Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts: 1558-1640.

H.R Woudhuysen. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. 8 pls.+ xvi + 516 pp. $95. ISBN: 0-1981-2966-1.

This monograph is yet another sign of the resurgent scholarly interest in the manuscript culture of Early Modern England. Mary Hobbs, Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts, Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance, and Timothy Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs and Literary Culture, have made obvious what no one should ever have doubted: manuscript production and circulation did not atrophy, but sustained a set of socially and culturally significant practices independent of, and at times in contest with, the dominant culture of print. Woudhuysen's learned and courageously unfashionable empirical book should do much to ensure that the field will remain productive for many years to come. He has attempted to do for manuscripts what scholars of his grandfather's generation did for early printed books by accumulating and adding to what is currently known about producers and disseminators of manuscript material. A book of this kind might not have many readers, but its users will be grateful both for the mass of factual information and for the range of speculative narratives in terms of which the author attempts to bring order to his gatherings.

Woudhuysen is largely concerned with matters of provenance. His efforts to identify and connect manuscript producers, purveyors, owners and users have produced the occasional discovery and generated a great many hypotheses as to the connections between them, but he is very reluctant to theorize his material in any way. In neither part of the book - the first dealing with the conditions of manuscript production and circulation in general, and the second with the manuscripts of Sir Philip Sidney in particular - does his terminology reveal a systematic reflectiveness. A basic term like "publication" is used to blur the distinction between production, circulation, publication, or presentation. It might be that Woudhuysen wants to align manuscript with print and so valorize the former, but this is far from desirable and only serves to obscure the distinctive features of manuscript culture. A great deal is lost, for example, in referring to the "publication" of Greville's "A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney" (207), a work the author initially wanted read only after his death and one he later lost interest in and probably wished to suppress. The existence of a manuscript does not entail that it was published.

Although Woudhuysen judiciously refuses to privilege literary manuscripts, scholars will inevitably want to know the implications of his findings for our understanding of poems, plays and narrative fiction. They will be disappointed. Woudhuysen's positivistic empiricism has little room for theoretical speculation or for what may be termed the sociology of the text. When he does risk comments on the hermeneutic implications of manuscript presentation, his judgement is often shaky. "In manuscript, poems could be copied in any order . . . , but print has the potential to establish a set order for poems, so that a volume . . . could be arranged to embody part of its meaning in its structure" (15). Surely, the distinction is not one of presentation, but one of genre? The miscellany has no inherent connection with manuscript, nor a complexly designed work with print.

The survey of Sidney's manuscripts is the most thorough to date, but it disappoints by being cautious and inconclusive. Sidneians especially want to know, for example, what difference Woudhuysen's findings would make to Ringler's edition of the poems or to Skretkowicz's edition of the New Arcadia. The latter embodies a radical and as yet unchallenged hypothesis about the relationship between the representatives of the text. It is clear that Woudhuysen has his reservations about Skretkowicz's approach, but he has not provided the evidence and arguments which would make a serious case against it.

JOHN GOUWS Rhodes University