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Megan Heffernan’s Making the Miscellany argues for a recalibration of the critical approach to early modern compilations, the multiauthor catchall collections ubiquitous in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. She examines what miscellany meant and might continue to mean in relation to a genre often read as an expression of individual subjectivity. Both “a history and a historiography of the early printed poetry book” (10), this volume persuasively challenges the assumptions that a lyric poem is a self-bounded artifact and that it is shaped by the presence (or absence) of authorial agency. Compilations are an unusually porous and open medium for poetic craft, and Heffernan examines how readers from the late sixteenth century to the present have used the miscellany to define their relationship to vernacular lyric poetry. When these poetry collections were first published, “compilers, poets, and readers were alert to a poetics of organization that exceeded the limits of the individual poem” (5). By the late eighteenth century the miscellany was a weird relic of the early modern past, before the reign of the author. Historicizing the displacement of early modern reading practices by an author-centered hermeneutic, Heffernan’s analysis toggles between Tudor and Stuart figures such as Thomas Wyatt, the printer Richard Tottel, and John Donne, on the one hand, and later readers, including Samuel Johnson, the nineteenth-century forger John Payne Collier, and T. S. Eliot, on the other.To explore the contributions of miscellanies, Heffernan leverages the concept of disorder, described as a loose, generative orientation to compiling that “revels in the allure of wandering, misplaced objects, identifying or even manufacturing a significance in the points of contact between unruly things” (10). Heffernan’s nuanced exploration makes disorder a vivifying force in the early modern poetic imagination. The first two chapters analyze the “disordering” role of compilers and stationers, the overlooked technicians whose interpretive choices shaped Renaissance poetry. The early modern English miscellany can claim a central role in shaping the reception of early vernacular writers such as Wyatt and the cultural understanding of the sonnet. In the 1550s Tottel began “novelizing” the lyric (not a phrase Heffernan uses) before the novel existed. By imposing a longform teleological shape on assorted short poems, Tottel’s choices shaped the reading public’s taste. As Jeffrey Todd Knight and Jonathan Crewe have shown, Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes (1557), later colloquially known as Tottel’s Miscellany, added titles and interpretive headnotes to lyrics by Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in order to create narratives of development. Heffernan expands on those insights by showing how such printers as Tottel effaced the origins and homogenized the contexts of poems. As Heffernan demonstrates in a careful analysis, Tottel revised Wyatt’s lyrics to bleed the political subtext out of “The lover suspected of change praiseth that it be not beleved against him.” The particularity of these poems was flattened, and the lyrics were then woven into a coherent sequential narrative about a single lover.In chapter 2 Heffernan finds presence in reputed absence. In lieu of a controlling author, miscellanies were the products of “nonauthorial material craft” that produced “the larger textual arrangement for readers” (88). In braiding together individual poems, the stationers Richard Jones and Nicholas Ling discouraged readers from excerpting lines for commonplacing. In chapters 3 and 4 the authors reassert their presence. Heffernan draws comparisons between Gascoigne’s A Hundreth sundrie Flowres bounde up in one small Poesie (1573) and a significantly revised edition, The Poesies of George Gascoigne Esquire (1575). In the revision Gascoigne took over the headnotes and prefatory matter, becoming the compiler and publisher of his own poetry. Like other early modern writers, he was outspoken in his anxiety about the lack of taste among English readers; in the early decades of popular print culture, writers did not know what to make of readerly attention, given that their audiences were constantly reconditioned by an unprecedented amount of printed information. Gascoigne’s two collections were an ambitious attempt to complicate, rather than streamline, popular ideas of publication and authorship. Chapter 4 looks at the sonnet form, particularly the rippling aftereffects of Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591/1598). Understanding that Sidney’s approach to compiling was “partial, incomplete, or slightly beyond his control” produces fresh readings of the poetry (132): the “attenuated poetic agency that developed out of these methods of compiling was an echo of his fraught desire for an idealized beloved who was always just beyond the poet’s reach” (134). In the sonnet collections that followed Sidney, Heffernan sees the role of the compiler recede as authors become the central organizing force, if not in the making of poetry, at least in the public imagination.Chapter 5 ties up some of the themes around authorship. In analyzing Donne’s posthumous Poems (1633/1635) and John Benson’s edition of Shakespeare’s Poems (1640), Heffernan demonstrates how the author-centered model continued to engage with the poetics of compiling, often in unexpected ways. In a brief coda she analyzes the rivalry of two eighteenth-century publishers, Bernard Lintott and Charles Gildon, and their editorial choices. Gildon relied on Benson’s compilation of Shakespeare’s poetry, with its editorial apparatus, while Lintott favored a stripped-down approach true to the earliest editions. Gildon was the more successful in his own time. That rivalry set the stage for our thinking about miscellanies while also projecting the conceptual category of the author onto early modern poetry. One strength of Heffernan’s book is the depiction of the complex, multivalent dynamics of the early modern media landscape. Making the Miscellany brings life to the circulation of texts through its sensitivity to the interrelationships between publishers, compilers, writers, and readers while never losing sight of the particularity and complexity of individual poems. By articulating how textual production spills over into a lyric poem’s field of meaning, Heffernan also contributes to the wider field of scholarship on historical poetics and lyric reading. Her book offers a compelling scholarly approach to synthesizing book history and formalist analysis, keeping both the wider culture and the specific poem always in focus.I believe that this book’s most important contribution is to complicate the persistent attachment to linear periodization, a strategy I hope more scholarship on early modern literary studies will pursue. Heffernan takes a transhistorical approach that replaces the tendency to see literary history as a sequence of chaos, formation, crisis, and reform with a model of discursive “clusters” of influence and contestation that more accurately reflects reading practices. Her methodology also allows for a comparative assortment of literary figures and eras. The juxtaposition of Collier and Donne illustrates what kinds of insights can be generated by the proximity of unlikely figures and by attention to “the significant twists and turns, the recursive loops and dead-end forays of textual practices that never fully align with the straightforward chronology of literary periodization” (217). At the same time, I think that Heffernan’s narrative exaggerates the radical alterity of the early modern miscellany. While author-focused studies dominated some models of textual production and literary analysis, other robust models like the miscellany have relied on anonymity, generic heterogeneity, intertextuality, and paratextuality—for instance, serial magazines of the late nineteenth century, the illuminated manuscripts of William Blake, television writing, contemporary fanzines, and modern social media. The book could have either surveyed a longer tradition of reading practices that rely on “disorder” or distinguished between the early miscellanies and these later works. Nevertheless, Heffernan makes a signal contribution to what may eventuate in yet broader recognition of the reading practices that approached the lyric as a site for networked, collaborative interpretation.
John Yargo (Fri,) studied this question.