In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth- Century England.

Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth- Century England

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 103 pls. + xxv + 313 pp. $130. ISBN: 0-19-818471-9.

In his lavishly illustrated volume, based on the Lyell Lectures delivered in 1995-96, Peter Beal reconstructs practices which have been overlooked in favour of the better-documented world of printers, stationers, and publishers. In the first chapter, Beal notes that clerks and scriveners were the object of satire and provides an appendix of twenty-four "characters" by contemporary writers such as Samuel Butler, from whom we learn that a scrivener is "the usurer's pimp" (203). Beal explores the circulation of manuscript lampoons which flourished from the 1670s-1690s, focussing on the notorious "Captain" Robert Julian. None of Julian's manuscripts had been conclusively identified until Beal found an inscription stating, "I bought this booke of Julian not so much for my own use as to prevent others reading of it" (20). Beal argues convincingly for Julian's part in altering the view that manuscripts were the products of elite literary circles and cheapening, therefore, the medium (although not all readers will f ind this result wholly negative).

In chapter 2, Beal insists that Donne's famous remarks about a manuscript made in a letter ("publish it not, but yet burn it not; and between those, do what you will with it") should not simply be seen as his endorsement of coterie manuscript culture. Instead, these remarks should relate specifically to the sensitive manuscript in question, Biathanatos, his treatise justifying suicide. The discovery of a new manuscript of the tract challenges certain notions editors have held about Donne's lost autograph manuscript and his readership. Though the chapter raises more questions than it answers, Beal suggests that

the three extant texts of the tract are closely related to Donne's original, and that the newly discovered Canterbury manuscript might have been commissioned by Lucy, Countess of Bedford.

The third chapter is devoted to an anonymous scribe Beal has aptly christened the Feathery scribe, whose "wispy, trailing strokes" (58) appear in well over 11,000 pages, as Beal's impressive appendix details. Twelve other hands regularly appear in his manuscripts, indicating how manuscripts were transcribed in Feathery's scriptorium, and even Feathery's place in the pecking order. Most of the material he produced was state papers which required some secrecy, but Feathery's texts cannot be linked with one particular party. Beal sees in Feathery's work a spirit of questioning established structures and looking back to the past. This chapter places Feathery's activities at the heart of intellectual inquiry of the late 1620s to 1641.

In the fourth chapter, Beal argues for the importance of Sir Philip Sidney's letter to Queen Elizabeth, in which Sidney urges her to forego a marriage with the French Duc d'Alencon. This letter of 1579 enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in the 1630s, and nine extant copies are associated with the Feathery scribe. Far from being a thoughtless copyist, he is responding to the rhetorical structure of the work. In one case Feathery even uses side headings to help the reader digest the text and extract what is useful from it -- these copies determined how a generation read Sidney's influential text.

Beal argues that Katherine Philips desired two things: authorial control over her texts and social advancement. He points out that manuscript circulation was a protective environment for a woman of her bourgeois class, a point strengthened by his bringing to light a misogynist attack by John Taylor on Philips in the early 1650s. Arguing that Philips was genuinely horrified by the unauthorized printing of her poems in 1663 (something Germaine Greer and others have contested) Beal proposes three apotheoses for Philips, who died shortly afterwards. These are the Rosania manuscript, presented as a kind of funerary monument, the authorized 1667 printed folio of her works, which enjoyed all the aristocratic sanction she could have desired, and the 1668 production of Horace before the English court. Arguing that Lady Castlemaine used this production as a forum through which to assert her authority, Beal makes a clever play on words: the virtuous Mrs. Philips was now in the hands of the king's mistress, who could fl aunt her power or virtu.

Perhaps scholars whose interests in seventeenth-century literature are primarily theoretical will find this meticulous archival research offputting. They are absolutely the people who should read this work, for Beal tackles complex editorial questions as well as explores the fluidity of manuscript culture, and his work will challenge formulations made by less informed critics.