'Such a general itching after book-learning': popular readers of 'the most eminent wits'.

ABSTRACT

This article considers a paradox that lies at the heart of mid-seventeenth-century printed miscellanies: that these very popular, cheap printed collections offered points of conduct advice for elite social contexts; that books like The Academy of Complements (1640) and Wits Interpreter (1655) purported to present social etiquettes and words of eloquence fit for application in the rarefied environment of court, but were directed to, and read by, a popular, decidedly non-elite audience. This article considers how we might make sense of this consumption of notionally elite texts by popular readers.

Learning is a thing that hath been much cried up and coveted in all ages, especially in this last century of years, by people of all sorts though never so mean and mechanical. [...] The extravagant humour of our country is not to be altogether commended, that all men should aspire to book-learning. There is not a simpler animal and a more superfluous member of state than a mere scholar.

(James Howell to Edward Sackville, Earl of Dorset, c. 1651) (1)

So plain and easie [...] that the meanest capacity may in a short time attain to a perfection.

(The Mysteries of Love &Eloquence (1658), title-page) Among the many and varied inclusions in The Academy of Complements, among the 'Pearles of Eloquence', the 'Choice and faire Flowers', the 'Complementall and Amorous Poems', the 'faire and rare Letters of Complement', (2) is a brief but audacious exposition on social etiquette. Titled 'Stiles and Tearmes used to the KING, or QUEENES Majesty, either in our Speech, or in Superscriptions of Petitions directed to them', this section describes how the reader might manage various kinds of verbal or written interactions with the monarchy. It is conduct advice taken to the highest point of application.We find that 'If you present anything', the act must be prefaced with 'May it please your Majesty'; 'If you write in forme of a petition to the King', the prose must begin 'May it please your Majesty to understand, or to grant ...' (pp. 245-46). In later editions of this same book the theme is explored further, as the reader is initiated into the intricacies of offering 'A tender of service to ones Soveraigne', or 'An humble addresse to a great Lord', where the reader is encouraged to employ epistolary prose such as: 'I must entreate you to pardon my boldnesse, in that I, who am a stranger, have presumed to come to visit you, being invited thereunto by the fame and report of your noble vertues.' (3)

The Academy of Complements is perhaps the best-known example of the mid-seventeenth-century printed miscellany. Printed miscellanies were small, octavo or duodecimo publications, the products of a bundling together of writing from diverse sources--manuscript commonplace books, plays, song books, other printed miscellanies. These texts are bursting with material: most commonly short poetry from numerous unascribed authors, but often also potted histories, court dialogues, model letters, notes of mythology, riddles and jokes. These books are verse miscellanies; models for etiquette; prompt-books for wits; exemplars of elite life. The most common subject for discussion is love, particularly the torturous sufferings of the snubbed male wooer, but poems praising or criticizing women, lauding Royalism, friendship, and drink, are also common. If these books could be said to have any unified voice, that voice must be pitched somewhere among the bawdy, the misogynous, the Royalist, the voyeuristic, and the educative. (4)

The Academy of Complements was a hugely popular text, running through at least twelve editions between 1640 and 1685, each new edition larger than the last. Frequent references in contemporary plays suggest this collection's title was well established and resonant with connotations. (5) This very popularity presents us with the paradox I would like to consider in this article. The Academy of Complements offered points of advice for elite social contexts: 'Stiles and Tearmes used to the KING, or QUEENES Majesty'; 'An humble addresse to a great Lord'. The book, and others like it, purported to present social etiquettes and words of eloquence fit for application in the rarefied environment of court. But, as we will see, the book was directed to, and read by, a popular, decidedly non-elite audience. So how might we make sense of this consumption of notionally elite texts by popular readers? What does this apparent transfer of materials suggest about ideas of social and cultural hierarchy, and the perceived function of socially educative literature? Did the popular dissemination of the eloquence 'of service to ones Soveraigne' subvert the elite worlds on display? Or were readers simply gazing at far-off contexts, with no real interest in the application of manners on display? Or was there some other understanding of the function of these texts?

While The Academy of Complements evinces a sense of gathered diversity--of poetry, exemplary compliments, 'Questions with their answers resolving the doubts of Lovers', tables 'of hard words'--other printed miscellanies are eclectic to the point of discordance. In The Mysteries of Love & Eloquence, aphoristic couplets and proverbs are offered alongside 'Jesting, and Jovial Questions', 'Set Forms of Expression inserted for imitation', and 'Select Sentences' (witty maxims, such as 'The dignity of truth is lost in much protesting'). In Wits Interpreter (1655), poetry is presented amid 'The Art of Reasoning, A New Logick', 'Accurate Complements', 'The Labyrinth of Fancies, New Experiements and Inventions', 'Letters A la mode', and 'Cardinal Richeleiu's Key to his manner of writing of Letters by Cyphers' (title-page), and witty word games are juxtaposed with drinking etiquettes, riddles and tricks--'How a Peare, or an Apple may be parted into many parts without breaking the Rind', or 'How to tell a man his Christian name though you never saw him before', or 'How a man may put his finger in, or wash his hands in melting Lead without danger of burning' (pp. 93-175).

However, while all printed miscellanies convey this impression of the rapid collection of disparate materials, these texts' preoccupation is with elite, usually court life. Miscellany dialogues, letters, and poems are offered as products of the socially exclusive. The Mysteries of Love &Eloquence displays the modes of wooing 'As they are manag'd in the Spring Garden, Hide Park, the New Exchange, and other eminent places'. It is a work, the title-page proclaims, 'in which are drawn to the Life, the Deportments of the most accomplisht Persons, the mode of their Courtly Entertainments [...] the Witchcrafts of their perswasive Language [and] other more Secret Dispatches'. Wit at a Venture (1674) is presented on its title-page as 'Clio's Privy-Garden'; Holborn Drollery (1673) as the product of the quick intelligence found strolling 'Grayes-Inne-Walkes'. Collections are offered as epitomes of 'the most eminent Wits', (6) as 'The Fancyee of so many letter'd and unequalled men'. (7) Sketches of Philip Sidney and Francis Bacon decorate the frontispiece of Wits Interpreter (1655); a title-page tempts with enigmatic promises of 'a Club of sparkling Wits, viz. C.J. B.J. L.M. W.T. Cum multis aliis--'. (8) And miscellany poems such as 'Epilogue spoken [...] before the King and Queen, at Court', (9) and verses beginning 'Courtiers, Courtiers, think it no scorn', (10) or 'Come all you Gallants that live near the Court', (11) evoke a similarly exclusive context.

Printed miscellanies do not, however, simply depict some notion of elite life. Readers are explicitly encouraged to employ the courtly eloquence and manners on display. Texts offer themselves as practical handbooks with material fit for application by readers. Printed miscellanies are to be used as manuals of etiquette and style, 'as every way beneficiall to thee', and full of 'such nimble applications, [which] if rightly directed, are most absolutely useful; and that those which have been adorned with such qualifications, have had such tall advantages over others, as seldom or never fall short of their ends'. (12)

The Academy of Complements (1640) presents comparable claims. It is a guide 'Wherein Ladyes, Gentlewomen, Schollers, and Strangers may accommodate their Courtly Practice with most Curious Ceremonies, Complements, Amorous, High expressions, and forms of speaking, or writing' (title-page). The book is a portable tutor, 'alwayes ready to furnish you with the best expressions of choice complementall language', and, in particular, to provide that crucial virtue, eloquence:

A principall part in a well qualified man [...] it [...] adornes our discourse, gives a grace and life to our actions, opens us the gates and dores to the best company, and puts us in such esteeme as well borne spirits ought to arrive too.

Through the careful study and application of these 'richest Iewels', the reader might attaine to the quality of such worth that thou mayst learne from it to cure thy dumbenes, to discourse confidently with thy friends, and assuredly to tender thy wit and service to those thou shalt have occasion to acknowledge, especially in the Court, where neatenesse and curiosities of all sorts, and principally of speech is to a sillable exactly studied.13 With just such a seriousness of purpose, The New Academy of Complements (1669) includes advice on offering 'A Tender of Service to the Kings most excellent Majesty' (pp. 25-26). The Mysteries of Love &Eloquence explains how to nuance 'Superscriptions for Letters' when writing to a duke, an earl, a marquess, a viscount, and a knight' (pp. 109-43), and Wits Academy dictates the etiquettes for addressing the monarch, the nobility, 'other Dukes', 'Professors of Liberal Arts and Sciences', and poets ('To the Muses best adorers'; 'To the Laureated Society'). (14)

There is, of course, an absurdity in all this. Printed miscellanies sold for 1s 6d or less: they were cheap, popular, commercial. A few pennies in the bookseller's purse would enable anyone to clamber up these various manifestations of the 'English Parnassus', and the notion that readers of these books might all trip off to court is correspondingly ridiculous. While some contemporary character collections and plays sketch a miscellany readership of socially elite foppish males, fidgeting dissolutely at the fringes of court life, this is to conflate the world described in verse with the world lived by readers. The popularity of printed miscellanies suggests such a uniformity of consumption was unlikely.

References to printed miscellanies in plays, for instance, depict readers from a non-elite social stratum. William Wycherley's The Country Wife describes the rural Mrs Pinchwife, who, finding her bookseller without the desired 'six-penny worth' of ballads, requests 'Covent-garden-Drollery, and a Play or two'. (15) This exchange suggests non-elite, female, provincial readers and, interestingly, a degree of cultural equivalence between printed miscellanies and popular ballads.

Extant manuscript marginalia in miscellanies similarly imply readers drawn from a wide cross-section, in terms of gender, age, location, and education. Manuscript notes such as 'William Wynne Ellin Wynne 1680' across one copy of Wit at a Venture, and 'Hannah Lea / is my name / Ha.' in a Wits Interpreter, both attest to female readers. (16) Clumsy attempts at calligraphy, (17) scribblings and doodles (18) suggest possible child readers, and evoke a context away from those educated town coteries. And the presence of material drawn from printed miscellanies in the manuscript collections of provincial, non-elite individuals such as the Derbyshire yeoman Leonard Wheatcroft (1627-1706)--a real-life Mrs Pinchwife?--provides further evidence of a readership well outside the narrow social and geographic range miscellany prefaces sometimes suggest. (19)

Yet printed miscellanies themselves also recognized this wide audience, and as a result, introductions and title-pages lurch between evocations of the exclusive, and more candid addresses to the commercially desirable mass reader. The Mysteries of Love &Eloquence, we remember, offered the modes of 'Wooing and Complementing; As they are manag'd in the Spring Garden [...] and other eminent places'. But those modes are made 'so plain and easie [...] that the meanest capacity may in a short time attain to a perfection' (my italics). The Marrow of Complements (1655) was 'Fitted for the use of all sorts of persons, from the Noblemans Palace to the Artizans Shop' (titlepage); The Academy of Complements (1640) promises benefit to even those 'of the most inferior ranke or qualitie' (sig. A7); Wits Academy (1677) offers its services 'to such as have had but small converse with the critical sort of people' (title-page). The New Academy of Complements is dizzyingly democratic: it is designed, the frontispiece declares, 'For Ladies, Gentlewomen, Courtiers, Gentlemen, Scholars, Souldiers, Citizens, Countrymen, and all persons, of what degree soever, of both Sexes'. And while The Card of Courtship boasts many a court like phrase, it is 'fitted to the Humours of all Degrees, Sexes, and Conditions', and dedicates itself 'To the longing Virgins, amorous Batchelors, blithe Widows, kind Wives, and flexible Husbands, of what Honour, Title, Calling, or Conversation so ever, within the REALM of GREAT BRITAIN'. (20)

What printed miscellanies seem to be offering, then, is a transfer of what purport to be court products to the anonymous popular reader; the reconstruction of 'the Spring Garden, Hide Park, the New Exchange, and other eminent places' in Wheatcroft's Derbyshire, or Pinchwife's provinces. These books are celebrating a court culture but at the same time flinging open the doors that create and preserve that culture, and this act of making exclusivity general results in an inevitable tension at the heart of printed miscellanies: a tension between cultivating a sense of the socially eminent--by celebrating the coterie quality of court, and its restricted access--and debasing that eminence through its transfer to the public. Were readers being offered exclusive knowledge, in other words, or was exclusive knowledge being destroyed?

This interesting tension was something printed miscellanies in fact tried to resolve. While frontispieces might dazzle with talk of the court opportunities a perusal of their text would yield, and while prefaces really did stress miscellany reading as a force for mobility, there is also an opposing emphasis on social hierarchy. Take The Mysteries of Love &Eloquence. Its prefaces grandly position the text as a product of court, but there is also stress on the need for other social ranks to know their status and limits. While the reader can observe courtly practice, he or she should understand that this text does not provide an opening to those circles. Context is crucial, and the reader's context will not change. 'Complements do not suit with all places', the preface notes,

nor with all sorts of men; it ill beseems a Mechannick to play the Orator; that urbanity which becomes a Citizen, would relish of too much curiosity in a Countreyman; and that Complement which gives proper grace to a Courtier, would cause derision if presented by a Merchant or a Factor. The Statesman requires a graceful and grave posture, whereas in ordinary affairs of Traffique, it were indiscretion to represent any such state. Thus I might instance from the Madam to the Chambermaid. (sig. a4)

Here we have a conduct manual text emphasizing the need to maintain, not disrupt, patterns and modes of social hierarchy. In fact the book tries to reconcile its promises to educate the reader with its desire to preserve hierarchy by positioning itself as a defence against, not a cause for, social upheaval. The book becomes a means to counter dramatic instances of social transformation, such as when 'a wench of fourteen, with a few Dramatical Drayton and Sidney Quillets, put to the non plus a Gallant of thirty; I may safely depose on it, that I have heard such a Lass defeat a Gentleman of some years standing at the Inns of Court' (sig. A5). Contextualized thus, this text becomes a force to resist the very upstarts, like this 'wench of fourteen', miscellanies often seem to encourage.

The rising chambermaid was evidently a particularly potent symbol of transgressive, abhorrent social mobility. When editor John Cotgrave attacks the promises of social advancement in other, rival publications, he saves particular scorn for the aspiring chambermaid. His eager, busy prose comments:

Not to trouble the Reader with many instances, I will present him with an Impossibility, which some of our late Scriblers most strongly hold forth; and what it is, think you, but an Art of Complementing, which they obtrude on the under-Wits, and amongst the rest they have more especially seduced a Favorite of theirs y'cleped the Chambermaid to make her believe, she may be easily completed with oVensive and defensive terms of Language, so to manage her Wit as if she were at a prize. (21)

Eloquence is socially stratified, and despite their educative emphasis, miscellanies such as Wits Interpreter were eager to maintain these stratifications. Chambermaids, as both women, and of a low social class, should remain 'constrained to blush, in ignorance, for want of Complements'. (22) Moments when this rigid sense of hierarchy is threatened are roundly condemned, often through ridicule. The Mysteries of Love &Eloquence generates humour by depicting as absurd wooings that reach across social levels, and as a consequence the book enforces those social stratifications. 'MOCK LETTERS And Drolling Letters' presents what are intended to be ludicrous scenarios of the lower addressing the higher: 'A Broom-man in Kent, to a young Lady of quality, whom he fell in Love withall, beholding her in a Belcony', which includes such pleadings as 'I would give all the old Shoes in my Sack to enjoy the happiness of your sweet company' (pp. 144-50).

What these texts offer, then, is a display of the customs of the elite--indeed, those customs dissected and made 'plaine and easie' for even 'the meanest capacity'--along with an assertion of the permanence of rank. The simultaneous advocacy of studied eloquence and social stability means that while readers' contexts should not change, the manners of the social elite can still offer lessons, of value within the readers' unalterable specifics. This means that while prefaces might imply an opening up of the previously exclusive--an opening of the doors to court--these texts in fact barred those very doors and enforced notions of social difference. By raising the issue of court access, the impossibility of that access was made apparent and these collections became vignettes of far-o. lives. Thus Wits Interpreter (1655) gestures towards social mobility, but is also a powerful reminder of essential social di.erences: it is 'A sure Guide [...] In which briefly the whole Mystery of those pleasing Witchcrafts of Eloquence and Love are made easie'; and yet it deals with 'Gentry' matters to which 'none but the Intelligent, such as are the Muses friends, ought to ascend' (sig. A[4.sup.v]).

In Thomas Forde's Love's Labyrinth, Act v, Scene 6, we see such a miscellany put to use. Doron, intent on wooing Carmila despite his flagging wit, turns to his 'magazine of Poetrie, [his ...] store-house of wit':

DORON I think I am provided now, if Poetrie will do't, my Carmila is mine; these witty knaves, what fine devices they have got to fetter maidens hearts? [...] there are some secret charms in these same verses sure. Let me see here what I have got. Ha Carmila, look here, I think you'l love me now. Reads.

Carmila--A Miracle.

CARMILA A miracle, for what, Doron?

DORON Why, a miracle of beautie, and I think you'l be a miracle of folly, if you don't love me now.

CARMILA What small Poet have you hired to make a miracle of my name.

DORON Nay, I have more yet, and better, that I found in the Nichodemus Of Complements, that's a sweet book, 'tis a very magazine of Poetrie, a storehouse of wit; do but hear them Carmila [...]. Now Carmila, you must imagine that 'tis I, and only I, say this to you, and none but you: for the unhappy wag ha's so fitted my fancie, as if 'twere made for no bodie but me.

Doron then offers a series of wheezing compliments that had actually appeared in Wits Recreations (1640) as verse number 222:

      Excellent Mistris, brighter than the Moon,
   Than scowred pewter, or the silver spoon:
   Thine eyes like Diamonds shine most clearly,
   As I'm an honest man, I love thee dearly.

But his efforts are rebuffed:

Had it been your own mother-wit, Doron, I could have like't it well: But for you to father the brat of another's brain, is too ridiculous. I like your love much better than your hackney lines. (23)

The comedy rests on an understanding of the printed miscellany as a provider of wit for the specifics of the reader's (Doron's) problems. The lines have a practical function for Doron--to get the girl--but are not a means to change his position in society in the way some miscellanies suggest. Doron's blundered wooings suggest that appropriation (inclusion within existing circumstances), more than transformation (the changing of circumstances), defined readers' attitudes to these texts. Indeed, if we try briefly to consider the evidence of actual readings of printed miscellanies, we see, I think, a similar emphasis on readers using and altering texts according to their circumstances, rather than changing their circumstances through the use of these texts. We see, in other words, printed miscellanies as, paradoxically, a force for social stability.

Certainly poems are not presented as fixed, or unalterable. Titles draw attention to verses as inconstant, contingent: thus 'A Rural Song, the third and fourth verses being lately added'; (24) or 'KISSES, with an Addition'; (25) or 'Bagnall's Ballet, supplied of what was left out in Musarum Deliciae'. (26)

There is a sense of catching poems mid-way through their evolution, and as a consequence, a sense of each text alluding to countless other possible versions. Readers are explicitly encouraged to take part in these textual transformations--to add, to alter, to make these texts their own: 'thou hast choise and select complements [...] which upon an occasion [...] thou may imitate or with a little alteration make use of.' (27) As a verse in Wits Recreations describes, poetry, once in print, 'must the peoples not the authors bee', (28) echoing Hamlet's observation that his words once spoken, become not 'mine now'. (29)

Extant manuscript marginalia in printed miscellanies imply readers happily following these exhortations: introducing little (sometimes not so little) alterations to fit material to their own circumstances. In the process readers showed less interest in the origin of these texts, more in the relevance of the material to their immediate contexts. This may be seen in a brief sample. Readers broke down verses into their constituent parts, and extracted particular sections. Crosses, pointing hands, notes of 'good' or, in the case of a Folger Wits Recreations (1641), the repeated 'I like', (30) hover in the margins, generally indicating an interest in a section of a poem, rather than the whole verse; considering the poem an accumulation of potentially profitable parts, more than a coherent, stable whole. A reader of Westminster Drollery The Second Part (1672) carefully underlined all the sexual references that could be found in the book (and there are many).31 This same book has marks next to parts of verses which ring proverbial and are fit for detachment and reapplication in new contexts: 'She that is faire doth seldome prove unkind'; 'Fruition is the Comfort of the Bride'; and--in a variation of the popular expression 'to dine with Duke Humphrey', meaning, to go without food--'with Humphry I sup' (pp. 2, 19). (32)

Readers altered texts to create new readings, imposing their own interests on the written material. A Folger copy of Wit and Mirth (1706) has the name 'Jemmy' crossed out and 'Billy' written underneath: perhaps a personalizing of the poem to suit particular circumstances. (33) A Wits Recreations (1654) text alters 'On a Clowne' to 'On a Minister'. (34) A Collection of Poems (1672) has manuscript marks altering 'Let every married Man, that's grave and wise' to 'Let every married Man, that's Rich and wise'; a few lines later, 'To teach and to instruct his Family' becomes 'To teach and to Increase his Family'. (35)

There are manuscript additions that allude to possible moments of use. A Wits Recreations (1663) has 'may 6th' written next to poems about braggarts, women, and long hair--suggesting an interest in the appropriation of verses for some event, now unknown. (36) A reader of another copy of Wits Recreations (1667) has labelled stanzas in the verse 'Of Melancholly' alternately 'Coh' and 'Dy'. (37) These titles may refer to voices, 'Coh' representing, perhaps, 'Chorus'. Such a marking seems to imply the extraction of the verse by a reader with an interest in the performance of the text, or at least the idea that here is a poem which ought to be considered as a duet or dialogue.

In several texts stanza numbers have been added within poems--alluding, perhaps, to a subsequent reordering of the poem. A manuscript transcription of Roger L'Estrange's 'Beat on proud billows' illustrates just such a process. (38) In the centre of the page the stanzas are written with numbers above. But to the left and right are alternative sequences of stanza numbers--different readings, then, based on the same poem. An accompanying note at the top of the page explains that what it calls these 'Double fig[ures]' are required since 'The written order is confused'. Here, then, the numbering of stanzas enables easy textual manipulation: readers of printed miscellanies might well have marked their texts with similar motives in mind, restructuring the printed text; making it their own. And there are other examples: of readers isolating, and appropriating lines; or adding new lines to printed verses; or altering poems according to their own predilections, interests, contexts. What these interventions all suggest is that while reader understandings of printed miscellanies did indeed rest on ideas of usefulness, it was not of the reading-your-way-to-court type suggested in The Academy of Complements. Rather, readers perceived these miscellanies as collections of verses that might be appropriated, applied, used in the readers' specific contexts. Poems were regarded as useful units that might be taken, altered, and reemployed amid a reader's particulars. Readers took courtly wit and suited it to their circumstances; they did not change their circumstances to suit courtly wit.

Thus while many early modern commentators such as James Howell, quoted at the outset of this piece, feared the democratizing potential of the press, and, in particular, the kind of cultural transfer printed miscellanies appear to effect, one of the primary significances of texts like The Academy of Complements was in fact their enforcement of social hierarchy. Although printed miscellanies apparently usher readers towards exclusive worlds, their real emphasis lies in the need for readers to appropriate elite wit within their own non-elite contexts: since 'that Complement which gives proper grace to a Courtier, would cause derision if presented by a Merchant or a Factor'. Printed miscellanies thus illustrate the capacity of what we might term 'aspirational texts', texts that imply a reader hoping for social advancement, to discourage and therefore presumably limit mobility.

One final note is called for. Since printed miscellanies claim to represent texts that originated in court circles, they enacted, at least theoretically, a transfer of elite culture to a popular readership. What is interesting, I think, is that we have seen 'popular' readers reading these texts in different ways from members of those more eminent contexts of origin. Rather than pondering original, court contexts, readers appropriated texts within their own environment, making the formerly elite texts relevant to them. In other words, the same texts were subject to different readings, according to some sense of social status. Thus Wits Academy (1677) envisages differing reading modes according to a notion of social hierarchy: it is a book 'helpful for the inexpert to imitate, and pleasant to those of better Judgement, at their own leisure to peruse' (title-page). Thus the transfer of texts between court and public, which potentially weakens notions of the exclusivity of these divisions, was accompanied by some awareness of rank or context that found expression in modes of textual consumption, which strengthens the significance of hierarchy. The ways in which readers adapted and extracted poems, the ways in which they read, were influenced by a sense of their relative social position.

This is important, since it seems to support Roger Chartier's compelling hypothesis that it is not necessarily a difference in book ownership that reflects (and induces) social hierarchy, but rather the different ways in which the same books might be read. 'A retrospective sociology', Chartier writes, 'that has long made the unequal distribution of objects the primary criterion of the cultural hierarchy must be replaced by a different approach that focuses attention on differentiated and contrasting uses of the same goods, the same texts, the same ideas'. (39) What makes popular reading, in other words, is not the book, but the ways in which the book is read. (40) Printed miscellanies, by offering the anonymous reader the elite discourses of court and, simultaneously, by stressing the need to adapt materials to the readers' non-elite contexts, encouraged just these sorts of differentiated uses of the same texts.

(1) Epistolae Ho-elianae, ed. by J. Jacobs, 2 vols (London, 1890), 1, 523-26; quoted in David Cressy, Education in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Arnold, 1975), p. 27.

(2) The Academy of Complements (1640), pp. 1, 41, 129, 179.

(3) The Academy of Complements, new edn (1650), pp. 59-68.

(4) For a fuller discussion of printed miscellanies, see my 'For Profit and Delight': Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640-1682 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003).

(5) See, for example, Peter Anthony Motteux, John Oldmixon, and Edward Filmer, The Novelty: Every Act a Play (1697), Act ii: in response to Needmore's ornate 'Can you have occasion to be melancholic, you who are the envy of the Men, and the Darling of the Women?', Freeman replies 'What a pox, hast thou lately been reading the Academy of Complements?' Note also Richard Brome, A Joviall Crew, or, The Merry Beggars (1652), Act ii, where Rachel laments that foolish suitors 'tell us, Ladies, your lips are sweeter [than sweetmeats], and then fall into Courtship, one in a set speech taken out of old Britains Works, another with Verses out of the Academy of Complements, or some or other of the new Poetical Pamphletters, ambitious onely to spoile Paper, and publish their names in print'.

(6) J. Cleaveland Revived (1660), title-page.

(7) The Harmony of the Muses (1654), sig. A3.

(8) Sportive Wit (1656).

(9) Covent Garden Drollery (1672), p. 86.

(10) The New Academy of Complements (1669), p. 103.

(11) Wits Academy (1677), pp. 96-98.

(12) The Mysteries of Love &Eloquence (1658), sig. A5; my italics.

(13) Sigs A4-A9; my italics.

(14) Wits Academy, new edn (1704), pp. 146-49.

(15) The Country Wife (1675), Act 111, Scene 2. Covent Garden Drollery was published in 1672.

(16) Wit at a Venture (1674), Folger F5, title-page; Wits Interpreter (1655) Bodleian Harding C160, final page.

(17) For instance, Wits Interpreter (1662), Bodleian Jessel, f. 279, p. 493, and Wits Recreations (1663), Folger M 1717 a, sig. Z[5.sup.v].

(18) See, for example, Westminster Drollery (1671), Bodleian Douce D27, pp. 35, 96, and Wits Recreations (1645), Folger M 1712, sigs L[7.sup.v], L[8.sup.v], T7.

(19) See Cedric C. Brown, 'The Two Pilgrimages of the Laureate of Ashover, Leonard Wheatcroft', in Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts, ed. by Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway, and Helen Wilcox (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 120-35. For Brown's notes on overlaps between the manuscript and printed miscellanies, see pp. 129-30. The Wheatcroft manuscript is in the Derbyshire Record Office at Matlock, DRO, D.253.

(20) The Card of Courtship (1653), title-page, and sig. A.

(21) Wits Interpreter (1655), sigs A[3.sup.v]-A4.

(22) The Academy of Complements (1640), sig. A5.

(23) Thomas Forde, Love's Labyrinth (1660).

(24) Oxford Drollery (1671), pp. 85-87.

(25) New Court Songs (1672), pp. 58-59.

(26) Wit Restor'd (1658), pp. 39-43.

(27) The Academy of Complements (1640), sig. A[6.sup.v]; my italics.

(28) Wits Recreations (1640), [p. 26] no. 90.

(29) Hamlet, 111.2.97.

(30) Folger M 1720 copy 1.

(31) BL 11621.a.45. There are notes next to 'pink-patticoat' (p. 5); 'up and down' (p. 80) and 'in and out' (p. 81); 'take their kisses back, and give 'em their own agen' (p. 82); and 'My brests never popt up and down so before' (p. 87).

(32) My thanks to Tim Amos for the Duke Humphrey point.

(33) Folger M 1738 D4 Cage, p. 117.

(34) BL 11601.bb.19, epitaph 82.

(35) Bodleian Harding C167, p. 63; my italics.

(36) Recreation for Ingenious Head-peeces (1663) Bodleian Douce W42, numbers 63, 65, 73, and 81. This is the title of later editions of Wits Recreations (1640).

(37) Folger M 1717 b, sigs Y3-Y5.

(38) Folger MS Va 148, fols [12.sup.v]-13.

(39) 'Texts, Printing, Readings', in The New Cultural History, ed. by L. Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 154-75 (p. 171).

(40) See also Roger Chartier, 'Reading Matter and "Popular" Reading: From the Renaissance to the Seventeenth Century', in A History of Reading in the West, ed. by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), pp. 269-83.