Spiller Elizabeth. Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance
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Pamphilia’s black humor 199
the lost princes and princesses in Part 2 have birthmarks. e birthmarks
that are a conventional romance device from Homer and Heliodorus to
Chretien de Troyes and Montalvo are signs of genealogical identity and
social standing. While such birthmarks promise that identity emerges
out of a past that persists and can be “read” on the body, Wroth instead
records not past origins but future destinies. Like the deer’s white spot,
Wroth’s birthmarks return us to Peter Martyr’s image of skin color as a
form of heraldry. us Floristello has not a single spot but an elaborate
“figure most perfectly framed of a lyoness in bloody couler, as it were
ramping to pray upon his bleeding hart strooke with loves dart” (2.97);
Floristello takes his name not from his family but from the “delicat, curi-
ous flower within a starr” that he mistakenly believes his beloved will
have on her breast (2.97). Parselius’ son, Trebisound, is recognized by a
red spot like a strawberry on his neck (2.219). His daughter, Candiana,
also unknown, has a “delicate mole on her left breast resembling a hart,
with a dart shott thorough itt” (2.219). Most importantly, Faire Designe,
who seems to be but is not yet recognized as Amphilanthus’ illegitimate
son and who is never named as Pamphilia’s son, has “a sipher on my hart”
that encodes the name of his beloved as she, he believes, has the matching
cipher of his on her heart (2.297).
In each case, these marks do little to clarify origins; if they secure
paternity, it is only indirectly. Rather, they express or anticipate passion
and in that sense they are complective. e birthmarks are thus a sign of
both the new understanding of racial identity as skin color that structures
Part 2 and, at the same time, Wroth’s own resistance to this new form
of identity. Importantly, though, they do not reveal the hidden secrets
of individual passion (what, for instance, Candiana does or might her-
self feel). Rather, Wroth imagines – or hopes – that one’s body might
express another’s passion, rather than one’s own. (Whereas Amphilanthus
in Book 1 made the cipher his armorial device in Part 1 to signal him-
self, his son ciphers not himself but his beloved.) is is not just a shift
in Wroth’s understanding of emotion but more importantly of reading
as an act that constitutes that emotion. In Part 2, all of these figures and
ciphers demand and depend on an act of reading.
Wroth’s desire for legal recognition of her own illegitimate children is
at the heart of these stories about the identities, passions, and complexions
of the lost princes and princesses. Part 1 seemed to create possibilities for
multiple readers: hence the ciphers embedded within the text and worn
by the central characters encouraged contemporary readers, like Denny,
to suppose that there were ciphers that connected the text to the world
Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance200
that they imagined that it described. Amphilanthus was the Knight of
the Cipher, while Pamphilia and others carved ciphers of her love into the
bark of trees. It was this sense of shadowed identities that led contempor-
ary readers to write asking Wroth for a copy of the “key” to the ciphers
hidden in the text. is interpretation of Wroth’s romance emerges in
part out of the difficulties that Wroth found in trying to make emotion
and meaning visible. Part 2, by contrast, is ultimately structured around a
single reader. In Part 1, the various ciphers (on trees, on armorial devices,
in sonnets) are expressions of personal passion that are also texts of self-
authorization: the characters (and through them Wroth) hope to make
the cipher of their passions legible to others. ese are texts with possible
audiences because at this point Wroth’s private passions still have not just
personal but also social consequences. If the ciphers are – or can be – mis-
read, it is in part because they are about making emotion and dispos-
ition known beyond the self within a public, social world of the kind that
romance had always imagined.
In Part 2, by contrast, the focus has narrowed. e ciphers are now
inscribed as birthmarks on the bodies of the second generation of princes
and princesses. In their very persons, the princes and princesses are of
course the physical consequences of expressions of passion. Yet, notably,
Wroth’s romance continuation does not focus on the past – at least not
in the sense of genealogical inheritances. Rather, these new ciphers are
only nostalgic to the extent that they work to attribute humoral qualities
to William Herbert as a reader. ese ciphered bookmarks are not self-
authorizing: they are not about Wroth. Rather, they mark and predict
reciprocal passion. In that sense, Wroth ultimately uses the birthmarks –
however optimistically – to engage and script Herbert’s passions. In a
literary and emotional sense, Wroth’s hope is that, in reading, Pembroke
will follow and participate in the quest to find the lost princes and prin-
cesses. e acts of interpretive recognition that this search demands
stand as fictional versions of the acts of legal recognition that she would
have him pursue in giving identity to their shared children. Indeed,
Wroth’s commitment to securing the rights of paternity for her illegitim-
ate children ought to ally itself well with the genealogical assumptions of
traditional romance. What we find, however, is that the form of reading
that Wroth hoped to shape for Herbert was not achievable. Pamphilia
shoots at shadows; Floristello is mistaken about his love; we never know
whether or not the true Sophie has the cipher of Faire Design on her.
However unknowable the biographical details finally are, the manuscript
Urania ultimately ends not because it has no ending, either biographical
Pamphilia’s black humor 201
and literary, because Pembroke, with the possibilities he represents, has
stopped reading.
In Part 2 the usurpation of Pamphilia’s melancholy and her marriage to
someone other than Amphilanthus leads to a breakdown in romance legi-
bility. A key question for Part 2 is thus who its imagined readers are. Does
Wroth truly construct any reader for this unpublished manuscript other
than her own Amphilanthus, William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke?
e Rodomandro episode is in some way about authorship; Faire Designe
and the birthmarks bring complexion back to the subject of readership.
In these episodes, Wroth is searching for a way in which new definitions
of “complexion” can also imply a new model for reading romance. Just as
the birthmarks do not acquire their true meaning or confer identity until
the right lover appears to interpret them, the text as a whole suggests a
new model of identity that is premised on William Herbert’s reading of
this manuscript. If the appearance of Rodomandro thus marks the end to
Wroth’s imagining of the possibilities for authorship, then the birthmarks
in a way represent a last, but basically futile, hope for some promise of
readership.
202
Notes
IntroductIon
1 omas Wilson, e Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1560), A5
v
.
2 Philip Sidney, “Astrophil and Stella,” Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of
the Major Works, ed. Katherine duncan-Jones (oxford university Press, 1989),
p. 153.
3 omas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the matter, forme, and power of a common-
wealth (London, 1651), p. 1.
4 Ania Loomba, “ ‘delicious traffick’: racial and religious difference on early
modern stages,” in catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells, eds.,
Shakespeare and Race (cambridge university Press, 2000), p. 201.
5 It may be helpful to provide a word about terminology here: the limitations and
usefulness of “race” as a category of inquiry or term of discussion in the early
modern period has been much debated. As Peter Erickson notes, “I know of
no other area of scholarly investigation in which the overall interpretive stance
and conceptual framework so directly and completely hinge on the status and
legitimacy of a single word. It is not too much to say that the very existence of
race as a valid topic in renaissance studies depends on the outcome of a defin-
itional crisis concerning the term race” (“e Moment of race in renaissance
Studies,” Shakespeare Studies 26 [1998], p. 27). While some critics have under-
standably wanted to push critical discussion toward making more precise or
historically accurate distinctions about this term, Kim F. Hall recognizes the
ways that this gesture may be self-defeating to the extent that it has the unin-
tended effect of cordoning off certain kinds of critical scrutiny under the other-
wise desirable goal of avoiding various forms of anachronism: “I hold onto the
idea of a language of race in the early modern period and eschew scare quotes
so popular in contemporary writing” (ings of Darkness: Economies of Race
and Gender in Early Modern England [Ithaca: cornell university Press, 1995],
p. 6). In a similar vein, Jonathan crewe has argued against too narrow or too
historically precise a notion of what race meant: “it seems to me that prevail-
ing historicist and/or cultural-studies categories make it difficult to precipi-
tate the issue of ‘race’ in Shakespeare or in renaissance studies as a whole
broadly or fluidly enough to do justice to the phenomenon … Without deny-
ing the sensitivity of the issue, I do not believe that these forms of constric-
tion do any good” (Jonathan crewe, “out of the Matrix: Shakespeare and
Notes to pages 3–4 203
race-Writing,” Yale Journal of Criticism 8.2 [1995], p. 13). In this project, I try
not to use the term “race” in an anachronistic sense, but I also recognize that
more neutral terms may not always sufficiently capture what may be at stake
in these texts, either for us or for contemporary readers. I also recognize,
as the following chapters will make clear, that different categories are very
hard to keep separate: matters that may seem to be questions of faith quickly
turn into issues of genealogy and ethnicity, whereas geo-humoral medical
assumptions can easily be absorbed into arguments about catholicism or
conversion.
6 Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of
Culture Fantasy (new York: columbia university Press, 2003), p. 14; Mary
Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (cambridge
university Press, 2003), p. 1; Gary taylor, Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture,
and Identity from Columbus to Hip-Hop (new York: Palgrave, 2005),
pp. 59–64.
7 notable exceptions to this pattern of almost exclusive interest in drama
are: Hall, ings of Darkness; Peter Erickson and clark Hulse, eds., Early
Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance
England (Philadelphia: university of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); and Sujata
Iyengar, Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern
England (Philadelphia: university of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
8 Mary Floyd-Wilson, “Moors, race, and the Study of English renaissance
Literature,” Literature Compass 3.5 (2006), p. 1045; 10.1111/j.1741-
4113.2006.00366.x.
9 A. c. Bradley also made similar claims earlier, but his statements were not in
proximity to the appearance of racial studies as a central part of the field.
10 Andrew Hadfield, ed., Routledge Literary Sourcebook on William Shakespeare’s
Othello (new York: routledge, 2003), p. 66. Hunter’s essay was initially given
on April 19, 1967, and published first in Proceedings of the British Academy 53
(1968), pp. 139–63, and republished as “othello and colour Prejudice,” in
Hunter’s Dramatic Identities and Cultural Traditions: Studies in Shakespeare
and his Contemporaries (new York: Barnes and noble, 1978), pp. 31–59.
11 Hunter, “othello and colour Prejudice,” pp. 31, 59. For recent histories of
scholarship on race in the renaissance, and in Shakespeare studies in par-
ticular, see Floyd-Wilson, “Moors, race, and the Study”; Emily Bartels,
“Shakespeare’s ‘other’ Worlds: e critical trek,” Literature Compass 5.6
(2008); 1111–38; 10.1111/j. 1714–4113.2008.00571.x; and Margo Hendricks,
“Surveying ‘race’ in Shakespeare,” in Alexander and Wells, eds., Shakespeare
and Race, pp. 1–36.
12 Because of Shakespeare’s power as a conveyor of cultural values, attention to
race has transformed performance studies in compelling ways. e scholar-
ship here is extensive, and includes work on Anglo-American literature, post-
colonial theater, and film. For a collection that brings together important recent
work in the field, see Ayanna ompson, ed., Colorblind Shakespeare: New
Perspectives on Race and Performance (new York: routledge, 2006).
Notes to pages 4–8204
13 dympna callaghan, “What’s at Stake in representing race?” Shakespeare
Studies 26 (1998), p. 23.
14 dympna callaghan, “‘othello was a White Man’: Properties of race on
Shakespeare’s Stage,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. terence Hawkes, vol. ii
(London: routledge, 1996), p. 193.
15 callaghan, “‘othello was a White Man,’” pp. 194, 211.
16 Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: e New World, Islam, and European
Identities (cambridge university Press, 2000), p. 4. See also daniel Vitkus’
model of “imitative receptivity” in Turning Turk: English eater and the
Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (new York: Palgrave, 2003) for a
related example of the benefits to this kind of approach.
17 Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire, p. 1.
18 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare
(university of chicago Press, 1980), p. 3.
19 Jacob Burckhardt, e Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860; new
York: Barnes and noble, 1999), p. 81.
20 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 9.
21 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (new York: random House, 1979), p. 63. See
Bartels, “Shakespeare’s ‘other’ Worlds,” p. 7.
22 Susan Stanford Friedman, “‘Border talk,’ Hybridity, and Performativity:
cultural eory and Identity in the Spaces between difference,” Eurozine
(www.eurozine.com), 2002–06–07, 5/14.
23 Mary omas crane, “What was Performance?” Criticism 43.2 (2002),
p. 169.
24 crane, “What was Performance,” p. 171.
25 Stephen Greenblatt, ed., e Norton Shakespeare (new York: norton, 1997);
further citations will be from this edition. See donald Foster’s lexical data-
base, SHAXIcon, for the possibility that Shakespeare may have played
this role. is possibility, while speculative, is interesting to think about in
the context of both reading and performance memories (http://shakespear-
eauthorship.com/shaxicon.html). For a provocative application of Foster’s
performance attributions to understanding Shakespeare’s possible relation-
ship to racial impersonation, see Imtiaz Habib, “racial Impersonation on
the Elizabethan Stage: e case of Shakespeare Playing Aaron,” Medieval
and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007), pp. 17–45. Habib argues for
a strong version of the relationship between drama and emergent racial-
ism, tending to see drama as a powerful causal force in creating racialism
(p. 17). Habib’s work is influenced by the post-colonial performance mod-
els of Michael taussig, and he thus is concerned to document the physical
presence of black Africans in London in the pre-slavery period. (See also
his Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible
[Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007].) Here, I would note that Foster stresses that
SHAXIcon provides a tool for seeing how Shakespeare’s work is “mne-
monically ‘structured’” not just by his possible performance roles but also by
his reading practices.
Notes to pages 8–12 205
26 callaghan, “‘othello was a White Man,’” pp. 195–96; Virginia Mason
Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (cambridge
university Press, 2005), pp. 9–12; Farah Karim-cooper, Cosmetics in
Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh university Press, 2007),
pp. 144–45.
27 richard Eden, trans., e Decades of the New World or West India (London,
1655), 310
v
. See chapter 4 for a discussion of the publication history of this
essay and its impact on English readers.
28 robert S. Miola, Shakespeare’s Reading (oxford university Press, 2000),
p. 2. Miola problematizes older models of source study (pp. 164–69), but
he is primarily interested in presenting a clear account of how Shakespeare
transformed what he read, “the book on the desk that Shakespeare read and
revised” (p. 35). My goal throughout this study is to think more about how
readers were transformed, both intellectually and physically, by both what
and how they read.
29 Hall, ings of Darkness, pp. 94–5, 100.
30 Margo Hendricks, “Surveying ‘race’ in Shakespeare,” in Alexander and
Wells, eds., Shakespeare and Race, p. 1.
31 See Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, e Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979;
cambridge university Press, 2008), pp. 25, 220–21; Alfred W. crosby, e
Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 (1997;
cambridge university Press, 2007), p. 231; Michael clapman, “Printing,” in
charles Singer et al., eds., A History of Technology (oxford university Press,
1957), iii: 377.
32 Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 7.
33 Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 14.
34 Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 70.
35 Benedict S. robinson, Islam and Early Modern English Literature: e
Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (new York: Palgrave, 2007), p. 4.
See, among others, Fredric Jameson, “Magical narratives: romance as
Genre,” New Literary History, 7 (1975), pp. 135–63; david Quint, Epic and
Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton university
Press, 1993); Joan Pong Linton, e Romance of the New World: Gender and
the Literary Formation of English Colonialism (cambridge university Press,
1998), pp. 13–38; Brian c. Lockey, Law and Empire in English Renaissance
Literature (cambridge university Press, 2006), esp. pp. 4, 8, 17–46.
36 Eisenstein, Printing Press, p. 170.
37 on the print history of the various versions and portions of the Amadís cycle,
see
chapter 3.
38 Edwin Place, “Preface,” in Edwin Place and Herbert Behm, trans., Amadis
of Gaul: Books
i and i i (1974: Lexington: university Press of Kentucky, 2003),
p. 9.
39 Irving A. Leonard, Books of the Brave: Being An Account of Books and of Men
in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century New World
(1949; Berkeley: university of california Press, 1992), pp. 124–39.
Notes to pages 13–16206
40 e Amadis cycle is unusual in that at least the first four books were trans-
lated into Latin (Venice, 1533), but none of the later books ever were and this
translation was not republished.
41 Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary Written by Fynes Moryson, Gent., … containing
his ten yeeres travell (London, 1617), pp. 56–57.
42 See chapter 4 for a fuller discussion.
43 See, especially, Barry Ife, Reading and Fiction in Golden-Age Spain: A Platonist
Critique and Some Picaresque Replies (cambridge university Press 1985),
pp. 1–23 and Shadi Bartsch, Decoding the Ancient Novel: e Reader and the
Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius (Princeton university
Press, 1989).
44 Ife, Reading and Fiction, p. 3.
45 Ife, Reading and Fiction, p. 3.
46 Janice radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular
Literature (charlotte: university of north carolina Press, 1984). For an early
modern example of readers who lived these fictions, see Barbara K. Lewalski,
Writing Women in Jacobean England (cambridge: Harvard university Press,
1993), pp. 45–65.
47 is question has been a central one since at least Eldred Jones’ important
Othello’s countrymen: e African in English Renaissance Drama (oxford
university Press, 1965), p. viii. See also James Walvin, e Black Presence: A
Documentary History of the Negro in England, 1555–1860 (London: orbach
and chambers, 1971), pp. 61–63; F. o. Shyllon, Black People in Britain
(oxford: clarendon, 1977), p. 3; Peter Fryer, Staying Power: e History of
Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 12; Emily Bartels,
“too Many Blackamoors: deportation, discrimination, and Elizabeth I,”
SEL 46.2 (2006), p. 306; Habib, “racial Impersonation,” pp. 22–23; and
Habib, Black Lives, pp. 19–120. For important parallel arguments about the
numbers of conversos, crypto Jews, and other “false christians” living in
England, see James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (new York: columbia
university Press, 1996), pp. 43–88.
48 Lucien Febvre, e Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: e Religion
of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (cambridge: Harvard university Press,
1988). Febvre’s formulation, as many critics have pointed out, is at the heart
of Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy. Febvre’s “age of the eye” – what
printing did – should perhaps be set alongside Michael Baxandall’s notion of
the “period eye,” which involves an early version of what has since become the
field of sensory history. See Mark M. Smith, “Producing Sense, consuming
Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History,” Journal of
Social History (Summer 2007), p. 842.
49 e Decades of the New World of West India, trans. richard Eden (London,
1555), 310
v
; see chapter 4 for discussion of the publication history of this essay
and its impact on English readers.
50 carlo Ginzberg, e Cheese and the Worms: e Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century
Miller, trans. John and Anne tedeschi (1976; new York: dorset Press, 1980),
p. 88.
Notes to pages 16–19 207
51 Valerie traub, “Mapping the Global Body,” in Erickson and Hulse, eds.,
Early Modern Visual Culture, p. 46.
52 And Stephen Gosson was not entirely wrong to complain that much of the
matter appearing on the renaissance English stage had been “ransacked”
from “the Palace of pleasure, the Golden Asse, the AEthiopian historie, Amadis
of Fraunce,” and the other printed romances (Playes confuted in five actions
[London, 1582], d5
r
).
53 robert Greville, Baron Brooke, Catalogus librarum ex bibliotheca (London,
1678).
54 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, e Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979;
cambridge university Press, 2008), p. 227.
55 See, for example, roxann Wheeler, e Complexion of Race: Categories of
Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: university
of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 2; Valerie traub, “Mapping the Global
Body,” in Erickson and Hulse, eds., Early Modern Visual Culture,
pp. 44–45.
56 For an overview of the history of reading as a field, see, among others, Heidi
Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender
and Literacy (cambridge university Press, 2005), pp. 2–5, 17–68; Leah Price,
“reading: e State of the discipline,” Book History 7 (2004), pp. 303–20;
Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, “current trends in the History of
reading,” in Andersen and Sauer, eds., Books and Readers in Early Modern
England (Philadelphia: university of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 1–22. For
an account of the methodological goals of the field, see robert darnton,
“First Steps toward a History of reading,” Australian Journal of French
Studies 23 (1986), pp. 5–30, and “History of reading,” in Peter Burke, ed.,
New Perspectives on Historical Writing, 2nd edn. (1991; cambridge university
Press, 2001), pp. 157–86; and roger chartier, “texts, Printing, readings,” in
Lynn Hunt, ed., e New Cultural History (Berkeley: university of california
Press, 1989), pp. 154–79.
57 robert darnton, “What is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111.3 (1982),
p. 65.
58 See, for examples, William H. Sherman, John Dee: e Politics of Reading
and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: university of Massachusetts
Press, 1997), pp. 79–114; Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for
Action’: How Gabriel Harvey read his Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990),
pp. 30–78; William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance
England (Pennsylvania: university of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 127–48.
See also darton, “History of reading,” pp. 142–47, for assessment of the dif-
ferent results produced by macro- and micro-historical approaches.
59 Jardine and Grafton, “‘Studied for Action,’” p. 40. See also Anthony
Grafton, “e Humanist as reader,” in Guglielmo cavallo et al., eds., A
History of Reading in the West (Amherst: university of Massachusetts Press,
1999), pp. 179–212.
60 Sherman, John Dee, pp. 65–66, 79–112. See also Sherman’s overview in
“What did renaissance readers Write in their Books?” in Andersen and
Notes to pages 19–22208
Sauer, eds., Books and Readers, 119–37; and Anthony Grafton, “Is the History
of reading a Marginal Enterprise? Guillaume Budé and his Books,” Papers
of the Bibliographic Society of America 91.2 (1997), pp. 139–57.
61 roger chartier, e Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early
Modern Europe, trans. Lydia G. cochrane (Princeton university Press, 1989),
p. 3.
62 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, pp. 58–69. See also Peter Lindbaum’s
examination of the Folger copies of Sidney’s romance (“Sidney’s Arcadia as
cultural Monument and Proto-novel,” in cedric c. Brown and Arthur
F. Marotti, eds., Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England
[Basingstroke: Macmillan, 1997], pp. 80–94).
63 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, pp. 157–58. Sherman finds that, across
all categories, about 20 percent of early modern books have “significant”
marginalia and inscriptions by early modern readers (Sherman, Used Books,
p. 73).
64 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, p. 8.
65 owen Gingerich, An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus
(Nuremburg, 1543 and Basel, 1566) (Leiden: Brill, 2002). See also his autobio-
graphical account of this book adventure, e Body Nobody Read: Chasing
the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus (new York: Walker and company,
2004).
66 See, for example, Sherman, Used Books, pp. 151–78; Gingerich, e Book
Nobody Read, pp. 202–19; and Jeffrey todd Knight, “Making Shakespeare’s
Books: Assembly and Intertextuality in the Archives,” Shakespeare Quarterly
60.3 (2009), pp. 304–40.
67 Price, “reading,” pp. 212–13.
68 roger Stoddard, “Looking at Marks in Books,” e Gazette of the Grolier
Club (2000), p. 32; cited in Sherman, “What did renaissance readers
Write,” p. 122.
69 Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the Renaissance (cambridge
university Press, 2000), p. 6. e question of precisely who read romances
has been a critically persistent one, particularly with respect to issues of
gender and class. recent critical work has emphasized the often rhetori-
cal, ideological character of prefaces and other paratexts, while work in
the history of reading has provided new evidence regarding historical read-
ers: see, among others, Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan
England (Ithaca: cornell university Press, 1935), p. 110; Hackett, Women
and Romance Fiction, pp. 3–19; Lori Humphrey newcomb, Reading Popular
Romance in Early Modern England (new York: columbia university Press,
2000), pp. 1–20; Steve Mentz, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: e
Rise of Prose Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 17–18; Brayman Hackel,
Reading Material, pp. 153–56. on recreational reading, see Jacqueline
Pearson, “Women reading, reading Women,” in Helen Wilcox, ed., Women
and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700 (cambridge university Press, 1996),
pp. 80–99.