While the connections between commonplace books, miscellanies, and essays have long been recognised, and the significance of the commonplace methodology for early essayists noted, we still lack a comprehensive account of the genres’ enmeshing. Drawing on the work of prominent early essayists (Michel de Montaigne, John Florio, William Cornwallis), as well as the collections of Joshua Baildon and Francis Osborne, this chapter fills that gap. It shows how the commonplace method helped to generate the early essay by providing essayists with their raw materials, and also demonstrates how commonplace books and miscellanies modelled the practices of notation, citation, and imitation that made the form possible. Early essays were made from citations, but they also transformed those citations. Thus, early essays were grounded in both the humanist imitative tradition, from which the culture of commonplacing emerged, and a longer tradition of miscellaneous writing, reaching back to late antiquity.

This chapter first considers the conceptual complexities involved in any reference to “the poem.” The poem can, for instance, be defined as a particular instantiation of a universal, called “poetry,” or it can be defined in opposition to other kinds of literary genre, linguistic artefact, or linguistic performance, from verse treatise to political slogan. The term “poem” may also be normative as well as descriptive, a marker not only of genre but also of success. Finally, the poem has sometimes been conceived in opposition to conceptual thinking itself, from which perspective the discourse of poems differs radically from the discourse of ideas. Treating examples by W. S. Graham, Ben Jonson, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Wallace Stevens, this chapter argues that, given this situation, poems continually strive to overspill their concept, whether by achieving the status of The Poem or of Poetry Itself, by breaking out of the confines of “mere” poetry and becoming part of the fabric of reality, or by changing what “poems” can be and what “poem” can mean.

Ben Jonson never tired of railing against those who would apply his supposedly innocent satire to particular persons and “make a libel which he made a play.” Yet the central irony of Poetaster (1601) – and, indeed, of Jonson’s playwriting career – is that he undeniably did lampoon specific individuals, not to mention the host of more ambiguous topical analogies that appear in his plays. In Poetaster – set in an Augustan Rome that clearly stands for England – Jonson sharply satirizes the late Elizabethan surveillance state through the clash between Horace, the virtuous satirist and authorial stand-in, and Lupus, the corrupt and ignorant tribune. From the Bishops’ Ban in 1599 to the aftermath of the Essex Rising in 1601, the regime cracked down on verse satires and seditious libels with unusual severity; the line between satire and libel threatened to vanish altogether. Yet Jonson remained undaunted. In Poetaster, he counts on his audiences to draw precisely those topical applications that he stridently denies. If they make his play a libel, it is because he has turned playgoers into libel-makers.

The epilogue situates the foregoing chapters in a longer theater history, tracing two early Stuart scenes of libel – in the anonymous Nobody and Somebody (c.1605) and Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626) – to their late Elizabethan roots. In Nobody and Somebody, the titular characters reenact in a comic vein Heywood’s story of Jane Shore and Richard III from Edward IV. At once a folk hero and a figure for libel, Nobody plays on his constitutive anonymity to affiliate himself with the same seditious, defamatory talk of which he is falsely accused. The Roman Actor likewise revises the paradigm of libel formulated by its dramatic predecessor, in this case Jonson’s Poetaster. In the play’s metatheatrical opening scenes, the actor Paris rehearses Jonsonian arguments to vindicate himself from accusations of libel leveled by the corrupt tribune and spy, Aretinus. Yet the rest of Massinger’s play belies Paris’s defense of playing, laying bare the unresolved ironies at the heart of Jonson’s satirical project. Finally, the epilogue returns in closing to the constitutive tensions – between protest and threat, free speech and false news – that animated the early modern public sphere.

This chapter argues that the religious policies of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) are not limited to its frequently noted anti-Puritan satire but are also concerned with Catholic dissent and, more generally, the question of the theatre’s legitimacy and effect on its audiences. The play’s parody of martyrdom arguably reflects the discourse of pseudo-martyrdom to which the Oath of Allegiance controversy had given rise after the Gunpowder Plot and which deeply divided English Catholics, who faced a choice between recusancy, conformity, or some form of semi-conformity. Jonson’s satirical portrayal of Puritans who unsuccessfully attempt to remain ‘religious in midst of the profane’ thus also speaks to Catholic concerns that conformity may eventually lead to an erosion of dissent. This chapter further argues that the Pauline theology of things indifferent is fundamental to the play’s ideological structure and informs both its treatment of religious dissent and the legitimacy of the theatre. Despite its comic resolution, Bartholomew Fair ultimately amounts to a coercive imperative of inclusion that undermines opposition both to the theatre and to the Established Church.

Written during his Catholic years, Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall (1603) portrays the tyrannical regime of the Roman Emperor Tiberius and his favourite Sejanus, who aggressively lay claim to the inward secrets of their political opponents. Despite the play’s ostentatious historical accuracy, its concerns and vocabulary are thus frequently reminiscent of Elizabethan Catholic complaints about religious persecution under Elizabeth I. However, rather than simply condemning dissimulation as a response to persecution, Sejanus His Fall offers a rationale for prudent accommodation of a tyrannical regime that is grounded in a neo-Stoicist disjunction between inward and outward self and in a differentiated understanding of parrhesia, the rhetoric of free speech. Even though Jonson’s attitude towards dissimulation thus merits reconsideration, Sejanus simultaneously expresses deep distrust in theatricality, which is grounded not only in neo-Stoicist ethics but also in the Platonic association of the theatre with tyranny and the inherent theatricality of Machiavellian power politics.

In Chapter 3, Herbert’s verse is read in the context of another collaborative enterprise, the Stuart court masque. These playful and extravagant secular entertainments are an unusual context against which to set Herbert’s often modest devotional poetic, though Herbert can hardly have been ignorant of the genre: members of Herbert’s family – including the Earls of Pembroke, their wives and children, and Herbert’s own brother Sir Henry Herbert (c.1594–1673), sometime Master of the Revels – were involved in their performance and production. This chapter offers the court masque as a particularly vivid contemporary genre that engages with the possibilities of interdisciplinary expression. These entertainments alert us not only to the interplay between words and music, but also to the ways in which musical ideas of harmonious proportion might be expressed visually through the stage’s elaborate perspectival sets, and through the moving human medium of dance.

This chapter considers how the moving, working bodies of boy actors were depicted on stage throughout the early modern period, drawing together a number of metatheatrical instances which explicitly stage the acquisition and performance of theatrical skill. Focusing particularly on moments in plays by Ben Jonson, John Marston, and William Shakespeare, it argues for a theatre directly influenced by and representative of early modern culture's fascination with boys' physical capacities. Having established the early modern stage as a site of heightened physical display, the chapter moves to consider what bearing this culture of physical training and skill demonstration had on the careers and reputations of individual boy actors. It traces the careers of leading boy actors Nathan Field and Richard Robinson, attending to the highly physical nature of the roles these boys played, as well as how playwrights and audiences celebrated and commemorated the corporeal nature of their performances. Boy actors' physical performances, it ultimately argues, had a demonstrable impact on individual careers and reputations as well as company repertories.

Celebrated as one of the foundational stylistic achievements of early modernity, plain talk is characterized primarily in terms of what it is not: not conspicuous, not decorated, not Latinate, not complicated. Plain talk is the most unmarked style imaginable. Scholars have generally consulted written works like Bacon’s essays for examples of this paradoxically styleless style, but this chapter turns to drama because drama stages the effects that the plain style has – or was hoped to have – on others. In city comedies like Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour, Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid at Cheapside, and John Marston’s Dutch Courtesan, plain talk projects a speaker who is, or seems to be, in public exactly as they are in private. But there is also a palpable anxiety that swirls around dramatic depictions of plain talk. It is a style that gains its full meaning and force from its relation to other styles. But it is also the result of plain talk’s distinguishing lack of distinguishing features. Brimming beneath any iteration of this unmarked style is the dread that it will go unremarked, lost in the anonymity of public life.

The rise of the epigram, that most distinctively early modern genre, emerged from the confluence of several elements of literary culture, including humanist Latin epigrams; the distinct (though related) tradition of moralizing and didactic distichs and other short poems; the role of verse composition in schools and universities; and the increasingly important role of translation and bilingual circulation. This chapter outlines the relationship between Latin and English epigram in England between the mid-sixteenth and the later seventeenth century: in doing so, it builds upon previous work which has concentrated on the English-language tradition, and extends the chronological range of the existing studies, none of which ranges beyond 1640. By focusing in particular upon the ways in which epigrams circulated in the manuscript record, it treats epigram culture as a bilingual phenomenon, the bilingualism of which evolved over the course of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and demonstrates how thekind of‘witty’, topical and frequently satiric epigram, which most critical work has prioritized, sits within a broader and on average more serious and more generalizing literary phenomenon.

This chapter turns to a third influential facet of the Horatian lyric tradition: the development in English literary culture of the major political ode. Unlike moralizing lyric or psalm paraphrase, this form, of which the most famous early modern example is Andrew Marvell’s 1650 ‘Horatian Ode on Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, made a relatively late appearance in English poetry, with only scattered and marginally canonical examples (such as those by Jonson, Drayton and Fanshawe) prior to Marvell.

This chapter therefore seeks to answer two related questions. What are the defining features of the political ode in early modern England, taking into account the full panoply of the Latin (and, for these purposes, primarily neo-Latin) tradition? And how different do the landmarks of English achievement in this form – including poems by Jonson and Drayton as well as Marvell and Cowley – appear if read within the Latin literary context from which they emerged? It identifies several phases in the maturing of the formal panegyric ode as written in England in the latter sixteenth century before the form entered the vernacular.

Several of the most remarkable political poems of the mid-seventeenth century, including Marvell’s ‘First Anniversary’ (1655) and Dryden’s ‘Astraea Redux’ (1660), belong to a genre which has not been clearly defined in English literature. These substantial poems, each of several hundred lines, derive elements from a range of panegyric forms, including the tradition of the political ode discussed in ; but the main generic model for poetry of this sort, which is little represented in English before Marvell’s ‘First Anniversary’, is the panegyric epic of the late antique poet Claudian: a genre, new to Latin when Claudian began writing, which combined the techniques of prose panegyric with contemporary (rather than mythological) epic. This chapter seeks to set the major seventeenth-century English examples of this form – as well as a handful of English-language precursors – within the wider context of a Latin genre which, though now obscure, was both widely understood and frequently composed throughout early modern Europe.

Chapter 5 focuses on the changes in the editorial profession that resulted from the rise to prominence of the New Bibliography and shows how the consolidation of editorial authority and the increasingly quasi-scientific method (or mystique) of the New Bibliography worked to exclude women from its editorial ranks. This resulted in a significant decrease of woman-edited editions around the middle of the twentieth century. Continuing previous discussion of male collaborators, it demonstrates that well into the twentieth century, women editors’ successes still relied in part on finding a way into the primarily masculine network of editors via their male colleagues and allies, focusing on the careers of Grace Trenery, Una Ellis-Fermor, Alice Walker, and Evelyn Simpson.

This chapter brings print and manuscript commonplace books into dialogue with anti-theatrical diatribes and defences of poetry in order to establish that literary taste, usually dated to the eighteenth century, emerges much earlier in the humanist trope of the reader as bee, using the sense of taste to discriminate between rhetorical ‘flowers’. Through a reading of Anne Southwell's commonplace book, I claim that in the context of humoral psychology, this trope possessed a literal dimension: contemporary sensitivity to the flavour of gall ink corresponds to the suggestion that literary judgement is exercised through actual acts of tasting. Focusing on Ben Jonson’s paratexts, I submit that this has implications for how we understand the politics of taste: locating judgement at the bottom of the sensory hierarchy, ‘taste’ democratises critical authority.

Baldesar Castiglione’s courtesy book Il Cortegiano introduced the notion of sprezzatura (a kind of ‘effortless mastery’) to early modern England. The notion of courtesy, which characterised the Middle English period, was replaced by the notion of civility. A review of the relevant research shows how the theoretical framework proposed by Brown and Levinson with the key notions of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ politeness has been applied to the plays by William Shakespeare. The chapter continues with a third-wave discursive politeness approach that is exemplified with case studies of two plays by Ben Jonson, Volpone, Or the Fox and Bartholomew Fair. They demonstrate how default politeness or impoliteness values of specific linguistic forms interact with the discursive contexts in which they occur.

Chapter 2 examines the staging of lives in early modern England, focusing on what is probably the most densely biofictional play of the period, Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1601). Poetaster is predicated on what Matthew Steggle has called the ‘poetics of personation’, creating fictional versions of the playwright and his contemporaries. But the ‘poetics of personation’ encompasses not just modern lives but ancient ones, too. Jonson’s play resurrects Virgil, Tibullus, Horace and Ovid based on extended passages of translation from their works. Poetaster thus actively stages the dynamics of biofictional reading. But in this multiplicity of characters ancient Lives and texts mingle and merge. Ovid enacts episodes from the biography of the emperor who banished him, Gallus belies his ancient life, regaining the favour of the emperor who – according to the biographical tradition – forced him to commit suicide. Issues are complicated further when Jonson’s ancient and modern ‘poetics of personation’ contaminate each other: Ovid mirrors the recently dead Marlowe; Crispinus and Demetrius figure Jonson’s rivals Marston and Dekker. Above all, Jonson himself lurks behind the figure of Horace, as the gap between ancient texts and modern biofictions allows the play to explore the political tensions between the poet and the state and the responsibilities of authorship.

Martin Butler explores some intertextual relationships between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Jonson’s reservations about Shakespeare’s late plays are well known. In the induction to Bartholomew Fair, Jonson alludes to the grotesque dances at the sheep-shearing in The Winter’s Tale and to the servant-monster Caliban and the 'strange shapes' in The Tempest’s banquet scene, the latter described by Sebastian, in vocabulary which Jonson pointedly echoes, as 'a living drollery'. All of these things 'make nature afraid': that is, they offend against 'nature', by which Jonson seems to mean 'verisimilitude'. This critique of the faults of Shakespeare’s late style is reinforced elsewhere by Jonson’s disparaging allusion to Pericles as a 'mouldy tale', his remarks about the false geography of The Winter’s Tale, and his prologue to the revised version of Every Man In His Humour. As the prologue concludes, 'you, that have so graced monsters, may like men'. If, by complaining about 'monsters', Jonson is referring to Shakespeare’s late plays, and to The Tempest in particular, then evidently, Butler shows, he felt that Shakespeare not only wanted art, he wanted nature too.