Literary Constellations

Abstract

Literary Constellations resituates collaboration within the networks of books and people in the publishing industry in early modern London. Though print technologies and publishing practices are most often understood as providing the conditions for the development of single authorship, this project proposes that print also produced new forms of collective literary endeavors. Looking into the book industry, especially the activities of publishers within the Stationers' Company, I present collaboration as creative activity dispersed among interconnected people and books in the literary arena. This approach expands the recent scholarly attention to collaborative literary activity while remaining grounded in the social and economic context in which books were produced. Not only were books written, translated, edited, marketed, printed, and sold collectively in various ways, but the publishing industry as it developed in London created new avenues for imagining books as existing within meaningful collectivities and as well. Each chapter of this project examines a publishing event and traces its connections in the arena of books to illuminate the dynamics of collaborative publishing. Readings of the literary works are crafted by finding, illuminating, and taking seriously the traces among, between, and in texts. The first chapter examines the 1551 English translation of Utopia as a representative example of a collaborative literary process that includes writing as one in a larger constellation of literary efforts that produce the book. I further explore how the publisher Abraham Veale developed a specialty in health-related texts in translation, of which Utopia becomes a part. Chapter 2 introduces the English translation of the Aeneid published by Abraham Veale, which included a supplementary "thirteenth book," and which was produced in a collaborative group of translators and annotators. This continuation of the epic raises questions about the potential for groups of agents in print to continue the work of poetry indefinitely. Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene directly responds to the English Aeneidos and its collaborative continuing of the work of Virgil, and in the process articulates an individualist model of literary writing and reading. The third chapter turns to the interdependence of play writing and publishing with other books in the marketplace. I argue that Pericles was published as part of an identifiable group of books, and so operates in an interdependent cluster of collaboratively built stories. Finally, Chapter 4 argues that news was a collaboratively produced print genre with close associations with printed plays. The project of selling individual dramatic authorship in the First Folio and Ben Jonson's late plays required the disentanglement of play texts from their associations with news. Part of this move toward disentanglement includes Jonson's satiric depiction of the stationer Nathaniel Butter and his news syndicate in The Staple of News.