The Material Text Between General and Particular, Edition and Copy

Abstract

I am grateful to Arthur F. Kinney and the other editors ofEnglish Literary Renaissance for the chance to help celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the journal. More than that, I am grateful to ELR for publishing my first scholarly article in 1999, and for having always supported research into the history of the book and the material text. That 1999 essay on “Walter Burre’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle” went on to form the basis of my dissertation and my first book, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade. There I tried to read early modern drama as its publishers read it, to understand historical reception from the perspective of the book trade. Doing so meant focusing on editions of plays—all of the copies printed from a single setting of type—since it was at the level of editions that early modern publishers made their decisions about how to invest their capital. Likewise, mywork with Alan Farmer— in a series of articles on popularity in the book trade, and in building the websiteDEEP:Database of Early English Playbooks— mainly involved editions, since if we want to reconstruct the success or failure of different kinds of books, or particular titles within those genres, we need to be careful to distinguish editions and their reprints from other ways of categorizing books such as issues or states. Many questions we want to ask about the publication, circulation, and reception of books in early modern England properly concern editions. An edition is a conceptual category, with a materiality rooted in the type that was set and then, after printing, distributed by compositors. But thematerial texts that instantiate an edition are individual copies, and these were never identical as they came off the press, much less so as they appear to us today. The concrete particularity of, for example, the marginalia in a given copy of a text can make scholarship on copies, rather than editions, seem more vivid, giving us a glimpse of a “real” historical reader. And yet