de Stephen Hawes, and the improvisation of genre in early sixteenth- century English poetry

T he printing of the by the Wynkyn de is the earliest example of the sustained publication of a contemporary English poet by a single printer. This article considers de Worde’s printing of Hawes, in a flurry around 1509 and then at intervals of more or less ten years until 1530, as part of a larger effort to establish a noncourt audience for contemporary English poetry with nevertheless courtly credentials. The paratexts with which de Worde frames Hawes’s verse – from woodcut illustrations, to the printing of the author’s name, to the citation of Hawes by other writers associated with de Worde – are examined as evidence for a growing tendency amongst London printers to provide opportunities for their readers to make imaginative crossreference between their varied literary output. They represent an alternative to the marketing of English literary texts primarily on the basis of authorship – what I describe as an ‘improvisation of literary genre’ by early Tudor England’s poets, printers, and readers.


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1509 and then at intervals of more or less ten years until 1530, can be understood as part of a larger effort to establish a non-court audience for contemporary English poetry with nevertheless courtly credentials. 6 The paratexts with which de Worde frames Hawes's verse -from woodcut illustrations, 7 to the printing of the author's name, to the citation of Hawes by other writers associated with de Worde -are indicative of a growing tendency amongst London printers to provide opportunities for their readers to make imaginative cross-reference between their varied literary output. 8 They represent an alternative to the marketing of English literary texts primarily on the basis of authorship -what Kevin Pask in The Emergence of the English Author and Alexandra Gillespie in Print Culture and the Medieval Author regard as integral to the development of English 'print culture'. 9 Focusing on de Worde's printing of Hawes, and the role of his editions within an expanding network of textually and/or visually related books, this article examines the processes for marketing, categorising, and collecting English poetry in early sixteenth-century England -what I describe as an 'improvisation of literary genre' running parallel but separate to the 'emergence of the English author'.
Wynkyn de Worde belongs to the second generation of English printers. A German immigrant, de Worde accompanied William Caxton from Cologne to Westminster in 1475 or 1476 and almost certainly helped to establish his press there. 10 After Caxton's death in early 1492, de Worde inherited the business. He left Westminster for Fleet Street in 1500 or 1501, probably in order to be closer to the publishing and mercantile centre of London. 11 De Worde's retention and later modification of Caxton's device, as well as the notices in many of his Westminster editions that the books were printed 'in Caxtons house', may have been designed 'to create a feeling of continuity between Caxton's and his own press'. 12 Yet de Worde differs from Caxton in terms of the number and diversity of the over eight-hundred editions issued before his death in around 1534. 13 De Worde established new markets for the religious and school books that constitute the bulk of his output. 14 From a literary-historical perspective, he is notable for the publication of older verse romances and contemporary English poets not seen under Caxton's press. 15 To some extent, de Worde's choice of English literary texts reflects Caxton's and his contemporary Pynson's 'adherence to traditions of literary popularity close to those of Middle English manuscript culture'. 16 The works of Chaucer and Lydgate dominate, Malory appears, and a number of Caxton's prose translations of Continental romances were reprinted before 1510. 17 Soon, however, de Worde began to augment his English literary repertoire with works by contemporary poets: John Skelton, William Nevill, William Walter, and, most extensively, Hawes.
It is not entirely clear who or what first encouraged de Worde to print Hawes's poems. As A. S. G. Edwards observes: It is hard to account for this sudden appetite for verse by a hitherto unprinted poet. The publication of works by a court poet may suggest either an effort on de Worde's part to gain access to the court circle through printing Hawes, or an effort from within the court circle to have such works in circulation as widely as possible through the medium of print. (Edwards,'Manuscript to Print',145) Neither suggestion is wholly satisfactory: there is scant evidence for the appreciation of Hawes's poetry at court and, besides a vague allusion to the late king's financial policies in the Ioyfull Medytacyon , little to recommend his writings as, following Edwards, 'commentaries on the nature of kingly responsibility addressed obliquely to Henry VII'. 18 Norman F. Blake proposes that Henry VII's mother, the known bibliophile Lady Margaret 12 Blake, 'De Worde: Early Years', 63. 13 For an impression of de Worde's output, search by publisher using the search query ' 22 There is some internal evidence to suggest that Hawes anticipated the dissemination of his verse in print, but little certainty as to how that process was effected. In the envoy to the Pastime, Hawes dispatches his book with an unusual prayer for the accurate 'Impressyon' of the text rather than its faithful copying by scribes: 'Go lytell boke I pray god the saue/ Frome mysse metryne by wronge Impressyon' (5803-4). 23 Elsewhere, there are in-text references to de Worde's woodcut illustrations. Following the grotesque dwarf Godfrey Gobilyve's report of his failed attempt to woo a rich old maiden appear the lines: 'Lo here the figure of them both certayne/ Iuge whiche is best fauourde of them twayne' (3780-1). On the facing page is a woodcut illustration depicting a bald-headed man and a loathly lady (Hodnett 1011: 1509, sig. [M2r]; 1517, sig. M8r), a visual analogy to the preceding joke about the respective ugliness of Godfrey and the old maiden. 24 Similarly, in the Conuercyon, the lines attributed to Christ, 'Beholde this letter with the prynte also/ Of myn owne seale by perfyte portrayture' (350-1), seem to refer to the imago pietatis woodcut earlier in the book (Hodnett 390: sig. A3v). These textual references to the publication and illustration of Hawes's poems, together with the evident attention given to their presentation by de Worde, suggest a degree of collaboration between poet and printer -at the very least, they must have been aware of each other's processes. 25 Yet de Worde had his own motives for printing Hawes's poems. His interest is the poet is not restricted to Hawes's known period of activity at court: de Worde reprinted the Pastime in 1517, and the Example, with some significant variants, in around 1520 and 1530. 26 In this, Hawes's status as groom of the Chamber seems to have been important to de Worde as a marker of a particular kind of fashionable court poetry, rather than as a claim to topicality or royal or aristocratic authorisation for his books. An initial period of collaboration between Hawes and de Worde may have presented the printer with an opportunity to establish a market outside of the court for amatory, ostensibly instructive, often fantastic English poetry, with putative court connections. His reprinting of Hawes may represent periodic attempts to reinvigorate that market, reissuing Hawes's dream poems alongside other English poets in textually and visually related editions that recommended and promulgated one another.
De Worde's Hawes editions can thus be seen as a powerful alternative to the promotion of contemporary English poetry primarily on the basis of authorship. Gillespie has written in Print Culture and the Medieval Author on the use of the 'medieval author' -principally Chaucer and Lydgate -as a means of ascribing cultural capital to English literary texts in print and encouraging the compilation of separate, often unbound books in nonce-volumes or Sammelbände (bound volumes of separately printed or hand-written texts, returned to below). De Worde's printing of Hawes demonstrates a solution to the problem of marketing contemporary English poetry that was not attributed to a recognisable author. The paratexts in de Worde's Hawes editions speak of an effort by the printer to present his literary publications as a textually and/ or visually related network of books that connects his customers to the reading habits and aesthetics of the court. 27 Hawes's name and, perhaps more importantly, his status as a groom of the Chamber, signalled the courtly credentials of de Worde's books, but are just one example of the printers' careful attention to the layout and illustration of his literary publications. Martha W. Driver demonstrates de Worde's use of '"labelling" features' such as his printer's device, woodcut illustrations, and the titlepage 'both as a way of increasing the impact of text upon the reader, and as a means of selling books and 26  developing a recognisable "image" for the printer'. 28 These features are especially apparent in de Worde's editions of religious and school texts, and Driver has written on the use of author portraits to illustrate texts attributed to mystical writers and contemporary ecclesiasts and grammarians. 29 Woodcuts illustrations could also provide '[n]arrative representations of the contents of the book', and are prominent too in de Worde's romance publications. 30 Similar strategies are discernible in the printer's presentation of contemporary literary texts, though arguably with as great an emphasis on their supposed providence and function as their particular contents or authorship. 31 Bearing visual as well textual resemblance to one another, each of de Worde's books adds value to the next as part of a recognisable category of literature -a genre, even -catering to a socially aspirant, codifying early Tudor readership. Rather than deriving their cultural capital from the biography or patronage of the historical poet, de Worde's Hawes editions advertise the value of his poetry as part of a pleasurable, profitable bibliography. And in turn, while Hawes's allegorical dream poems presented characters and settings which were compelling in their own right, they also provided de Worde with the names, phrases, and images with which he could encourage analogies between his other literary publications.
Nowhere is this desire for analogy more apparent than in de Worde's production and reuse of the woodcuts illustrating his Hawes editions. the Example, demonstrating 'a concern for close correlation of the verbal and visual aspects of a contemporary poetic text [that] seems without precedent in early sixteenth century printing'. 33  Consider, for instance, the print peregrinations of Hodnett 1009. Seth Lerer, writing of de Worde's reuse of the woodcut in the Iiii: leues, the Conforte, Troilus, and the Squire of Low Degree, suggests that, 'by reprinting it prominently in these other texts, … de Worde offers his readers a set of critical associations among [them]'. 39 So, in the Iiii: leues, de Worde's use of Hodnett 1009 as the frontispiece for the edition may have been suggested by its position in the Pastime, where Graunde Amoure discovers his beloved, 'Bell Pucell', making 'a garlonde … With trueloues' (1991-2) at 'the very moment introduced by the woodcut of the man and woman'. 40 There is a further connection between the Iiii: leues, the Conforte, and Troilus: in the Conforte and the Iiii: leues, the words printed in the scrolls above the man's and woman's heads -'Holde thys/ a token ywys' and 'for your sake/ I shall it take' -evokes the ringexchange episode in Troilus (III.1366-72), but by means of a 'Skeletonized' paraphrase in Phyllype Sparowe (682-92, composed c.1505). 41 The allusion is obscure, but is indicative of the textual and visual cross-references which de Worde seems to have encouraged.
The range and complexity of the possible associations of a woodcut like Hodnett 1009 become further apparent upon closer examination of de Worde's possible sources for the image. Driver's The Image in Print: Book Illustration in Late Medieval England and Its Sources gives a detailed account of de Worde's adaptation and recutting of woodcuts from French, Flemish, and Dutch sources for his editions of the 1490s and early 1500s. 42  contains his earliest use of one of early English print's most versatile factotums: a young man in a coat looking back over one shoulder (Fig. 2)   in perhaps 1506 (STC 17033.7), the figures appear in a composite image that bears a striking resemblance to Hodnett 1009: Everyman is on the right, Everywoman on the left; and they are separated by a tree factotum (Fig. 2). This is the first edition of the Temple to have an illustrated titlepage, a rough antecedent for the titlepage of the Conforte. 53 I do not mean to suggest that the latter edition was envisaged as a sequel or companion to the Temple; nevertheless, the resemblance is apposite to a text in which Hawes makes direct reference to Lydgate's 'bokes' -one of the 'confortes' claimed by the love-sick poet-narrator (Conforte, 279-87) -and which has structural and thematic parallels with Lydgate's framed first-person allegories. Such details reinforce the idea of de Worde's production of textual and visual connections between his books -connections that he was confident would be appreciated, even innovated, by his readers (see further below). Much like the depersonalised poet-narrator's of Hawes's dream poems, the Everyman figure -Graunde Amour -the Everywoman figure -Bell Pucell -and their single-block woodcut relations belong to no one text or poet and have no definite signification. They are available as representations of youths, lovers, and husbands, of maidens, beloveds, and wives, whether in romance, pseudo-historical, or satirical texts, and helped early Tudor readers to draw together these diverse reading materials. It is becoming increasingly clear that authorship, far being from the only or even the most significant means of accruing cultural capital in early English print, was just one of the ways by which de Worde and his contemporaries were able to promote their literary publications. In the case of Hawes, advertising the character and reputation of the historical poet seems to have been of less importance than assimilating his identity to the type of the lover-poet-moralist, as demonstrated by a brief reprising of his name and writings by de Worde and his associates in around 1530. Hawes's name appears in the colophon or on the titlepage of each of de Worde's editions of his poems; yet in over two decades of publication, the printer supplies only one further biographical detail regarding the poet, Hawes's position as a groom of the Chamber: Stephen Hawes somtyme grome of the honourable chamber of our late souerayne lorde kynge Henry the seuenth (whose soule god pardon).
(Hawes, Conforte, titlepage; cf. Fig. 1)  In the Louer and a jaye, Hawes's books are attributed to Amour, lover of Pucell, rather than Stephen Hawes, groom of the Chamber. The description of Hawes as 'yonge' indicates the quasi-Troilean status which he had come to occupy in the bibliographic imaginary -an attentive courtier, vulnerable to the caprices of love, but amenable to wise counsel. 57 This is a convenient fiction for Feylde, who has written his own 'dytty' 'Oflamentable loue' under similar auspices. The Louer and a jaye is an allegorical dream poem in which the poet-narrator reports a conversation overheard between a lover, 'Amator', and a Jay, 'Graculus', precipitated by the departure of Amator's beloved, 'pucell' (sig. A3v, l. 22). An exposition of the dream is supplied in 'Lenuoye of the auctoure', with clues to the identities of Amator and his beloved:  Feylde is as uninterested as was Hawes in the Conforte in providing any definite extra-literary referents for his allegory. 'F. T.' clearly stands for 'Thomas Feylde', named in the colophon (sig. [C4v]); but 'A. B.' is no more helpful than the Conforte's 'my p p p thre' (140) for identifying the poem's Pucell. As in Hawes, the value of Feylde's poetry relies on its expression of topical commonplaces -here, 'the actes and propertyes of women' (sig. C4v, l. 2) -using a form and types associated with the 'pastymes pleasaunte' of a refined social elite. Feylde does not pretend to emulate the medieval authors cited in the prologue. Like Hawes, he is visible only as Amator-Amour. The identity is reinforced by the titlepage to the Louer and a jaye: Feylde is not named; and the illustration is a composite image composed of the Everyman figure and an altered version of the tree factotum used in the 1506? Temple (Fig. 3). Here, Everyman represents Feylde-Amator, forging a visual link to the lovers in the Temple, the Pastime, Troilus, and, by analogy with Hodnett 1009, the Conforte -all products of de Worde's press. 58 It would seem that, by around 1530, the names of Hawes and his books perform a similar function, as markers of literary genre within an expanding print market -points of reference whereby other English poets could signal the pleasure and profit to be derived from their books.
Marketing English poetry by means of analogy rather than authorship seems to have proved a commercial success. De Worde and his associates continued to develop the possibilities for textual and visual cross-references between their books, with Hawes's Example and Pastime providing a useful paradigm. The publication by de Worde of a number of English literary texts containing allusion to or borrowings from Hawes has led A. S. G. Edwards and Carol M. Meale to posit 'the existence of a de Worde poetic coterie' during the 1520s and early 1530s.' 59 Between perhaps 1520 and 1533, de Worde pub-58 A further suggestive parallel is Vérard's use of the Pamphile-Cherea-L'amaunt factotum to represent L'amant in the sprawling lyric verse collection Le Jardin de Plaisance (Paris: Vérard, 1501). The book's composite images, complementing a loose narrative frame for the anthology, serve, according to Jane Taylor, to replicate 'the experience of verse-production and verse-reception in the world of the court. [...] Vérard's determined effort to re-imagine a social-narrative articulation for his anthology bespeaks an anxiety to provide poems with the sort of social context which alone, it seems, can give them legitimacy'. Taylor 62 and Walter's antifeminist dialogue, The spectacle of louers (STC 25008), which includes borrowings from the Pastime. 63 De Worde's publication of contemporary English poets constitutes only a small portion of his English literary output; nevertheless, his selection and marketing of even this limited number of texts sets de Worde apart from Caxton, Pynson, and Julian Notary among England's early printers. 64 Edwards suggests a 'degree of interconnectedness' between de Worde's publication of Walter, Felyde, Nevill, and his reprinting of Hawes 'that seems not to have a great deal to do with actual content', but which was guided instead 'by a consistency of taste -in this instance, interest in Hawes's works'. 65 I am inclined to agree, but with the caveat that similarities in content seem to have been less meaningful to de Worde and his associates than similarities in function -and in this respect, de Worde's pleasurable, profitable, English books are closely aligned. A program of moralising and contextualising paratexts facilitated de Worde's publication of courtly, amatory, often romance-type English verse by little-known contemporary poets -'storyes fruytefull and delectable' such as those prescribed by Hawes, Feylde, and Copland. 66 Crucially, de Worde and his associates seem to have appreciated the role of the reader in the collecting and application of their books. The bibliographic network or literary genre represented by de Worde's English literary publications is deliberately inclusive, one in which authors such as Hawes feature as one among many organising principles. As will be seen below, it was ultimately de Worde's readers, not the printer himself, who determined the consumption and compilation of contemporary English poetry. Textual and visual connections serve as prompts, not directives, in what can be understood as an interactive improvisation of genre in early sixteenth-century England.
In a bibliographic culture of manuscript booklets and nonce-volumes, where the availability of texts depended as much on happenstance as on demand, paratextual links between de Worde's English literary publications presented buyers and compilers with multiple options by which to organise their reading materials, whilst stimulating further print consumption. Gillespie posits that de Worde, like Caxton before him, printed folio and later quarto editions of English texts that invited collection in Sammelbände because of their visual and functional analogies. 67 'Sammelbände, like manuscript booklets', argues Gillespie, 'allowed for a dynamic aspect in the early trade in printed books. They could accommodate for the whims of buyers', but also demonstrate the 'new mechanisms' devised by printers and retailers 'to single out, promote, and also to link their wares'. 68 Alexandra da Costa's recent Marketing English Books, 1476-1550: How Printers Changed Reading also considers the role of 'complementarity' -'the potential for a work to be bound with others' -in the sale of books. 69 The low survival rate of Sammelbände in libraries and private collections makes it difficult to assess buyers' responsiveness to printers' marketing strategies. 70 Yet as da Costa demonstrates, as early as the beginning of sixteenth century, printers seem to have assumed that buyers would be able to browse through their own or a bookseller's stock before making a purchase. 'There is, then, enough evidence to believe that epitexts [i.e. paratexts] such as title-pages, tables of contents, woodcuts and even errata notices mattered a great deal in the marketing of early printed books.' 71 Even if exposed to only a fraction of a printer's output, buyers had ample opportunity for making connections between the books in a printer's or bookseller's shop, as well as those that they already owned. This is especially important for de Worde's marketing of otherwise diverse, perhaps not always obviously moral or instructive works by contemporary English poets, which gain value by means of analogy. Textual allusions and borrowings, reused woodcuts, hortatory prefaces and envoys, and, less prominently, authorial attributions, encouraged what I have been describing as the improvisation of genre by early sixteenth-century readers of contemporary English poetry, with Hawes as a perennial intertext. 67 Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author, 26-117; cf. eadem., 'Poets, Printers, and Early English and The fyftene joyes of maryage (STC 15258), also possibly translated by Copland. Each edition was printed by or has some association with de Worde's press, and the titlepage of all but two shares a single-block or factotum woodcut with the Example or the Pastime. 80 Should the reconstructed Macro Sammelband be taken to represent an early-Tudor volume, the selection and arrangement of its contents indicate the receptiveness of its compiler to the textual and visual analogies suggested between de Worde's literary publications.
The star example of a de Worde Sammelband, and the compilation which most aptly demonstrates Hawes's place in the bibliographic network delineated above, is the volume that was sold at the auction of John Ker, 3 rd Duke of Roxburghe's library in 1812, formerly in the collection of the Revd. Richard Farmer, and now dispersed throughout the BL, Library of Congress, and HL. 81 This 'single-volume quarto assembly of lyric verse, visions, courtly love poems, and misogynist tracts' contained no poems by Hawes when described in 1812, though reminiscences of his books haunt its contents. 82 The volume's frontispiece, that of de Worde's 1517 Troilus, is shared by the titlepage of the Conforte (see above and but insistently instructive; they are the compositions of various writers, but share an imagined affiliation to the mores and ideals epitomised by the Everyman-Troilus-Amour and/or Everywoman-Criseyde-Pucell depicted on their titlepages. The role of Hawes within such volumes, and in the bibliographic network they represent, is as a possible, though not essential, point of reference -a marker of genre rather than a guide to the meaning or selection of texts, and an advertisement for the products of de Worde's press. De Worde died in late 1534 or early 1535, two years after the publication of William Thynne's Workes of Geffray Chaucer (STC 5068). The publication of Chaucer's Workes is understood as a pivotal moment in the 'emergence of the English author', inaugurating an early modern tradition of printing English poets' collected 'Works'. 85 This was not, of course, the only way to market English poetry in print, nor was it especially viable in the cases of contemporary poets without an established reputation. De Worde's printing of Hawes and his use of Hawes's poetry as an affirmative point of reference in later literary publications represents a practical and stimulating alternative to authorbased marketing strategies. Adding value by analogy was a vital mechanism for supplying consumer demand for new writing. It warrants further examination as an integral component of early sixteenth-century English literary culture.
Durham University, Durham, UK 85 See, for example, Pask, Emergence of the English Author, especially 14-19. 23 APPENDIX Abstract T he printing of the poems of the early Tudor poet Stephen Hawes (c.1474before 1529) by the London printer Wynkyn de Worde (d. 1534/5) is the earliest example of the sustained publication of a contemporary English poet by a single printer. This article considers de Worde's printing of Hawes, in a flurry around 1509 and then at intervals of more or less ten years until 1530, as part of a larger effort to establish a noncourt audience for contemporary English poetry with nevertheless courtly credentials. The paratexts with which de Worde frames Hawes's verse -from woodcut illustrations, to the printing of the author's name, to the citation of Hawes by other writers associated with de Worde -are examined as evidence for a growing tendency amongst London printers to provide opportunities for their readers to make imaginative crossreference between their varied literary output. They represent an alternative to the marketing of English literary texts primarily on the basis of authorship -what I describe as an 'improvisation of literary genre' by early Tudor England's poets, printers, and readers.