often in verse, the bills set out the basic elements of the subscription scenario: that Taylor undertakes a journey upon completion of which he will present a printed account of that journey to those who have signed their names and dwellings. The bill printed at the beginnning of Taylors Travels, from London, to the Isle of Wight (1649), though atypical in its prose and its legalistic language, makes the implied contract of all the bills explicit. When John Taylor hath beene from London to the Isle of Wight and returned againe, and that at his returne, he doe give or cause to be given to me, Booke or Pamphlet of true newes and relations of Passages at the Island, and to and fro in

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his Jorney; I doe promise to give to him or his assignes, the summe of what I please in Lawfull money of England, provided that the sayd summe be not under 6 pence. (Workes, 4th collection, [1]) The bill establishes a contract between Taylor as a creditor and the signer/subscriber as debtor. Moreover, in its allowance for assignment, the bill functions as a partly negotiable instrument; the subscriber's debt may be paid to a third party designated by Taylor. This particular bill, then, could be read as acknowledging the position of the Stationer, but for the fact that the title page on which the bill appears also carries an imprint which states that it was "printed at the author's charge" and is "nowhere to be sold." More to the point, the economic structure created by the bill approximates that of a (inland) bill of exchange. It inscribes the pamphlet not in the visible marketplace sites of commodity sale and purchase but in the financial relations that underwrite the production and circulation of commodities. The stipulated minimum debt of sixpence once again calls attention to a surplus, for it is a highly inflated price for a twelve-page pamphlet. If we assume that the bill circulated separately, prior to the production of the pamphlet, subscribers would be incurring a debt on which they would not realize full value. They would be investing in Taylor and his project(s) rather than in a particular value/good that would return to them. If we assume a breakdown in the subscription relation, or a situation in which the bill and imprint are fictional, and thus that the reader acquires the pamphlet in customary ways and at usual prices, then the bill in effect argues that the reader benefits by getting the pamphlet at a "cut rate" price. In either case, Taylor, as the drawer of the bill, occupies the position of the capitalist and the (potential) reader is willy-nilly inscribed within a logic of capital, either as an investor in Taylorpamphlet-futures or as the beneficiary of the price reduction enabled by capitalist production. The breakdown in the subscription scenario secures Taylor's position as creditor. That is to say, it rewrites his "loss" as a situation in which his readership is forever indebted to him. Taylor's position as a creditor also paradoxically underwrites the reader's avoidance of loss, for though readers are indebted to him, the circumstances of pamphlet production and circulation compel the writer toward a position of continued production - continuing adventures upon return for the writer and continuing returns for the reader. The ongoing subscription scenario and its repeated breakdown thus figure a continuous effort to bring the positions of writer and reader into some kind of equilibrium. This is the logic of seriality, of journalism. The pamphlets yield a cultural surplus, not only the information or pleasure they convey, but also more

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generally, the desire for or expectation of such discourses. "Consumption," Marx wrote in his notebook, "ideally posits the object of production as an internal image, as a need, as drive and as purpose."27 The premise of subscription sets up an economic calculus in which production and consumption exist in a predictable balance, a perfect circuit. By disrupting that circuit, breakdown does not so much reinstitute a separation between production and consumption as reveal that they are simultaneously inextricably related and incommensurable. Production cannot be commensurated with consumption because the unfolding of consumption rehearses and creates social meanings not bound by the transactions of sale and purchase in the marketplace. Consumption is always either in excess of production or falling short, in either case, beckoning renewed production and precipitating the reciprocating rhythm of loss and surplus, the pamphlet surplus that Taylor's subscription scenario reveals. Subscription posits a closed system of production and consumption; breakdown a dissemination that is openended, unpredictable, promiscuous. The logic of breakdown reveals a constitutive disequilibrium between the economic circumstances in which discourse is produced and distributed as a commodity and the social implications of its dissemination as discourse, between the marketplace and the public sphere. If Taylor's entrepreneurial enthusiasm distinguishes him from the other writers I have discussed, the subscription scenario places him in their company because of its effort to map the intersection between the marketplace and the discursive field. The entrepreneurial model of discursive production that emerges parodically in Dekker's Lanthorn and Candlelight is staged in "positive" terms in the subscription scenario. In Dekker's pamphlet, I argued, the marketplace reduces both patrimonial and artisanal claims to signifiers of exchange value manipulated by rogue-writer-entrepreneurs wholly complicit with a market logic. In making fraud a defining condition of marketplace-situated discourse, Dekker's pamphlet can only imagine a public sphere in phobic/ opportunistic terms. In contrast, the subscription scenario and the entrepreneurial model of writing underlying it make no use of patrimonial or artisanal claims. Rather, writers and readers alike are inscribed within an entrepreneurial logic - the inevitability and necessity of "adventures upon return." Such a logic depends on and creates opportunity, a propitious constellation of time, place, personnel, and circumstance that the subscription scenario reveals as a disequilibrium between the operations of the market and the objects, desires and representations mediated by that market. In phobic conceptions of the public sphere, the marketplace is identified as the origin or site of excess - either it is uncontrollable or it

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is all-controlling. That phobic response is not present in Taylor's pamphlets, or Deloney's. They do represent excess or surplus as the product of market operations, as an economic accumulation, or as that which resists the regulating operations of the market. But they also represent surplus or excess as simultaneously a characteristic of the dissemination of all discourse, as a dispersed surplus that reproduces itself continuously without necessarily thereby accumulating. The public sphere in their pamphlets is constituted by that simultaneity and difference. A phobic conception of the public sphere tacitly supposes a desire to control public discourse, to see it shaped in certain ways, according to certain criteria, to certain ends; the phobia expresses the fear that such control is impossible or is already exercised in nefarious ways. But if the notion of a public sphere includes the recognition that control is inevitably incomplete, necessarily provisional, and always subject to dispersal, the ground on which the phobia is constructed disappears. Both the mix of discourses Taylor's pamphlets contain and their frequent triviality offend the rationality and civic highmindedness associated with the notion of a public sphere. But I would argue that Taylor gets it right, that a public sphere - then or now - cannot be separated from the economic interests invested in the production of discourse as a commodity. But a pamphlet - whether or not printed at its author's charge - becomes a discourse "nowhere to be sold" precisely because the production of discourse as a commodity precipitates a dissemination beyond the marketplace, one that cannot be foretold, or counted. Successful subscription might indeed gesture toward the nightmare of a liberal public sphere, normatively disinterested and rational and yet always contaminated or scandalized by market (or private) interests. Unsuccessful subscription, however, bespeaks multiple and various interests in production and, at the same time, a reservation of judgment on and commitment to the product itself. And repeated unsuccessful subscription foregrounds the incommensurability between production and consumption as the defining circumstance in which discourse exists as a commodity. The subscription scenario suggests that we ought not to think of a public sphere in spatial terms but as a process and one that is simultaneously susceptible and resistant to efforts of control. John Aubrey records Taylor as a gregarious man who later kept a tavern called the Poet's Head (the sign for which was Taylor's portrait) and notes that his works are "a fair folio" (11:253). The evidence of Taylor's dedications and the claims he makes about individuals who supported his various journeys suggest that he had a wide range of acquaintance, a loose network plausibly originating in his days as a waterman. However the folio publication was arranged and whatever

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part Taylor or his network of acquaintance may have played in its issue, its mere existence attests to a symbolic claim of capital, that is, to the success of Taylor's effort to venture his writing labors and receive the symbolic reward.28 But the publication of the folio in no way affected Taylor's writing practice; the claim of symbolic capital does not affect the constitutive disequilibrium between the economic circumstances of discursive production and the contingencies of its dissemination. His post-folio publications do not differ from the pamphlets written before 1630. Two decades later, at the age of seventy, he is still undertaking journeys, still lamenting that signers to his "bills" have not paid, and still producing work that claims to provide a service and/or a surplus to its readers. Perhaps the clearest exemplar of Taylor's "service work" is The Carriers Cosmography (1637), which lists the schedules and London stopping points of those who provide transport for goods or passengers to and from all parts of the kingdom. The service Carriers Cosmography offers to its readers is one that reduces, almost eliminates, their labor of investigation: Taylor has already done the work, they need only consult the pamphlet. That is, the pamphlet renders the reader's labor superfluous because Taylor's labor has created a condition of "surplus" which all can enjoy. The pamphlet's topic places it squarely within an entrepreneurial logic; it is one of those pamphlets focused on the infrastructure of a market-based economy that must be read as promoting the incipient interests of capital. Its cosmographical implications, however, include as well the representation of a world in which the reader can imagine his or her multiple and simultaneous connection to other places. In the preface, Taylor refers to the travels of his own discourse along the routes he describes: "I hope I shall give none of my Readers cause to curse the Carrier that brought me to towne" (Workes, 2nd collection, 4). But what he most emphasizes in the preface is his labor in accumulating the data and the abuse and inhospitality he suffered while laboring. The hope that his readers will not curse the carrier thus anticipates a repetition of that abuse, a nonrecognition of or hostility toward the pamphlet and its distributor (carriers alike) that would be a refusal of the opportunities the pamphlet represents. Though the preface does not set Carriers Cosmography into a subscription scenario, it links Taylor's potentially unrequited labor to his earlier labor in the tavern sign pamphlets and chastises those who have not paid as promised and thus caused him "too much losse;" he hopes that the "tedious toyle" evident in Carriers Cosmography will move his earlier subscribers finally to pay. The Carriers Cosmography and its quite specific topographic and commercial focus is inscribed within the seriality of Taylor's discursive

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production and the ongoing effort to commensurate its economic circumstances with the surpluses it generates. One of Taylor's last pamphlets, A short relation of a long journey (1652), carries on its imprint Taylor's address at the Poet's Head, as if subscribers could find it there. But in the "bill" that functions as a preface, Taylor again claims that "near 3000" subscribers have not yet paid him (Workes, 1st collection). If Taylor indeed published at his own charges, even though those circumstances are not recorded in the imprints of most of his pamphlets, his effort to construct an entrepreneurial position for the writer was evidently unsuccessful. Whether or not Taylor published at his own charges, the scenario of subscription publication calls attention simultaneously to the status of discourse as labor, as a means of producing not only value but surplus value, and to the inexhaustibility of discourse, its endless construction of culture.

Afterword

In the sixteenth century "commodity" was an attribute, a quality of convenience, capability, advantage that might inhere in or be imputed to objects and opportunities alike. The technology of print afforded such an opportunity, a convenient means of reproducing and disseminating discourse. In the case of pamphlets, we can trace the process whereby commodity comes to describe not attributes of an object but the object itself, along with the misrecognitions that result. However unstable the boundary between pamphlet and book, the extended availability of such a distinction has shaped our understanding of print. The great ages of political pamphleteering did not so much undo that distinction as affirm it by providing the exception that proved the rule. "The actual number of modern pamphlets is very large," Orwell writes, "but they are poor things, not much read and seldom deserving to be read . . . describing a short parabola from printing press to waste-paper basket" (16). Making certain pamphlets into rich things, honorary books, elides the proliferation of print in order to reinforce one of its mythic dimensions, an association with democratic institutions. But the ambivalence of proliferation remains, both in the sense that most of the products of the press are indeed destined for waste paper, and in what might be called an Orwellian sense that proliferation can as easily work against democratic goals. In rethinking the case of "pamphlet" - a commodity-discourse characterized by an imputed ephemerality and the implied publicity of a circulation not necessarily tethered to traditional sites of discursive production and authority - the sixteenth-century sense of commodity reemerges as an attribute of (the) technology, the objects it creates, and the opportunities it can be made to shape. Though the commodiousness attributed to print in the late sixteenth century positions pamphlets and books in relation to scribal and oral mediations of discourse, in fact the book - the codex as opposed to the scroll - predates print by at least 1,000 years. Nor can pamphlet or book be positioned clearly within the interpenetration of scribal and printed modes that continued for two and a half centuries after the emergence of 204

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print. Rather, as the case of pamphlets makes clear, the commodiousness of the technology can be marked historically only in relation to the marketplace structures and conditions in which it was deployed. From the perspective of the pamphlets I have discussed, the eighteenth century seems to form a watershed in the organization of the social relations of print by virtue of the rationalization achieved on various levels - a regime of copyright, a classic public sphere, an operative distinction between high and low, elite and popular discourses. But our contemporary historical conjuncture reveals that watershed to be itself a moment of precarious balance now unsettled by the advent of new techonologies of dissemination that cannot be easily accommodated within the notions of object, property, and nation that are the legacy of print. Though early modern pamphlets and the social relations they entered, disturbed, and constructed were taken up within eighteenthcentury formations, they continued to exert unassimilable pressure on those same formations. The pamphlet and its direct heirs - the various forms of periodic publication - remain the site at which the cultural status of marketplace-situated discourses is most vigorously contested. And pamphlet's minimal definition - an ephemeral short publication serves to characterize the potential of desktop, Internet, and World Wide Web publication and their availability as sites for the projection of discursive desire. It remains to be seen how the technologies available in the late-twentieth century, with their capacity for what Harold Love, in Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, calls "user publication," will shape the public sphere. "User publication" is at once the precondition for a public sphere and a phenomenon whose potential haunts those who wish public discourse to be susceptible to some form of rational control or supervision. If most or all users were to publish, the result might indeed be chaotic, but that chaos might also be seen as a condition of plenitude that does not preclude organization even as it remains open to the influx of new matter and energy. The new technologies of dissemination have given rise to rhetorics of loss (loss of control, of community, of property rights, of book-objects, of ways-of-being in relation to texts) and gain (enhanced access, greater resources, malleable texts) quite similar to the rhetorics associated with early modern pamphlets. The residue of the pamphlets I have discussed might be said to consist in the ways in which, for an early modern moment, print seemed to offer itself as a tool available for users. Such a moment has now come again. "User publication" in an electronic mode is at once an extension of the functions of print - as print was in relation to script - and a profound alteration in the machinery that supports those functions. In important

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ways that alteration returns technology to a simulacrum of scribal and oral modes, to a dissemination that is susceptible to a certain control by the producer of discourse and yet also open-ended, unpredictable, promiscuous. But the consequentially of print's entanglement with capitalism also assumes a renewed importance. The new technologies do not require a constant infusion of capital in order to maintain production and circulation, nor is there an economy of scale that propels diverse interests into consolidation. Given that the new technologies have emerged within a fully capitalist economy, however, there is every possibility that their deployment will unfold within a logic that considers surplus to be primarily, if not exclusively, an economic calculation.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley, 40. See also pages 35,171,219. 2 The Letters of John Chamberlain, 1:57. In an earlier letter, the book is specified as "Ortelius his Thesaurus Geographicus" (1:52). 3 Price was determined by the number of sheets; the workingfigurefor the end of the sixteenth century is halfpence/sheet. A three-halfpenny pamphlet would be 24 pages in quarto, 48 in octavo. See Francis R. Johnson, "Notes on English Retail Book-Prices, 1550-1640." It is worth noting that the price of books remained relatively stable from 1550 to 1635, though the general price index rose more than 100 percent. 4 Guillory, "Canonical and Non-canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate," 494. 5 For English studies, J. W. Saunders formulated the now classic tag, "the stigma of print," to describe the sixteenth-century response to the marketplace of print in "The Stigma of Print." For the prior history and an early critique of the notion, see Steven May, "Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical 'Stigma of Print.'" 6 Newman, Fashioning Femininity, 146. 7 See especially thefinalchapter of Guillory, Cultural Capital. 8 For an overview of the separateness of the traditions, see Feather, "CrossChannel Currents: historical bibliography and Vhistoire du livre." See also Darnton, "What is the History of Books?"; Sutherland, "Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of Literary Sociology;" Chartier, Frenchness in the History of the Book. In recent work the nonalignment has become much less pronounced. Cultural historians have become less reliant on what Roger Chartier calls "massive data sets" {The Order of Books, 26) and have turned toward problems of textuality and reading. Anglo-American bibliography is in the advanced stages of a paradigm shift induced, in part, by theory-driven questions about the possibility or desirability of establishing a definitive authorial text. The unfolding of the paradigm shift can be traced in the journal of the Society for Textual Scholarship, Text (1984—) and in essay collections like Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. Bornstein and Williams, and New Directions in Textual Studies, ed. Oliphant and Bradford. 9 Among the other pamphlets I discuss, two had significant extended circulation: Greenes Groatsworth of Wit was printed in 1592,1596,1617,1621,1629, and 1637, and Tis Merrie When Gossips Meete in 1602,1609,1610,1619, and 207

208

10 11 12 13 14

15

16

17 18

19 20 21

Notes to pages 9-15 1627. Laura Stevenson's Praise and Paradox has an appendix listing Elizabethan "best-sellers." Though one might quarrel with how she defines the category, the list offers a convenient, if simple, overview of widely circulated books. About half of Burton's books went to the Bodleian, a total of 872. See Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton. See Pearson, "The Libraries of English Bishops, 1600-1642." See Morgan, "Frances Wolfreston and 'Hor Bouks': A Seventeenth-Century Woman Book-Collector." Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. William Drummond's reconstructed library and the reading lists he kept in manuscript are easily available in The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden, ed. MacDonald. See also T.A. Birrell, "Reading as Pastime: The place of light literature in some gentlemen's libraries of the 17th Century." For discussions of the material in the Thomason collection, see Holstun, "Ranting at the New Historicism;" Friedman, The Battle of the Frogs and Fairford's Flies: Miracles and the Pulp Press During the English Revolution', Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution. For a discussion of distribution in the eighteenth century and the question of continuity with earlier practices, see Feather, The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century England. See also Pollard, "The English Market for Printed Books." See the summary of the deposition in Calendar of State Papers Domestic 118 (1628-29), 343. John Fenton, Buckingham's assassin was not, of course, lower class. A few copies of books in which notations of a lending upon deposit protocol are inscribed survive from before the turn of the century and with increasing, though still limited frequency, for the first half of the seventeenth century. I am indebted to Peter Blayney for discussion of this matter. In the later seventeenth century references to the "hiring of books" appear with some regularity, and by the eighteenth century circulating libraries, often but not exclusively associated with booksellers' shops, are well attested. See McKillop, "English Circulating Libraries, 1725-50." Clark, "The Ownership of Books in England, 1560-1640," 97. Willen, "Women in the Public Sphere in Early Modern England," 567. From the prefatory material of, respectively, several of Robert Greene's coney-catching pamphlets (1591-92); John Marston's The History of Antonio and Mellida (1602); and the folio edition of John Taylor's pamphlets, The Workes of John Taylor, The Water-Poet (1630).

1 PRINT MATTERS

1 Orwell and Reynolds, eds., British Pamphlets, 1:7. 2 The best single introduction to the print economy is Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book.

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3 I am oversimplifying a complex set of issues, for "cash flow" involves economic pressures that bear differently on related but separate aspects of the print trade. In the case of the finished commodity, it is the cost of paper, edition size and distribution practices that matter most. In production, "cash flow" depends on shop and job organization as well as standing investments in presses and type. D. F. McKenzie's important essay, "Printers of the Mind," makes the case for an "efficient" model of print shop production, one that involves the concurrent printing of different texts and assumes a rational and flexible organization of tasks (primarily composition and presswork) within one print shop (based on seventeenth-century material in the archives of Cambridge University Press). In "Printers by the Rules", JeanFrancois Gilmont examines the documentary evidence (primarily French) supporting a model of continuous production on one book in which the interconnection between text, personnel, tasks, and equipment makes shop organization inevitably inefficient. Gilmont does not mean to resurrect the claim of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century textual bibliographers that continuous production was the model of printshop practice from 1500-1800, but to demonstrate that though the machinery in the shop remained unchanged, the organization of its use evolved. He suggests the late sixteenth century as a transitional moment. It is also important to keep in mind, as McKenzie notes, that those who worked in print shops were not necessarily concerned with continuous employment, but rather with securing enough money or compensation for their needs - hence the piecework contracts and statutory pressures on journeymen to fulfill their contracts (whether piecework or temporally based) in the evidence Gilmont examines. For a thickly detailed description of an early seventeenth-century London print shop organized by concurrent printing (and shared printing), see Blayney, The Texts of King Lear and Their Origins. 4 See Lehmann-Haupt, Peter Schoeffer, 63-84. Lehmann-Haupt classifies about half of the list as books or pamphlets and half as single- or doublesheet productions, including some pamphlets. As he notes, pamphlets could be considered in either category. 5 A circular of his available stock that Schoeffer printed in 1470 offers titles printed as much as ten years previously, see Lehmann-Haupt. Similarly, an inventory of an English printer/bookseller's stock taken in 1585 lists titles ten to twenty years old. See Rodger, "Roger Ward's Shrewsbury Stock." 6 See, for example, Elizabeth Eisenstein's prefatory remarks in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, or the first two chapters of her magnum opus, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. 7 Jaszi, "On the Author Effect: Contemporary Copyright and Collective Creativity," 319. 8 In The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan argues that print technology "is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio" (164). Such an argument not only collapses together the technology and the material on which it operates but also ignores the social and economic relations involved in deploying the technology. 9 All subsequent accounts of print shop practices until the mid-nineteenth century depend on Moxon, see appendix 7 of Davis and Carter's edition. A

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Notes to pages 20-4

member of the Royal Society, Moxon evidences both an antiquarian and a progressive interest: he demystifies the craft of the past because he is concerned about rationalizing its practices in the present. Aside from Moxon's, two other early modern books survive that address aspects of printshop practice: a dialogue on printing in Christopher Plantin's Dialogues francois pour jeunes enfans (1567; reproduced in Calligraphy and Printing in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Nash), and a work on proof correction, Orthotypographia (1608), written in Latin by a German, Hieronymous Hornschuch. See also Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography. 10 R. D. Dunn, "Fragment of an Unpublished Essay on Printing by William Camden," 145-49. "Ironic juxtaposition" in the next sentence is Dunn's editorial comment. 11 Bacon, The New Organon and Related Writings, 118. 12 Camden is by no means unique in criminalizing the history of print. Moxon cites a version of the same story, only it is Gutenberg who "stole his [Coster's] Tools away while he was at Church, and with them went to Mentz" (4). A manuscript history of printing in England, written in about 1670 by Richard Smyth, an antiquarian, repeats a local criminal tale about how Caxton and an accomplice "in disguise" bribed one of Gutenberg's "underworkmen" who "stole from his fellows in disguise" and was transported to Oxford where he remained under "guard closely watched to prevent [his] escape" until he had transmitted the craft. Smyth's history has been edited by Roderick Cave, "Richard Smyth and Early English Printing." Witchcraft, counterfeiting and dishonest servants named Faust or Fust who break the bonds of secrecy figure in accounts of the history of printing through the nineteenth century. See for example John Smith, The Printer's Grammar (1755), and Caleb Stower, The Printer's Grammar (1808). 13 See Usher, A History of Mechanical Inventions, chapter 10, "The Invention of Printing." For a concise description of print shop practices, see Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 40-56,78-141. 14 For a general description of the London guild economy, see Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London, especially chapter 14, "Government of the Companies," and chapter 15, "Industrial Expansion under the Tudors;" and, Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. 15 See Blagden, The Stationers' Company, for an overview of the Company and a bibliography of more specific work. 16 See for example, Christopher Barker's Report on Printing (1582) reprinted in Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1664,1:114-16,144. See also the various documents collected in Greg, A Companion to Arber. 17 See Lefebvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, chapter 4, "The Book as Commodity". 18 See Blagden, "The English Stock of the Stationers' Company," 166. 19 For discussions of Copy, see Greg, "Entrance, License and Copy" in Some Aspects of London Publishing', Sisson, "The Laws of Elizabethan Copyright;" and, Lyman Ray Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective. Patterson, who is an American lawyer, might quibble with the "legal" of legal

Notes to pages 24-30

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fiction because Copy was not founded in common law. It was recognized at law (as Sisson's essay on a Chancery suit involving Copy attests) and provided the model from which the statutory copyright of the eighteenth century was drawn, as Patterson discusses at length. But Patterson's discussion takes no account of the jurisdictional authority granted to guilds (see Sisson for details of the relation between Chancery and the Stationers' Court); they are, for him only "trades." Joseph Loewenstein, following Patterson, says that "stationers' copyright . . . was hardly a property right at all . . . [but] merely a mechanism produced by the internal workings of the guild" ("The Script in the Marketplace," 105). This is a misreading of Patterson, who is quite clear that Copy is an economic property that could be sold, transferred, etc. (though not outside of the Company). In qualifying the property status of Copy, Patterson analogizes it to a "perpetual lease" (10); he does this so that he can reserve an anterior ownership vested in the author, whose "personal," "natural" or "inchoate" rights, he argues, are elided in the history of copyright (70). For a discussion of the problem of the rhetoric of personal rights, see Lynd, "Communal Rights." Between 1603 and 1614 the value of the stock increased by more than 50 percent; annual dividends were "normal" at about 12 percent, but could go as high as 25 percent. See Blagden, The Stationers' Company, 92-96, and Blagden, "The English Stock of the Stationers' Company in the Time of the Stuarts." In addition to the trade terms "master," "journeyman," etc., the Company (like other guilds) had another set of terms to denote a different hierarchical ordering of its members: the "commonalty" or "yeomanry" (all freemen of the Company); the "livery" (a status achieved by election and purchase and a prerequisite for holding office in the Company); the "Renter Wardens" (officers elected from the livery); the "Court of Assistants" (the governing body of the Company, composed of those who had been Renter Wardens). For the full text of the commissioners' report, see Greg, Companion, 126-33. See Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety. For a discussion of how an abstract right of property was developed out of ownership considered as a matter of possession, see Tigar, "The Right of Property and the Law of Theft." For a discussion of the intersections and disputes between an anthropological view of commodities and that arising out of political economy, especially Marx's definition, see Arjun Appadurai's introductory essay, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value," in The Social Life of Things, ed. Appadurai. Baudrillard, For a Political Economy of the Sign, 139. See also Gayatri Spivak's essay, "Speculations on Reading Marx," especially 54. In English Humanist Books, David Carlson describes a moment early in the sixteenth century when printers began to speculate on their own behalf in the market for humanist books. See chapter 6, "Printers' Needs." For discussion of Wolfe's career, see Hoppe, "John Wolfe"; Loewenstein, "For a History of Literary Property"; and Huffman, Elizabethan Impressions. Loewenstein's argument is close to mine in recognizing the range and implications of Wolfe's importance.

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Notes to pages 30-9

29 The phrase is McKerrow's in A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers, 1557-1640. The sense of Ponsonby's importance arises not least because he published The Arcadia and The Faerie Queene. But Wolfe's shop printed the latter (legitimately) and when Ponsonby's Copies were transferred after his death, Greene's Carde of Fancie and Mamilla are included as properties of value, see Arber, 111:269, 274. For a discussion of early twentieth-century bibliographic commentary on trade issues, see Werstine, "Narratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts." Gerald Johnson's essays, "Thomas Pavier" and "John Busby" offer revisionary accounts of other "notorious" careers in the trade. 30 Quoted in Meyer, Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama , 4. 31 As Loewenstein comments, Wolfe's invocation of Luther presents intriguing avenues of inquiry about how Luther could be seen as a secular type and about the importance of pamphlet writing to Luther and to protestant discourses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ("For a History of Literary Property," 432 n34). 32 For a discussion of Wolfe's relation to the dissemination of Machiavelli's ideas, see Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State, 86-110, and Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, 128-30. 33 For a discussion of Wolfe's false imprints, see Gerber, "All of the Five Fictitious Italian Editions"; Sellers, "Italian Books Printed in England Before 1640"; Woodfield, Surreptitious Printing in England, 5-18; Huffman, Elizabethan Impressions', and, Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State. 34 The prefaces were not necessarily written by Wolfe. Gerber argues that Wolfe and Petruccio Ubaldino, a Florentine exile, were "colaborers." Some of the fictional elements (character and place names) in the Aretino prefaces are found in earlier Italian editions. See Sellers, "Italian Books," 116. 35 /Discoursi (STC17161). "ci pare che ci faccia gran torto in fare stampare que libre, che da nostri sono sempre stati stampati." 36 See Woodfield, Surreptitious Printing, 24-33, Huffman, Elizabethan Impressions', and Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State. 37 Usury is the general word under which pre-banking practices of credit, interest, and exchange are commonly designated, as in Thomas Wilson's A Discourse on Usury (1572). For a brief discussion, see "Usury and the Right Use of Wealth" in Fischer's Econolingua, 138-51. 38 Greene's repudiation can be read along the lines suggested by Susan Stewart's reading of Psalmanazar's memoires (1728) in Crimes of Writing as a final confession that secures what Stewart calls "a rhetoric of 'truth'" identified with the speaking subject (55-61). Such an argument would have to include the two other posthumous pamphlets I discuss below, which also present confession/conversion narratives. Greene's posthumous pamphlets might be said to instance that authorial fiction, I argue below, at the instigation and in the interest of the trade. 39 Greenes Vision: Written at the Instant of his Death and The Repentance of Robert Greene, both 1592. 40 See Foucault, "What is an Author?," and Barthes, "Authors and Writers." 41 The French and Continental systems are constructed on the basis of "natural" and moral rights pertaining to the author, while the Anglo-

Notes to pages 39-43

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46 47 48

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American system centers around economic rights in textual property. AngloAmerican copyright is thus fully transferable, while the "droit d'auteur" maintains a residue of perpetual and inalienable rights vested in the author. For a discussion of the various (Western) national systems and the implications of their coincidence and noncoincidence, see Saunders, Authorship and Copyright. See also the essays collected in Of Authors and Origins: Essays on Copyright Law, ed. Sherman and Strowel, especially Geller, "Must Copyright be Forever Caught Between Marketplace and Authorship Norms?" Prompted by Foucault's essay, there has been considerable recent work in literary studies on copyright and authorship. See for example, Rose, "The Author as Proprietor;" Woodmansee, "The Genius and the Copyright;" and, Hesse, "Enlightenment Epistemology and the Law of Authorship." Saunders, "Dropping the Subject," 107. For a discussion of how French copyright law has protected the notion of "droit d'auteur" from what might be called the imperatives of the marketplace by means of a distinction between cultural and industrial production, see Nesbit, "What Was an Author?." In Ownership of the Image, Edelman theorizes the same distinction within a marxist theory of law. Both Nesbit and Edelman take as their focus the challenge that new technologies of reproduction (photography, film) offered to copyright. For an Anglo-American effort to work out a similar distinction between "high authorship" and "low authorship" works, see Ginsberg, "Creation and Commercial Value: Copyright Protection of Works of Information." In "Copyright Without Walls," Ginsberg suggests that property-based copyright protection may cede to a contract-based form of protection in the world of electronic media. See Loewenstein, "Legal Proofs and Corrected Readings: Press-Agency and the New Bibliography." Chartier, The Order of Books, 25-59. For the debates and bibliography on "mass culture" from differing historical and institutional perspectives, see Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, ed. Mukerji and Schudson; Culture, Society, and the Media, ed. Gurevitch, Bennett, Curran, and Woollacott; Mass Culture: the Popular Arts in America, ed. Rosenberg and White. Habermas, "The Public Sphere: an Encyclopedia Article," 50; henceforth "Encyclopedia." See for example, Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Calhoun, especially Eley, "Nation, Public and Political Cultures"; Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere"; and Ryan, "Gender and Public Access." Writing some thirty years after the initial publication of Structural Transformation, Habermas comments on the "breakdown" of the liberal public sphere: "Therewith emerged a new sort of influence, i.e., media power, which, used for purposes of manipulation, once and for all took care of the innocence of the principle of publicity" ("Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," 437). The earliest critique of Habermas's relegation of the marketplace or capitalist economy to a contingent factor, Public Sphere and Experience, was written by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge in 1972, but not available in English until 1994. As my own argument was formulated before I read their work and their argument is densely layered, idiosyncratic in its

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analytic categories, and focused primarily around the organization of the mass media, I have not attempted to integrate it into my discussion. I would note, however, that Negt and Kluge's insistence on the complexity of what they call the horizons of experience - an historical, collective, and individual process of accumulation, discipline, blockage, and fantasy, offers a basis on which a public sphere not constrained by explicit notions of Enlightenment reason and a tacit dependence on property relations might begin to be theorized. See also Fredric Jameson's discussion of their continuing work in "On Negt and Kluge." 49 References to Habermas's discussion of the public sphere in The Structural Transformation are noted parenthetically by page number alone. 50 See, for example, Saccamano, "The Consolations of Ambivalence: Habermas and the Public Sphere." 2 FIGURING THE MARKETPLACE OF PRINT

1 Kind-Hartes Dreame was entered on December 8,1592 (Arber, 11:623). The extant texts bear no date. 2 For a review of critical commentary on the passage and its place in Shakespeare studies, see D. Allen Carroll, "Greene's 'Upstart Crow' Passage." More recent comments include Carroll's introduction to his new edition of Greenes Groatsworth of Wit and an earlier note, "Johannes Factotum and Jack Cade;" and Weimann, "Bi-fold Authority in Shakespeare's Theater," 404-5. 3 Chettle served an apprenticeship with Thomas East from September 1577 until October 1584 (Arber, 11:81; 693). In 1591 he set up a print shop with John Danter and William Hoskins; Danter's move to premises on Hosier Lane in 1592 is generally taken to signal the end of the partnership. That Chettle continued some association with Danter is clear from the record of a dispute between them in 1593. See Greg and Boswell, Records, 38, 46. Journeymen were often hired by the job. Peter Blayney, engaged in an historical and bibliographic study of the print trade in London, suggests that there was a pool of about 100 journeymen compositors who circulated among the approximately thirty print shops that were active at one time or another in the period. Other evidence suggests that Chettle continued to be active in the trade at least until 1596. From 1598 until 1603 his name appears in Henslowe's diary as a writer of plays, but those dates refer to the extent of the surviving diary rather than Chettle's work in playwriting. For a discussion of Chettle's probable earlier involvement in writing for the stage, see Jenkins, The Life and Work of Henry Chettle. 4 Greene died on September 3,1592. Greenes Groatsworth of Wit was entered on September 20, 1592 to William Wright "upon peril of Henry Chettle" (Arber, II: 620). What specific liability, risk, or danger is provided for by "peril" is not clear. 5 Nashe too refutes the authorship, calling it "a scald trivial lying pamphlet" (The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. McKerrow, 1:154). 6 See E. A. J. Johnson's discussion in Predecessors of Adam Smith, chapter 13, "Art and Ingenious Labor." Johnson discusses both the history of the word

Notes to pages 50-7

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and its use in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century economic discourse to denote the productive capacity of labor and skill. In the absence of concepts of labor and capital, Johnson argues, "art" served as the term for describing how wealth was produced. Quoted by Johnson, Predecessors, 269, from The Economic Writings of William Petty, ed. C. H. Hull (Cambridge, 1899), 81. The quoted phrasing is ubiquitous; see Arber, II: 746,751,752,753,755,757, 790,797. Establishing a claim of Copy ownership involved both an oral and a textual act. The claim was submitted at a meeting of the Court of Assistants and repeated in the minutes of the subsequent meeting so that it could be publicly contested, as well as recorded in the register. See Sisson's discussion in "The Laws of Elizabthan Copyright." Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Smith, 1:76. For a discussion of ballads as the "other" against which poetry defines itself, see Achinstein, "Audiences and Authors: Ballads and the Making of English Renaissance Literary Culture." The addressees are Mopo, William Pickering and S. P. (elsewhere in the text, Stephen, and presumably Stephen Peele). Obviously Mopo cannot be traced; the other two were roughly contemporary with Henry Chettle; Stephen Peele also wrote ballads. See McKerrow's Dictionary for brief biographies of each. See the entries under "printers, journeymen" in the index of Greg, Companion for examples of petitions and documents focusing specifically on this issue. See also Blagden, The Stationers' Company. The right to operate an establishment, especially a retail establishment, was by the "custom of the city" open to anyone who was "free," a status acquired in relation to a particular guild which also conferred citizenship in the city. This custom obviously impinged on guild claims to the exclusive practice of a "mystery," hence its usual restriction to buying and selling rather than production. For a discussion of the custom, see Archer, The Pursuit of Stability, especially chapter 4, "The Framework of Social Relations: The Livery Companies." The Stationers and the Drapers were engaged in a longstanding dispute over the custom because a number of Drapers were booksellers and some had print shops as well. I discuss the situation briefly below, in chapter 4. See Gerald Johnson, "The Stationers Versus the Drapers." Quotes from, respectively, Philip Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses (1583); William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetry (1586); and Thomas Nashe, Anatomy of Absurdity (1589). In the appendix to The Rise of the English Street Ballad, Wurzbach assembles some thirty pages of extracts illustrating the responses to ballads between 1550 and 1700. Quoted by Watt in "Publisher, pedlar, pot-poet," 63, from Nicholas Brownde, The doctrine of the Sabbath (1595). For further discussion of ballads, in addition to Wurzbach's and Watt's books and the Achinstein essay already cited, see Rollins, "The Black-letter Broadside Ballad;" and Achinstein, "Plagues and Publication." For discussions of the various medical practices and the relations between practitioners, see Pelling and Webster, "Medical Practitioners," and Lucinda McCray Beier, Sufferers and Healers, especially chapter 2, "The Medical

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Notes to pages 57-79 Marketplace." For discussion of the circulation of vernacular medical literature, see Slack, "Mirrors of Health." See Capp, English Almanacs, 1500-1800. Of the zodiacal man, Capp notes that it was "a figure, unchanged since classical times, which showed the organs and parts of the body controlled by the various signs of the zodiac" (30). For Capp's discussion of astrological medicine, see 204-14. For discussion of early methods and accounts of typecasting, see Carter, A View of Early Typography. For a description of casting type and illustrations of the mold, punch, matrix, and type, see Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 9-12. Pierce Pennilesse is invoked on the title page of Kind-Harts Dreame. The invectives as said to be "delivered by severall Ghosts unto him [Kind Hart] after Pierce Penilesse Post had refused the carriage." Nashe's Pierce Penilesse had been entered on August 8,1592 and printed three times by the beginning of 1593. The reference is to Gabriel Harvey's Foure Letters and Certaine Sonnets: Especially Touching Robert Greene, and Other Parties by Him Abused (entered on December 4, 1592, four days before Kind-Harts Dreame, and possibly an enlargement of a similar, earlier pamphlet). Ballad, 1570; Tarltons Toyes, 1576; Tarltons Tragical Treatises, 1578; Tarltons Device, 1579; Tarltons Farewell, 1588; Tarltons Recantacion, 1589; Tarltons Repentence, 1589; Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie, 1590, Tarltons Jests; before 1600. I discuss the appropriation and use of Tarlton's name by the book trade and the after effects of that use in "So beloved that men use his picture for their signs." An image of Tarlton with tabor and pipe seems to have been used for alehouse signs. See ibid. See Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld for a significant collection of conycatching pamphlets and ballads. In his introductory essay, Judges reads the material as a more or less straightforward representation of a criminalized and impoverished sector of the population. For discussion of the documentary archive and its relation to the pamphlet representations, see A. L. Beier, Masterless Men. For an overview of the genre in a wider European context, see Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, chapter 8. In Worlds Apart, Jean-Christophe Agnew argues, as I do, that cony-catching pamphlets are a fictional response to the social conditions of an emerging market economy (63-73). One pamphlet in particular, Thomas Harmon's A Caveat for Common Cursitors (1566), has become the focus of literary critical work in Renaissance studies. See Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets," in Shakespearean Negotiations; Barry Taylor, Vagrant Writing; and Hanson, Discovering the Subject. Anonymous [Cuthbert Conny-catcher], The Defence of Conny-catching (1592). Greene usually has been assumed to be the author. Foley, "Falstaff in Love and Other Stories from Tudor England." See Weimann, "Bi-fold Authority in Shakespeare's Theatre," from which my quotes are taken, as well as his book, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition.

Notes to pages 82-6

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3 T H E PATRIMONY OF LEARNING

1 See Curtis, "The Alienated Intellectuals of Early Stuart England;" Stone, "The Educational Revolution in England, 1560-1640;" and Chartier, "Time to Understand: The Frustrated Intellectuals," in his Cultural History. 2 For example: There be three kinds of government most noted among all writers . . . a monarchic . . . an oligarchic . . . the third a democratic, where every one of the people hath his interest in the direction and his voice in elections. Now all these three be best maintained by those kindes of wit, which are most proper for that kind of government, wherein they live. But bycause the government of our countrie is a monarchic: I will in choisc seeke out that kind of wit, which best agreeth with monarchic, neither will I touch the other two, unles I fortune to trip upon them by chaunce. (Mulcaster, Positions, 154)

3 Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie, 62. 4 Goldberg argues that Mulcaster cannot articulate an elementary pedagogy because it is disrupted, from the beginning, by the problem of a writing that exists before reading and asserts its prerogative in the inculcation of literacy. The orthographic treatise that displaces the pedagogic discussion in the Elementarie thus registers a Derridean problematic of writing. 5 Thomas, "The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England," 100. 6 Harvey's published writings in English are available in The Works of Gabriel Harvey, ed. Grosart, henceforth referred to as GH. Virginia Stern provides a thorough account of Harvey's life in Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library. For Nashe's life and works see The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. McKerrow, henceforth referred to as TN. 7 The conventional chronology of the Harvey/Nashe quarrel begins with Richard Harvey's Lamb of God, SL pamphlet addressing the Marprelate Controversy, published in the fall of 1589, which includes jabs at Nashe and "any such famous obscure man, or any other piperly makeplay or makebate" (TN, V:180). The second text is Robert Greene's Quip for an Upstart Courtier, published in 1592, whose first issue includes a satirical portrait of the Harvey family - father and three sons. The third is Pierce Penilesse. See McKerrow's edition of Nashe for a summary discussion of both quarrels (TN, V:34-109) and Richard Harvey's text. See also McGinn, "Nashe's Share in the Marprelate Controversy," and Summergill, "The Influence of the Marprelate Controversy on Thomas Nashe." 8 See volume 5 of McKerrow's edition of Nashe for a generous sampling of comments on the quarrel. The comment from Covell is quoted from Stern, 122. 9 McKerrow suggested that the two men clashed over the humanist program, Harvey advocating for the moderns, Nashe for the ancients. Refining and correcting McKerrow, Marshall McLuhan argued that the Ramism identified with Harvey is less a modern program than a continuation of scholastic emphasis on dialectic (logic) at the expense of grammar and rhetoric, and correlatively, that Nashe's rhetorical affiliation was not simply "ancient" but an effort of reform focused against late medieval scholasticism ("The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of his Time"). For an extended discussion

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Notes to pages 86-93 of Nashe in terms of McLuhan's argument, see Kinney, Humanist Poetics. Jonathan Crewe's Unredeemed Rhetoric makes the strongest and most provocative argument for Nashe's involvement with the ideas and ideals of rhetoric. Other critics have offered various versions of the "conflict of principles." In addition to the various book-length studies of Nashe - Hibbard, Thomas Nashe; Nicholl, A Cup of News; and, Hilliard, The Singularity of Thomas Nashe - see Perkins, "Issues and Motivations in the Nashe-Harvey Quarrel" and Friedenreich, "Nashe's Strange Newes and the Case For Professional Writers." Two more recent books, Hutson's Thomas Nashe in Context and Tribble's Margins and Marginality address the quarrel with a more specific focus on print. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 68. See Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 72. See Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters. Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates. See, for example, Marotti, "'Love is Not Love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order," and his Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. For a discussion of scribal publication not limited to literary works, see Love, Scribal Publication. For an account of Cambridge practices that is most relevant to my discussion see Jardine, "The Place of Dialectic: Teaching in Sixteenth-Century Cambridge." See also Jardine and Grafton, From Humanism to the Humanities, especially 184-96, which take Harvey as an exemplary figure. What I am calling Familiar Letters for ease of reference was actually two pamphlets: Three Proper and Wittie Familiar Letters: Lately Passed Between Two Universitie men ... (H. Bynneman, 1580) and Two Other Very Commendable Letters, of the Same Mens Writing... (H. Bynneman, 1580). Manuscript material is available in the Camden Society's Letterbook of Gabriel Harvey. Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia, ed. Moore Smith, prints selections from the marginalia and a commonplace book. Both Moore Smith and Stern provide lists of other manuscripts and essays where discussion of or material from Harvey's marginalia can be found. For a cautionary discussion of Scott's edition of the Letterbook, see Nielson, "Reading Between the Lines: Manuscript Personality and Gabriel Harvey's Drafts." I discuss Nielson's argument briefly below. Jardine and Grafton, " 'Studied for Action': How Gabriel Harvey read his Livy." Moore Smith was the first modern scholar to recognize that the personae refer to Harvey himself, see his understated and somewhat incredulous comments in Marginalia. Stern identifies and discusses eight Harvey personae and suspects that future scholars will find more (passim and 148-90). For a discussion of ex tempore discursive training in classical and Renaissance rhetoric, see Cave, The Cornucopian Text, especially 124-56. I am indebted to Cave's discussion of copia in The Cornucopian Text, see especially 3-34. In Ciceronianus, Harvey comments on such efforts in a pedagogically intended self-parody: "I believed that the bone and sinew of imitation lay in

Notes to pages 93-112

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my ability to choose as many brilliant and elegant words as possible, to reduce them into order, and to connect them in a rhythmical period" (69). In the preface to Menaphon, Nashe complains of those who must borrow invention of Ariosto & his countrimen, take up choise of words by exchange in Tullies Tuscalans & the Latine Historiographers storehouses; similitudes, nay, whole sheetes and tractates verbatim, from the plentie of Plutarch and Plinie; and to conclude, their whole methode of writing from the libertie of comicallfictionsthat have succeeded to our Rhetoricians by a second imitation (TN, 111:313).

23 Wylson is Robert Wilson, also a clown and a member, like Tarlton, of the Queen's Company. 24 For "devil," see Moxon, Mechanick Exercises', "hell" as the receptacle or place for usable waste is not limited to printing, but used in tailoring as well, for example, and presumably in other crafts also (see OED). 25 See OED for the courier usage and the association with legal punishment. For "knight of the post" as a perjuring witness, see McKerrow's commentary (TN, IV:94). Title pages were put up on posts to advertise a bookseller's stock and chalk marks on a post were used to keep track of the "tab" at food and drink establishments. 26 I owe the date at which Wolfe stopped being active as a printer to Peter Blayney, to whom I am also indebted for a listing of the books each man printed; such lists are now available in the third volume of The Short Title Catalogue of English Books, 1475-1640. 27 The one exception, Danter's willingness - for whatever reason - to print a Catholic psalter, underlines their difference in status: Wolfe, as Company Beadle, ordered and supervised the search of Danter's shop and the destruction of his press and type. 28 The oldest senses of "plat" are those which denote flat surfaces and territorial divisions (where it first overlaps with "plot" and implicates governmental authority). According to the OED, "plat" and "plot" become associated with "design" "and "scheme" early in the sixteenth century and soon after with building foundations and settlement sites. "Platform" in the sense of a program or plan for exercising authority (as in the modern sense of a political platform) emerges specifically in relation to questions of reformation in Church government, particularly but not exclusively in the effort to establish Presbyterian (antiepiscopal) forms. See Hutson, "Fortunate Travelers: Reading for the Plot in Sixteenth-Century England," for a discussion of "plat/plot" as the informing model of reading practice. 29 Of Tarlton's "famous play," only the plat survives: a written scheme of characters and scenes that enabled improvisatory dramatic practice. 30 In "Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops' Ban of 1599" Richard McCabe argues this point against the alternative that the order is directed against pornography and motivated by ecclesiastical rather than political concerns. The "alternatives" are not mutually exclusive, especially given the frequency with which discourse about publication uses sexualized language. 31 Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 47.

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Notes to pages 115-28

4 A R T I S A N A L DISPOSSESSION

1 All citations are to Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld. 2 The texts of the weavers' pamphlet and the mayor's letter are included in the documentary appendix to Consitt, The London Weavers Company, 312-18. 3 Stephen Slany to Lord Burghley, 25 July 1596, in Queen Elizabeth and Her Times, ed. Thomas Wright, 11:462-63. 4 "Perfected" is a technical term referring to the printing of the second side of a sheet. 5 The first book of ballads, A Garland of Good Will, appears in the Stationers' Register with two dates, 1593 and 1596; the second, Strange Histories, cannot be dated. 6 See, for example, Rollins, "Concerning Bodleian Ms. Ashmole 48." 7 For Elderton's life and career, see Rollins, "William Elderton: Elizabethan Actor and Ballad-writer." 8 No first editions of Deloney's books are known: of the ballad books, 5 editions printed before 1640 and 7 printed between 1640 and 1700 survive; of the four fictions, a total of 29 editions printed before 1700. The earliest extant edition of Jack ofNewbury (1619) claims to be the eighth, that of Thomas of Reading (1612), the fourth, but such title-page indicators are unreliable. 9 Copies of Jack of Newbury from two eighteenth-century printings by W. Hall, a printer in Newbury, are in the rare book collection of the Baker Library at the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard University. Both title pages reproduce the publication data of the 1680 edition printed by W. Wilde for Thomas Passenger and William Thackeray. The 1812 edition of Thomas of Reading printed by James Ballantyne and Co. reproduces the title page of the 1632 edition printed by Ellizabeth Allde for Robert Bird. 10 Deloney's fictions have been edited twice in the twentieth century, first by Mann in an edition, The Works of Thomas Deloney, that includes all of Deloney's known writings, and then by Lawliss, The Novels of Thomas Deloney. All page numbers included parenthetically in my text are to Lawliss's edition. 11 See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 120-27. 12 For a discussion of development of the concept of hegemony and the problem of totalization in its use, see Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. 13 See, for example, Montrose, "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form." 14 Until the mid-seventeenth century, the cloth trade was responsible for 80 to 90 percent of England's export trade, thus making its leading merchants also crucial to the government's financial activities. See Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London; Clarkson, The Pre-Industrial Economy in England; Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects; and Textile History and Economic History, ed. Harte and Ponting. 15 Surviving demographic evidence indicates dispersed production for local markets - in cities, shoemaking shops tended to be scattered rather than clustered. The practice could also be an itinerant one. The earliest push to

Notes to pages 128-45

16 17

18

19

20 21

22

23

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large-scale manufacture of shoes and boots resulted from the provisioning requirements of the parliamentary army during the Civil War, and the putting-out system did not spread to shoemaking until the early eighteenth century. See Clarkson, "The Leather Crafts in Tudor and Stuart England," and "The Organization of the English Leather Industry." . The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harrington, 257. For a survey of critical work on Deloney, see Eugene P. Wright, Thomas Deloney and its bibliography, as well as the introductions to the two editions cited above. See also Margolies, Novel and Society in Elizabethan England and McKeon, The Origin of the English Novel. This is the song claiming that Jack's establishment had 200 looms in one room. There is evidence that sixteenth-century clothiers converted monastic properties to large-scale cloth manufacture, but none that they were successful or on the scale of Jack's establishment. There is also evidence of relatively small establishments (a master and a few apprentices and journeymen) that carried out the various processes in making cloth at one site. See D.M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth, 250, in addition to the work cited in note 14 above. Deloney himself parodies economies of scale in The Gentle Craft, Part 2 through a character called "boasting Tom," who claims to have had 150 men working for him as a shoemaker, an even less likely possibility and one that the men to whom he boasts immediately dismiss. In The Rhetoric of Concealment, Rosemary Kegl argues that Jack of Newbury uses proverbs and proverbial wisdom, and the collective identities they construct, to enforce a hegemonic order. Her argument depends on a coincidence between Jack's interests and the narrator's that I would dispute (127-48). De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 36-38. In the opening chapters of her book, Gossip, Spacks discusses the perception of gossip as a deauthorized mode of discourse and a "trivial" form of speech and/or knowledge (3-23). Her argument that "gossip provides a model for many operations of the novel . . . for a kind of interpretation that defines aspects of the text's relation to the reader and locates its roots in ordinary social discourse" (11) comes to conclusions similar to the ones I draw from Deloney's use of the figure, though Spacks surveys writing from the eighteenth century to the present. For strong readings of Jack of Newbury as another story predicated on displacing and subordinating women so that an exemplary masculinity can be constructed, see Linton, "Jack of Newbery and Drake in California," and Kegl, The Rhetoric of Concealment, 149-66. See Johnson, "The Stationers Versus the Drapers." As Johnson notes, it was a lawsuit involving Simon Stafford, who was a draper-printer, that brought matters to a head, for Stafford's print shop provided the possibility that books could be produced outside the Stationers' supervision and control. Stafford had been apprenticed to Christopher Barker, originally a draper and a publisher who had acquired shares in important patents and the position of Queen's Printer. Barker was connected to the Court (Sir Francis Walsingham in particular) which supported his translation against the Drapers' reluctance in 1578.

222

Notes to pages 146-79

24 Stow, A Survey of London, 1:153-54. 25 Thomas Pavier owned A Garland of Good Will, The Gentle Craft, Parts 1 and 2, and Thomas of Reading', William Barley owned Strange Histories. Pavier was translated from the Drapers to the Stationers in 1600, Barley in 1606. Pavier, at any rate, was not the first owner of the Copies he held. 26 Quoted in Mann's commentary on Thomas of Reading, 556, from Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), which in turn takes it from Harrison's Description of England. 27 See Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals. 28 The story of Simon Eyre was retold by Thomas Dekker in his play, The Shoemakers Holiday (1599). Henslowe's diary records a now lost play called "Six Clothiers" or "vj yeomen" that was probably drawn from Thomas of Reading (Mann, 547). In Spectacular Politics (48-52), Paula Backscheider discusses the use of Jack ofNewbury in a pageant staged before Charles II. 5 T H E PUBLIC SPHERE AND THE MARKETPLACE

1 Habermas, "Concluding Remarks," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Calhoun, 465. 2 For a discussion of how Habermas and his most important German successors in theorizing the public sphere, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, collapse "culture" into "media" and thus inevitably produce a monstrous or phobic sense of the media, see Polan, "The Public's Fear; or, Media as Monster." 3 For a discussion of the relation of individual subjects to the "we" of a public sphere, see Warner, "The Mass Public and the Mass Subject." 4 In "Marx and Heterogenity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat," Peter Stallybrass examines the way nineteenth-century texts represent a spectacle of heterogeneity that works to privilege an apparently unified homogeneous counterpart - the bourgeois state and the bourgeois subject, for example. I am indebted to his argument that the representation of heterogeneity exists in or establishes a specular relation with an abstract unity on which the construction of a hegemonic order depends. 5 Marx, Grundrisse, 91. 6 Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor, 28-29. Italics in orginal. 7 For arguments that the prefatory material to Tis Merrie constructs its audience as specifically, if not exclusively, male, the dedication to London gentlewomen notwithstanding, see Wall, The Imprint of Gender, 204-5, and Newcomb, "Social Things: The Production of Popular Culture in the Reception of Robert Greene's Pandosto." Newcomb's essay comments perceptively on the class implications of the dialogue between the apprentice and the gentleman reader. 8 See, for example, Agnew, Worlds Apart, 118-19; Bruster, Drama and the Market, 1-28; and McLuskie, "The Poets' Royal Exchange." Bruster's book makes the important argument, too often overlooked, that the theater was a market and a business venture not unlike those involved in the exchanges. 9 A second such site, the New Exchange, opened in 1609, the same year that saw the publication of The Gulls Hornbook. For an exemplary discussion of

Notes to pages 179-92

10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17

18

19

20 21

223

how the intersection between the discursive field and a market site like the New Exchange could be represented in the theater, see Newman, Fashioning Femininity, chapter 8, "City Talk: Femininity and Commodification in Jonson's Epicoene." The 1609 copy of the text microfilmed for Early English Books, 1475-1649 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms, 1963-) reads "players and their factors," allowing for a distinction between actors and the commercial entities that produced plays. None of the nineteenth- or twentieth-century editions I consulted retains the reading. I am indebted to Peter Stallybrass for provoking me to clarify this point. For an extended discussion of women's presence in the theater and Gosson's strictures, see Jean Howard, "Scripts and/versus Playhouse: Ideological Production and the Renaissance Stage." Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 11:690. Quoted in Albright, Dramatic Publication in England, 286. In "Speech-Manuscript-Print," D. F. McKenzie quotes Marston's complaint as evidence that he "thinks of his text as one to be spoken and heard, not printed and read" (90). That conclusion rests uneasily not only with the larger context of Marston's remarks, but also with McKenzie's argument that "writers might happily [or, he notes later, anxiously] use any or all of the modes of speech, manuscript, and print" (108). See McKenzie's discussion (ibid.) for examples of the rhetoric by which sermon writers negotiated the problem of equivalence/difference. I note that the Lacanian conceptual framework, to which these remarks are indebted, theorizes at the level of the individual psyche the impossible task of commensuration that occurs at the level of the social or collective in the public sphere if, as I have suggested, the public sphere is simultaneously inseparable from the state, the market, and the "intimate sphere" and the medium of their interweaving. In 1642, Taylor claimed to have written some 220 "books" in the previous thirty years. In his recent biography of Taylor, The World of John Taylor, Bernard Capp arrives at a lower figure of about 150 separate titles and 500,000 individual copies (66-67). Pennilesse Pilgrimage (STC 23784), discussed below, is entered to Gosson. It is possible that the entry was part of a deal between Taylor and Gosson, the pamphlet printed at Taylor's charges but distributed and sold by Gosson. Though Gosson did not reissue Pennilesse Pilgrimage, he did reissue a number of other pamphlets by Taylor and entered to Gosson. See, for example, Plant, The English Book Trade, and Sheavyn, The Literary Profession. Printed by A . M[atthewes]., entered to Henry Gosson. All citations of Taylor are from the Spenser Society reprints of his work in five volumes between 1869 and 1877, the folio in a single volume with editorially added continuous pagination, and the remaining pamphlets in four quarto volumes. Citations from the folio refer to the page number of the Spenser Society reprint of the folio and take the form, Workes, 00. Citations from the quarto collections refer to the pagination of individual pamphlets and take the form, Workes, nth collection, 00.

224

Notes to pages 193-202

22 The Honorable, and Memorable Foundations ... of divers Cities . . . Also a Relation of the Wine Taverns... (Workes, 4th collection, 6). 23 In An Arrant Thief whom every man may trust... with a comparison between a thief and a book (1622), life itself is figured as a continual loss. Good books/honest thieves transcend this condition of loss by "stealing the mind from vaine pretences," while "bad books through eyes and ears do breake and / take possession of the hearts fraile Center" (Workes, 286). 24 In "Printing for the Author," Keith Maslen examines eighteenth-century evidence of publication at the author's charges using the ledger records to supply information lacking in imprints. He finds that imprints often do not indicate authorial investment in the economics of publication. To my knowledge no such records survive for printing or publishing houses in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries. 25 In "The Peculiar Peregrinations of John Taylor the Water Poet," Warren Wooden suggests that Taylor initially set up "wagering journeys" with a "handicap" to excite interest and make the wager significant and then dropped the premise of a handicap. Wooden assumes that Taylor did indeed "develop [a] mass subscription system" (14), though he is primarily interested in the themes and modes of Taylor's travel narratives. 26 In his initial essay on Taylor, "John Taylor 'the Water-Poet'," Bernard Capp takes Taylor's assertions about subscription, the number of subscribers, etc. at face value. The notion of sponsorship developed in the later biography offers the possibility of a more complex understanding. In the biography Capp compares what he calls Taylor's sponsored journeys with those undertaken by Gervase Markham, Thomas Cory ate, and William Kemp, and cites the one piece of external evidence of Taylor-sponsorship, a pledge of one pound toward the journey to Scotland recorded in Edward Alleyn's diary (64). 27 Marx, Grundrisse, 92. Italics in original. 28 In "Octavo Nonce Collections of John Taylor," Arthur Freeman discusses surviving bibliographical evidence that booksellers, Gosson in particular, also may have issued octavo collections of various pamphlets on several occasions between 1621 and 1639. Freeman speculates that some of these collections were a way of disposing of overstock, the titles included depending on what was available. They may also have been a means of capitalizing on a new title, including the profitable reissue of old titles. The two possibilities are by no means mutually exclusive.

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Marlowe, Christopher. The Complete Plays. Ed. J. B. Steane. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1969. Marotti, Arthur. Manuscript, Print, and the Renaissance Lyric. Cornell University Press, 1995. " 'Love is Not Love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order." ELH 49 (1982). Marx, Karl. Capital, vol. 1. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Ed. Frederick Engels. Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1973. Maslen, Keith. "Printing for the Author:" From the Bowyer Printing Ledgers, 1710-1775." The Library, Fifth Series, 27 (1972). May, Steven. "Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical 'Stigma of Print.'" Renaissance Papers (1980). McCabe, Richard. "Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops' Ban of 1599." Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981). McGinn, Donald. "Nashe's Share in the Marprelate Controversy." PMLA 59 (1944). McKenzie, D. F. "Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing House Practices." Studies in Bibliography 22 (1969). "Speech-Manuscript-Print." In New Directions in Textual Studies. Ed. Oliphant and Bradford. McKerrow, R. B. A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of Foreign Printers of English Books, 1557-1640. London: Bibliographic Society, 1910. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. McKillop, Alan Dugald. "English Circulating Libraries, 1725-1750." The Library, Fourth Series, 14 (1933-34). McLuskie, Kathleen. "The Poets' Royal Exchange: Patronage and Commerce in Early Modern Drama." Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991). McLuhan, Herbert Marshall. "The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of his Time." Unpublished Dissertation. Cambridge University, 1943. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenburg Galaxy. University of Toronto Press, 1962. Understanding Media. New York: McGraw Hill, 1964. Meyer, Edward. Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama. Weimar: Verlag von EmilFelber,1897. Montrose, Louis Adrian. "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form." ELH 50 (1983). Morgan, Paul. "Frances Wolfreston and 'Hor Bouks': A Seventeenth-Century Woman Book-Collector." The Library, Sixth Series, 11 (1989). Moxon, Joseph. Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing. 2nd edn. Ed. Herbert Davis and Harry Carter. Oxford University Press, 1962. Mulcaster, Richard. The First Part of the Elementarie. Ed. E. T. Campagnac. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925. Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children (1581). Ed. William Barker. University of Toronto Press, 1984.

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Index

Achinstein, Sharon 6,215nn9,15 Agnew, Jean-Christophe 79,215n24 Anderson, Benedict 41-42 Appadurai, Arjun 211n25 artisanal models and practices 49-50,62, 118-19,124-27 and mercantile practices 143-144, 149-50,190 printing 23-26,49-50, 97-101,118-121 shoemaking 127-30,220nl5 weaving 97-101,127-32,220nnl4,18 writing 95-101,108-9,114-17 see also entrepreneurial models and practices; guild economy; patrimonial models and practices. Aubrey, John 201 author-function 38-41,46-48,63-65,68-71, 171-72 Backsheider, Paula 222n28 Bacon, Francis 21,22 ballad(s) 52-57,117-18,123-24,131-32 ballad-singing economy 61-62,64-65, 158-160 ballad writing 117-18,121-25 and the book trade 26-27,52-57 singers 52-57,72,158 see also song; Deloney, Thomas ban order of 1599 see Stationers' Company Barker, Christopher 30,55,83,190,221n23 Barley, William 222n25 Barthes, Roland 38-39 Baudrillard, Jean 29 bibliography 8,78,207n8 Blayney, Peter 208nl8,209n3,214n3, 219n26 Bodley, Thomas 1,9,21 book trade see Stationers' Company; Drapers' Company Borgman, Albert 18-19 Bourdieu, Pierre 8,87 Bruster, Douglas 222n8 Burcot, Dr. 57-63,154,156-57

Burke, Peter 10,72 Burton, Robert 9,208nl0 Butler, Martin 183-84 Camden, William 21-22,210nl2 capital, cultural 8,98-99,111-13,197 capital, symbolic 8,189-91 capitalism see marketplace; print and capitalism Capp, Bernard 59,196-97,216nl7,223nl8, 224n26 Carlson, David 21 In27 Carlton, Dudley 2-3 Carroll, D.Allen 47 Cave, Terence 218nn20,21 Certeau, Michel de 8,133-34 Chamberlain, John 2-3 Chartier, Roger 40,207n8 Chettle, Henry 46-81 passim, 108-9,158, 164 Kind-Hartes Dreame 46-81 passim, 110, 156,164 Clark, Peter 12 The Cobbler of Canterbury 66,102 commodity(ies) and consumption 176,78 exchange value and use value of 28-29, 170,172-73 production and consumption of 35-36, 170-74,193-94,197-98 cony-catching stories 73-77,115-17,168, 216n24 Copy 24-27,53-55,94,97-99,111-12, 210nl9,215n8 Copyright 28,39-40,163-64,189,205, 210nl9,212n41 counsel 90,103-4,134-36,138 see also discursive authority Crewe, Jonathan 217n9 Danter, John 97-98,219n27 Dekker, Thomas 9,81,88,115-17,200 Gulls Hornbook 174-82,185 237

238

Index

A Knight's Conjuring 88 Lanthorn and Candlelight 115-17,200 Shoemakers Holiday 222n28 Deloney, Thomas 9,102,117-61 passim, 168-69,190,201 as a ballad writer 117-18,121-25, 220nn5,8 as a weaver 119-121 The Gentle Craft, Part 1124,128-30, 140-46,222nn25,28 The Gentle Craft, Part 2 124,128,154-61, 221nl8,222n25 Jack ofNewbury 124,128-40,146-47, 154,220nn8,9,221nnl8,19,22 Thomas of Reading 124,128,148-54, 220nn8,9,222nn25,28 discourse, as a commodity 17-18,28-30,40, 43-45,167-68,180 discursive authority 1-3,38,47-48, 87-89 figurations of. see ballad(s); counsel; gossip; jest; song see also oratory, discursive field 3-4,8,30,180 Donaldson, Peter 212n32 Drapers' Company 144,145-46,215nl2, 221n23,222n25 Drummond, William 208nl4 Edelman, Bernard 213n42 Eisenstein, Elizabeth 18,20 Elderton,Williaml23-24 entrepreneurial models and practices 116, 193-201,203 see also artisanal models and practices; patrimonial models and practices Erasmus 87,92-93,101 excess, thematization of 133,139-40, 152-54,159-61,189-91 see also gossip; surplus. Feather, John 207n8,208nl6 Febvre, Lucien 20,208n2 Foley, Stephen 76 Foucault, Michel 8,39,64 Freeman, Arthur 224n28 Freud, Sigmund 86-87 Gerber, A. 212n34 Gilmont, Jean Francois 209n3 Ginsberg, Jane 213n42 Goldberg, Jonathan 83,217n4 gossip 3,145-154 passim and domestic secrets 144-45 as a figure of discursive authority 134, 136-40,144-45

as a figure of excess 136-40,159-60, 190-91 as a trope for print dissemination 146-50, 157,169 see also discursive authority Gosson, Henry 191,223nnl9,21,224n28 Gosson, Stephen 183-84 Grafton, Anthony 90 Greenblatt, Stephen 47,50,69 Greene, Robert 33,38,49,63-66,102-3, 105-7,110,156,171,173,212n29, 214nn2,4 Greenes Groatsworth of Wit 33-38, 47-48,50, 65,79,80,207n9 Quip For an Upstart Courtier 102, 217n7 guild economy conflict within 23,26-7,126,139-40, 143,150 organization of 23,26,181,210nl4, 211n21,215nl2 versus open economy 62,64-65,68,75, 77,143 see also artisanal models and practices; print and capitalism. Guillory, John 6,7 Gutenburg, Johan 15,22-23 Habermas, Jttrgen 5,18,19,42^5,162-66, 178,213n48,222n2 Halpern, Richard 6-7,83 Harrington, John 129-30 Harvey, Gabriel 6,9,84-113 passim, 114, 117,123,155,182,216n20,217n6, 218nnl7,19 Familiar Letters 88-90,93,109 Ciceronianus 93,218n22 Rhetor 93 Foure Letters 102-3,105-6 Pierce's Supererogation 103-5,106, 155 see also Harvey/Nashe quarrrel Harvey/Nashe quarrel 84-89,102-113, 164-66,168,217n9 Helgerson, Richard 87-88,101 Hesse, Carla212n41 Howard, Jean 223n 12 Hutson, Lorna 218n9,219n28 Jaszi, Peter 17 Jameson, Frederic 214n48 Jardine, Lisa 89,90 jest 134-36,138,140 see also discursive authority Johnson, Gerald 145,212n29,221n23 Jonson, Ben 6,80,185,197

Index Kahn, Victoria 212n32 Kegl, Rosemary 221nnl9,22 Kinney, Arthur 218n9 Kluge, Alexander 213n48,222n2 Lambarde, William 52-53 learned men 20-22,27,33-38,57-65, 82-113 passim, 114,117,156 Lehmann-Haupt, Helmutt 209nn4,5 libraries 1,9-10,188,208nnl0,18 see also Bodley, Thomas Linton, Joan Pong 221n22 literacy 4,11-12,16,82-85,119,123-24, 188 Loewenstein, Joseph 30,40,210nl9, 211n28,212n31 Love, Harold 205,218nl4 McCabe, Richard 219n30 McLuhan, Marshallb 18,41,61,209n8, 217n9 McKenzie, D. F. 209n3,223nnl5,16 McKeon, Michael 6 Machiavelli 30-33,34,212nn31,32,33,34 marketplace 33,35-38,66-71,75-76,86, 164 commensuration with public sphere 165-71,187-89,200-201 of print 3,48-51,52-57,68-69,73,76-78, 107,110-13,114-17 Marprelate Controversy 31,84-86,103-5, 217n7 Marotti, Arthur 6-7,88 Marston, John 185,223nl5 Martin, Henri-Jean22,208n2 Marx, Karl 17,28-29,170192,197 Maslen, Keith 224n24 Moxon, Joseph 20,60-61,209n9,219n24 Mulcaster, Richard 82-84,87,106 Mullaney, Stephen 79 Nashe, Thomas 8,47,48,63-64,84-113 passim, 114-15,117-18,123,155-56, 171,173,217n6 Anatomy of Absurdity 94-95,105 Christ's Tears 107 Have With You to Saffron Walden 107-110 Lenten Stuffe 107,110 Pierce Pennilesse 96-98,102,105,107, 171,216nl9 Preface to Menaphon 64,219n22 Unfortunate Traveller 107 Negt, Oscar 213n48,222n2 Nesbit, Molly 213n42 Newcomb, Lori Humphreys 222n7

239 new historicism 7 Newman, Karen 7,223n9 Nielson, James 90 oratory 88-113 passim in print 93-94,96-97,99,101,107-11 techniques of 89-93,104-7 as vocational practice 88-93 Orwell, George 14-15,17,18,43,204 pastoral, as symbolic formation 127 pamphlet(s) as a commodity 2-3,35,173-78,184-89, 198,204 denned 1-6,14-17 dissemination of 8-13,16-17,107,122, 184-85,198,204 and economy of print 14-17,26-27 and ephemerality 173,187-88 and/as play texts 37-38,78-79,183-87 pricing 207n3 and public sphere 4,15,88-89,187-89 readers/reading 9-12,173-78,183,185, 194,198 patrimonial models and practices 95,98, 100-101,111,114-17,200 see also artisanal models and practices; entrepreneurial models and practices Patterson, Lyman Ray 210nl9 Pavier, Thomas 222n25 players/playing 37-38,65-70,78-79,178-82 see also pamphlet(s), and/as play texts; stage Polan, Dana 222n2 Ponsonby, William 30,212n29 print and agency 17,20-21,149-150,164 and capital(ism) 20,22-26,41-42, 98-101,164-68,199-200 and criminality 21-23,189,210nl2 economy of 15-17,23-27,96-100, 159-60 history of 15-16,20-23 multiple agencies of 48,65,68-70,77-78, 167-68 technology of 18-19,20,22,60-61, 204-6,209n8,210nl3 "stigma of print" 87,113,207n5 propriate interests 27,33,89 see also textual property Prynne, William 184,186 public sphere 18,157,204-6 classic liberal 18,42-45,162-66,178,205 emergence of 88,113,119,154,160-61, 182 as imaginary construct 187-88

240

Index

and journalism 43-45,113,191 and marketplace 19,43-45,163-171,178 phobic conceptions of 2,166,169,187, 200-201 see also marketplace, commensuration with public sphere; marketplace, of print. Puttenham, George 112

Stevenson, Laura 125,126,208n9 subscription publication 191-200,202-3 scribal publication 4,16,87,101,206, 218nl4 surplus 189-91,206 and loss 189-91,197-200 surplus value 197 see also excess, thematizations of

Ramism 89,92 Tarlton, Richard 49,65-70,80,94,105,182, Rose, Mark 212n41 216nn21,22,23 219n29 Rowlands, Samuel 88,171-75,178 Taylor, John 8, 88,191-203 passim Tis Merrie When Gossips Meete 171-75, Carriers Cosmography 202 178,182,185,207n9 Kicksey-Winsey 194,196 A Pennilesse Pilgrimage 194,196 satire 111-13,177 Taylors Travels from London 198-99 Saunders, David 40,213n41 Taylors Travels to Prague 198 Schoeffer, Peterl5-16,22-23,209nn4,5 The Sculler 195-96 Shakespeare, William 5,70,78 A Shilling or Travels of Twelve-Pence Sohn-Rethel, Alfred 172-73,177 193 song 150,152-54,158-60 A Short Relation of a Long Journey 203 see also ballad(s); discursive authority Workes I92,2
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN RENAISSANCE LITERATURE AND CULTURE General Editor STEPHEN ORGEL Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Humanities, Stanford University 1.

Drama and the market in the age of Shakespeare DOUGLAS BRUSTER, University of Chicago

2.

The Renaissance dialogue: literary dialogue in its social and political contexts, Castiglione to Galileo VIRGINIA COX, University College London

3.

Spenser's secret career RICHARD RAMBUSS, Emory University

4.

Shakespeare and the geography of difference JOHN GILLIES, La Trobe University

5.

Men in women's clothing: anti-theatricality and effeminization, 1579-1642 LAURA LEVINE, Wellesley College

6.

The reformation of the subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant epic LINDA GREGERSON, University of Michigan

7.

Voyages in print: English travel to America, 1576-1624 MARY C. FULLER, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

8.

Subject and object in Renaissance culture edited by MARGRETA DE GRAZIA, MAUREEN QUILLIGAN, PETER STALLYBRASS, University of Pennsylvania

9.

Shakespeare and the theatre of wonder T. G. BISHOP, Case Western Reserve University

10.

Anxious masculinity in early modern England MARK BREITENBERG

11.

Seizures of the will in early modern English drama FRANK WHIGHAM, University of Texas at Austin

12.

The emergence of the English author: scripting the life of the poet in early modern England KEVIN PASK, Concordia University

13.

The poetics of English nationhood, 1590-1612 CLAIRE McEACHERN, University of California, Los Angeles

14.

Textual intercourse: collaboration, authorship, and sexualities in Renaissance drama JEFFREY MASTEN, Harvard University

15.

Knowledge, discovery and imagination in early modern Europe: the rise of aesthetic rationalism TIMOTHY J. REISS, New York University

16.

The project of prose in early modern Europe and the New World Edited by ELIZABETH FOWLER, Yale University, and ROLAND GREENE, University of Oregon

17.

The marketplace of print: pamphlets and the public sphere in early modern England ALEXANDRA HALASZ, Dartmouth College