Stigma of print issue

[Don]

Not new evidence, but worth considering as an antidote to arbitrary
Shakespeare authorship theories based on the famous "stigma of print"
negative reasoning, is the article,

Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical "Stigma of Print"
by Steven W. May
Originally published in Renaissance Papers, 1980
at http://shakespeareauthorship.com/stigma.html


See the author's even-handed of the evidence, pro and con, and final
round-up:

(quote)
In conclusion then, several fundamental changes in our received ideas
about aristocratic attitudes toward the press during the Renaissance
are evident. First, no "stigma of print" is discernible during the
Tudor age, much less thereafter.
(unquote)

Naturally it's possible that the Shakespeare author did have
reservations about publishing if it violated an agreement of a high
order, or just because it would allow pirating. bookburn

[Sabrina Feldman]

On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 7:54:43 PM UTC-7, Don wrote:
> Naturally it's possible that the Shakespeare author did have
> reservations about publishing if it violated an agreement of a high
> order, or just because it would allow pirating. bookburn

The question that interests me most isn't whether a 'stigma of print' was felt uniformly throughout the Elizabethan aristocracy, but whether Thomas Sackville felt himself subject to a 'stigma of print.' I think there is clear evidence that he did.

Literary critics have long recognized that Sackville had the potential to become a truly great poet. The scholar John Cunliffe wrote in the early twentieth century, "Only the small extent of Sackville's poetical work has prevented him from inclusion among the masters of the grand style...He conceives greatly, and handles his great conceptions with a sureness of touch which belongs only to the few." Another critic, Fitzroy Pyle, wrote in a 1938 article: "Thomas Sackville is one of the great might-have-beens of literature. He appears to have written nothing after the age of twenty-four and comparatively little before that; yet...it is generally agreed that 'his contributions to the Mirror for Magistrates contain the best poetry written in the English language between Chaucer and Spenser.'" Critics have also drawn connections between Sackville's works and Shakespeare's writings. "If we must date the dawn of English poetry in the time of Chaucer," notes Reginald Sackville-West in The Works of Thomas Sackville (1859), "we may trace to Sackville the style and character which it afterwards assumed in Spenser and Shakespeare." Because a handful of Sackville's youthful works strongly influenced the course of English poetry and the drama, his later works could have been even more influential.

Steven May's article overlooks or too lightly dismisses evidence that Elizabethan courtiers, especially Lords, would not be taken seriously at court as politicians if they also pursued their poetic interests. "It is ridiculous for a lord to print verses," declared the eminent jurist John Selden in the early seventeenth century; "'tis well enough to make them to please himself, but to make them public is foolish." The opinion was a common one--"Rime will undo you, and hinder your growth, and reputation in Court, more than anything beside you have either mentioned or feared," the poet Ben Jonson wrote in one of his masques. "If you dabble in poetry once, it is done of your being believed or understood here." As a final example, when the courtier Philip Sidney began devoting too much time to poetry in the 1580s, his friend Hubert Languet cautioned him that he mustn't compromise his future career as a statesman: "you must consider what are your prospects, and how soon you will have to abandon this literary use."

One taboo that no Elizabethan aristocratic writer violated was to publish an original stage play under his own name, which would have carried the shameful implication that he not only sought personal gain, fame, and public acclaim from his creative writings, but was also openly trafficking with the disreputable public theatres. Many of Elizabeth's courtiers enjoyed writing plays and masques for private performances, but these circulated as manuscripts rather than through the medium of print. For this reason, although Gorboduc must be added to the list of works published under Sackville's name, it is an unauthorized entry:

* The blank verse play Gorboduc, co-authored in Sackville and Norton in 1561, printed without their knowledge or consent in 1565.

Sackville and Norton "never intended" for Gorboduc "to be published," but during the plague year of 1565, one of their acquaintances--a young man who "lacked a little money and much discretion"--printed the play surreptitiously while Sackville was "out of England, and T. Norton far out of London, and neither of them made privy," as the 1570 edition of the play makes clear. This second edition includes a lengthy preface by the printer John Day explaining the circumstances of the original publication. According to Day, the 1565 edition was "exceedingly corrupted," as if the pirate who printed it "enticed into his house a fair maid and done her villainy, and after all to bescratched her face, torn her apparel, berayed and disfigured her, and then thrust her out of doors dishonested." Day's claim that the 1565 edition of Gorboduc was so corrupted it needed to be republished is laughable, because the 1565 text is nearly identical to the 1570 text. It has a few minor misprints, such as "terrour" for "errour," and a repeated line or two.

The main reason for reprinting Gorboduc in 1570 seems to have been to place on record that Sackville and Norton weren't responsible for the original publication. As Day explains, the authors "were very much displeased that she [Gorboduc] so ran abroad without leave, whereby she caught her shame, as many wantons do." The play was "somewhat less ashamed of the dishonesty done to her because it was by fraud and force." If readers "still reproached [her] with her former mishap...the poor gentlewoman will surely play Lucrece's part, and of herself die for shame." These sorts of disclaimers about how reluctant the authors were to see their work in print are actually rather common in the Elizabethan literature, though usually from an author seeking to justify his decision to print in the first place.

It is a sobering fact that, were it not for an act of literary piracy in 1565, Thomas Sackville might never have been recognized as the father of the Elizabethan drama. Scholars have long assumed Gorboduc to be Sackville's only play, but the dramatic records for the early Elizabethan period are far too sketchy to draw this conclusion. While there are no specific records that Sackville continued writing plays after 1561, there is abundant evidence that he continued writing poetry in a variety of genres. Because Sackville did not want Gorboduc to be published under his name, it is possible--even probable--that he wrote later plays he did not allow to be published under his name.