Michelle O’Callaghan. Crafting Poetry Anthologies in Renaissance England: Early Modern Cultures of Recreation.

Abstract

Scholarship on English Renaissance poetics has tended to centre on formal literary-critical treatises and rhetorical handbooks from the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period. Yet, as Michelle O’Callaghan’s meticulous, compelling study argues, an alternative but equally vibrant site for debates about what constitutes poetic making is found in the poetry anthologies that emerge in the latter sixteenth century as a recognizable and distinct kind of printed book. In their contents and paratexts, printed lyric anthologies theorize and materialize competing kinds of lyric making, understood here as a manual craft, a learnt and evolving skill not restricted to the creative labour of single authors but instead performed by a host of other agents—compilers, editors, and printers—who develop their craft ‘through pragmatic modes of imitation’ (p. 12) and whose creative design in organizing poetic parts into composite wholes manifests a techne analogous to the poet’s inventions (pp. 43–4). The lyric craft of these anthologies is ‘recreative’ (p. 3) in the dual sense of a pleasurable, reinvigorating pastime (the reader’s recreation) and an artisanal process of making again in new contexts beyond the confines of the physical anthology, in households, commonplace books, songbooks, and the ballad trade (the poem’s re-creation). English poetry anthologies of this period are invitingly multimodal, ‘embodied through re-creative performance’ (p. 19) that cuts across class and gendered readerships: lyrics are embodied on the page but re-embodied as soundscapes in new, often more evanescent settings—to be imitated and parodied, vocalized as speech, sung to a tune, or performed in plays (Vaux’s ‘I lothe that I did love’ is famously reanimated on stage by Hamlet’s gravedigger). So, this monograph is a study both of practices of crafting and habits of reading: singing, browsing, and commonplacing are all manifestations of a ‘recreational poetics’ (p. 228).