Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric.

This book is a welcome addition to recent scholarship on scribal culture and its intersections with an emerging print culture. For those who are unfamiliar with the manuscript circulation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lyric in commonplace books, miscellanies, and anthologies, it offers a wide-ranging survey of the phenomenon. For those whose acquaintance is limited to the circumstances affecting now-canonical poems, it affords a compelling reminder of how vast the manuscript archive is and how its heterogeneity challenges the notions of authorship that have underwritten the single-author editions we use in our scholarship. Indeed, Marotti's purpose is to bring that archive to the attention of those who are not bibliographers and textual scholars so that we may construct a more informed understanding of both the socio-historical circumstances in which lyrics were produced and those that institutionalized them as objects of study. His notes form a useful introduction to bibliographic and textual studies on individual manuscripts or writers as well as to the existing work on the implications of scribal and print publication. Unfortunately, the book has no bibliography so tracing references can be a time-consuming process. Happily, though, there is a separate index to the one hundred seventy-four manuscripts Marotti discusses.

The book is divided into five chapters, three on what Marotti calls "the manuscript system" and two on the print publication of lyrics. The chapters on the manuscript system present an overview of manuscript books and collections, the sites and personnel involved in their production, the contexts in which they circulated, and the social textuality in which they were implicated. One chapter focuses in particular on sexual and political poems that often were restricted to manuscript circulation in the period. Sample poems are described in terms of an immediate manuscript context and quoted in their entirety. Similarly, in discussing the malleability that characterized manuscript transmission and the answer and compiler poetry that featured prominently in collections produced by what Harold Love, in Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, calls "user publication," Marotti includes a generous sampling of hitherto unpublished material.

The chapters on print publication address what by now has become familiar territory: four key moments of print publication (the miscellany published by Richard Tottel in 1557; the printings of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella in 1591 and 1592, followed by his collected works in 1598; the Jonson folio of 1616; and the 1633 editions of the poems of John Donne and George Herbert) and the complex negotiations involved in the shift from the forms of patronage implied by manuscript circulation to those fashioned to support print publication. Though Marotti's argument about print publication - that it significantly contributed to the institutionalization of lyric poetry and the canonization of individual authors - is not novel, it brings together a wide range of work on individual authors or publications and particular phenomena that has been done in recent years and positions it so that its general import becomes easily available. The discussion of printed miscellanies and anthologies, for example, takes on new inflections in a context that has focused on the production and circulation of similar books in scribal form. So too, the attention to a continuing scribal production in the seventeenth century alongside the print publication activities of a publisher like Humphrey Mosley complicates any simple distinctions between scribal culture and print culture as well as the traditional period divisions that have separated the study of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century poetry from that of the later seventeenth century.

It is perhaps inevitable that a book covering so much material makes questionable assumptions and generalizations. "Every handwritten copy of a poem is unique' and handwriting "individualized" and "personalized" (25), for example, only in a limited sense. The various scripts used in the period were strong markers of particular scribal and social settings, and individuals often used more than one script. Moreover, the italic hand, as Jonathan Goldberg's Writing Matter argues, was impersonal by design and instruction. Nor can print production be opposed as identical, fixed, and conventional to a fluid, freeform scribal circulation. The long period in which scribal and print forms of publication coexisted and intersected makes any construction of their difference in terms of an opposition or series of oppositions a risky proposition, as Wendy Wall has made clear in her discussion of "literary pseudomorphs" - printed texts that self-consciously incorporated manuscript-identified features long after print was a familiar medium - in The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. In her book, Wall acknowledges an indebtedness to Marotti's work - a project begun more than a decade ago with an important essay on Elizabethan sonnet sequences that comes to a certain closure in Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric. But that closure is only partial, for the evidence Marotti presents in his discussion of the manuscript system suggests that the trajectory lyric traces from manuscript to print and then to "literature" is but one of the stories that might be told. Among the strengths of Marotti's book is that it raises questions we cannot as yet answer. One turns, for example, to the expert tools at hand - such as Peter Beal's Index to English Literary Manuscripts - with an intensified regret that it is author-and-work centered. Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric and the nearly simultaneous books by Love and Wall push us farther in rethinking the practices of writing, literacy, and print in early modern England.

ALEXANDRA HALASZ Dartmouth College