Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England.

This is an essay on the sociology of texts. Tribble's project problematizes the contestation for authority between auctorial text and gloss as they are situated on the printed territory of the page, challenging the univocality of the early modern English text (I use her terms, which she wisely limits to the first and last few pages). Tribble's main intent is to show how the structure of the printed page was used to control the reader's understanding. She explains this well in the heart of the book, and she provides useful, if extended, readings of particular works. She acknowledges William W. E. Slights' "The Edifying Margins of Renaissance English Books," (Renaissance Quarterly 42:4 [Winter 1989]: 682-716), though on several points he dealt with the same topics more tersely and effectively. A fault of this book generally is its repetition, using more examples to make its good points than are necessary.

The English Bible is the subject of the first of her four major chapters. She emphasizes that attention to its margins is necessary to an understanding of its history. Edmund Becke's notes to Matthew's Bible (1549) were voluminous and described the controversy behind particular points. The Geneva Bible apparatus (1560) avoided such matters, instead focusing on making the text accessible through page heads, arguments, notes and a subject index. The Catholic Rheims New Testament (1582) used the page "to foster controversy" (43) by refuting heresy and asserting church tradition. In 1601 William Fulke published a parallel text of the Rheims and Bishops' New Testament, providing direct refutation of one text by the other through "competing typefaces, competing notes, competing interpretations" (50). King James opposed glosses, and in 1611 the Bible appeared with none save a few textual variants.

The movement through the period was from extensive, even controversial, glossing to very little. She brings out the paradox of Reformist editors claiming, through voluminous notes, that the plain text would speak for itself. It is a paradox that points up how the page became a battlefield which the controversialists could not leave alone until ordered. Tribble's method works well here as she relates the physical form of a work to its text. She leaves out, however, the politics of the period; from this book one could infer that the Elizabethan settlement was worked out primarily on the margins of the Bible.

Her second chapter examines the "contested nature of literary authority," (57) a large way of describing how literary authors learned to present themselves in the environment of print rather than manuscript. Glosses became the "site" on which new relationships were established. Spenser and Harington used their glosses to establish the literary or courtly circles of which they were a part, thus validating themselves. Tribble notes that Harington assumed his notes would sometimes help those who were not the "learned sort," (93) but she does not note that many readers of his Orlando Furioso translation were women; one might expect their perspective to affect Tribble's argument about Harington and the circle he was establishing. She discusses Ronsard as well, and bogs down in an extended explication of The Shepheardes Calender.

The third chapter, on the Marprelate controversy, makes the case that where the "humanist page" framed the text and set interpretive boundaries (102), the manic glosses of the Marprelate participants subverted those conventions. Tribble's walkthrough of the texts is good fun, and she illuminates the use of the margins. She shows us every instance she can of "the contested and uneasy relationship between the gloss and its establishment of cultural authority and the various social institutions - central or marginal - the gloss is intended to validate" (129).

Ben Jonson, subject of the final chapter, early used the margins and later abandoned them. Initially they served him as authorities, and as a means to associate his work with classical genres (for example his 1604 entertainment for King James, here lengthily contrasted with Dekker's). Jonson's theory of the masque, which emphasized less the show of the moment than the lasting "mysteries" of the verse, can be seen at work in his extensive glosses on his early Hymenai (1606). The play Sejanus (1605) was similarly heavily glossed; but in the 1616 Works its glosses, unlike those of the masques, were eliminated. Tribble describes why - the political dangers had passed against which Jonson had defended himself with classical authority - but she takes ten pages to do so where Slights took two, and adds little to his argument.

One implication of Tribble's use of reader-response theory is that Renaissance authors were themselves quite aware how readers would bring their own contexts and understandings to their readings, and she demonstrates how authors then attempted to control those understandings. She argues that her chosen texts were ambiguous about the role of authorities, reflected in the use of notes. She asks, "do notes establish a vital link with the past, a foundation for the present writer; [or] do they undermine that authority"? (160) But the ambiguity recedes if we distinguish the didactic and polemic works she has chosen from the imaginative ones. The notes to the Bible and to the Nashe and Marprelate texts are unambiguous, assertive claims for intellectual territory. The glosses to Spenser, Harington and Jonson are often allusive, eluding easy interpretations of stance or sense.

Tribble's book draws productive attention to authorial strategies that continue to affect our understanding. But there are surprisingly many typos, solecisms and careless transcriptions of titles for a scholar interested in presentation. In her extended discussion of Fulke's 1601 refutation of the Rheims New Testament, she misdates it to 1602 (43); in fact it was his second parallel-column edition, but she makes no mention of his 1588 edition nor why she did not use it. The book production and layout are handsome.

PETER S. GRAHAM Rutgers University Libraries