Copyright © 1984 and 1996 by Karl Young.
Printing was a different business then than it is now. In order to curb sedition and control the press, the number of printers licensed by the crown was limited, as was the number of type founders and the amount of type they could cast. Of course, there were underground presses operating in the country and type could be smuggled in from the continent, but, nonetheless, printers overworked their type, reusing it until it became completely illegible. Ink was expensive and hard to make, so it was used as sparingly as possible. Although editions with a standard of clarity at least as high as our own could be commissioned by wealthy patrons, this was by no means the norm -- but the crude norm may have had some benefits. The roughness of impression gave letters a tactile quality: the printed word seemed more of an object, more a physical reality, than it does today. Print was more difficult to read then -- lack of standardized spelling and a multitude of inconsistent symbols and abbreviations contributed to the difficulty, along with the worn type, the rough impression, and the light ink. Paper was heavier and the wire marks on its surface were the result of normal paper making processes, not a superfluous decoration as in today's laid finishes. Paper, like print, was more palpable, and a reader holding a book or turning a page probably had a greater awareness of its tactile quality than does his modern counterpart. Book bindings were sturdy, meant for active use; if they fell apart from extended wear, they could be rebound. A book might stay in a family for generations, being read and reread by many of its members as well as friends to whom they might lend it. A reader buying a copy of The Faerie Qveene [Fig. 6] in 1620 would as likely as not be buying a used book -- books were made to last and the difference between the new and used market was less distinct than it is now. The Faerie Qveene had become a classic by 1620, recalling an epoch that seemed glorious, however painful it may have been to those actively involved in its political events. The reader may well have heard a good deal of the book read or recited before he bought it and may have already committed some passages to memory -- he may even have used passages as maxims, things he turned over in his mind when making decisions or trying to make sense out of the world. The book he had purchased would probably not be read through and shelved (though some ostentatious buyers might keep a copy on their shelves just for show). It would be used as a script for reading to family and friends, as something to ponder over in private, or as something to commit, in part, to memory (which was still considered one of the basic arts of life). The text is admirably suited to these uses: the narrative allegory could be listened to with varying degrees of attentiveness; its regular rhythms and graceful phrases would be easy to read aloud; and the combination above with the regular stanzas and rhymes would make passages relatively easy to memorize. Even its inconsistencies and obscurities -- unintentional results of composition in installments -- would make it something to reread many times. Even when reading the book in private, it would be more a script to declaim than a source of silent information, conveyed from page to brain by an easy activity of the eyes.
Poetry that circulated in manuscript, of course, shared with printed books the current freedom from standardized orthography. Shakespeare, for instance, spelled his own name half a dozen different ways, almost one for each signature we have. In "The Good-Morrow," John Donne could render the word "be" three different ways (bee, beest, be) on the same sheet of paper. For Shakespeare and Donne and most of their contemporaries a written word was not confined to a single orthographic form: it could change according to the writer's intuitive sense of how it should look or sound, showing shades of emphasis, intonation, color, perhaps even pitch in his own pronunciation. Written language maintained the fluidity, even volatility, of speech: a phrase or line was something a poet created with his mouth, not an arrangement of fixed parts that could be precisely interchanged. A written poem was essentially a record of spoken verse and a score that could enable a reader to recreate it. The elaborate and inconsistent abbreviations and symbols current in script and print also underscore the oral orientation of writing. When a text is just a form of notation, "&" (a symbol that is still with us) could easily stand for "and," and "ye" could be an acceptable abbreviation for "the" (the "y" stood for "th" as in "thorn," not "y" as in "year" as some people now pronounce it in an attempt to sound old fashioned). Punctuation of this period often seems illogical to us for the same reason: we punctuate according to fixed notions of sentence construction, whereas the Jacobean poet punctuated by ear: his punctuation was a form of notation, often indicating a pause where the normal construction of a sentence would not suggest one. A number of conventions, create ambiguities somewhat similar to those in Chinese verse. The use of the apostrophe in possessives had not come into standard usage, and when Donne used a word like "worlds" he may have primarily meant "world's," but wished to leave a sense of secondary meaning: multiple worlds (he was probably familiar with Giordano Bruno's notion of infinite worlds). Letters like "I" and "J" or "U" and "V" were at that time more or less interchangeable, creating further ambiguities and keeping the reader at a speed approximating serious speech.
Only four of Donne's poems were printed in his lifetime, and one of them was plagiarized rather than published under his own name. These was not because Donne couldn't find publishers for his work, but because he had several reasons for not wanting to see them in print. He only meant them for an audience of friends and didn't like the idea of having strangers see them -- particularly if the poems could be used to thwart his political and ecclesiastical career. Restricting distribution allowed him a great deal of freedom to experiment with meter and syntax, use arcane reference comprehensible only to a few fellow cognoscenti, and deal with subjects he would otherwise have to keep to himself. This was not unusual at his time: other gentlemen circulated verse only in manuscript, or published their more public poems in book form while circulating more personal verses in manuscript.
Generally speaking, the manuscripts circulated by Donne and his fellows were not written in the wide-curving and ornate hands of which some 17th century penmen were capable, though they were not without flourishes and decorations. The capacity of quill pens to swing from thin to thick lines allowed a certain amount of expressive coloration in individual words, though this was minor in comparison to the expressiveness of Chinese calligraphers. Of course, manuscripts, even in fair hands, had to be read slowly. And, as important as anything else, manuscripts were personal in a way that printed books could never be. A manuscript was something fashioned by the author's (or a friend's) own hand and passed more or less directly to the reader, without the intermediary machinery of type and press, or the scrutiny of censors, publishers, typographers, proofreaders, salesmen, etc.
Donne's poetry reads as though it were meant for manuscript circulation. He assumes that the reader will be willing to spend a fair amount of time figuring out what the poems mean and how they should be vocalized. He assumes a stance of familiarity with his readers, not only sharing his private thoughts with them but also assuming that they are familiar with the arcane images, scientific experiments, philosophical arguments, and biographical details he knows.
Donne seems to assume that the manuscripts' recipients would not only read the poems aloud, but carefully rehearse them, perhaps to be recited to other friends. Lines like
are difficult to recite and would have demanded a skilled speaker who had practiced a bit to bring them off right. Donne's metrics are tricky. Sometimes he creates uneven patterns simply to keep the poems from becoming too neat, too prim. Sometimes his irregularities are metrical experiments, or approximations of colloquial speech, or theatric gestures, or based on melodic patterns. Sometimes if you read what seems to be an uneven line with even stresses, the reading brings out meanings that would be muffled if normal speech rhythms were followed. A reader would have to spend considerable time sorting these options out.
The poems are, in their nature as well as their written form, often ambiguous, asking serious questions and filling in witty answers without disturbing the original puzzle. A reader would be expected to ponder them after reading them aloud and even after committing some to memory. The reader was expected to contemplate them, turn them over in his mind, apply them to the changing patterns of his life, the way he would an important letter. At the same time, the poems served as a social bond between a small group of people: something they shared but held private from the rest of the world. They could be recited in all sorts of interpersonal situations: amorous, entertaining, jocular, serious, consoling.
In 1615 Donne was ordained a minister and in 1621 became Dean of St. Paul's. After this time he tried to suppress most of his poems, apparently because they were then in fairly wide circulation and might tend to discredit his office in the church. Both the writing of lyrics and the preaching of sermons in Donne's time were closely related to theater. The texts of Donne's sermons are full of the same kind of conceits, striking images, ringing phrases, grandiose tropes, and poetic cadences as his sermons. Accounts of his preaching indicate that he could use dramatic gestures, employ a wide vocal range, and even weep when it seemed like the right thing to do. He preached his last sermon dressed in his own shroud, which sounds like something out of a play by Webster. If the theater was the basis of language art in the Jacobean era, we can see a private extension of it in his lyrics and a public one in his sermons. Play, lyric, and sermon were all vocal arts that used scripts, and that's precisely what the texts of Donne's poems and sermons are.
A certain aura would have surrounded a manuscript fascicle of Donne's poems coming into a readers's hands in 1620. The reader would probably know that the author was trying to suppress them, which would make them all the more interesting. Many of the poems' initial readers had been members of an unofficial elite, and access to the manuscripts would make the new readers feel privileged to share in the glory of the small group of savants associated with Donne. The reader would certainly be aware of Donne's reputation for wit and may have heard some of the poems read or recited by other people.
He would first read through them quietly, perhaps silently. He would try to get a general sense of the poem, then concentrate on details. He would probably commit some of them to memory, and make copies of some or all of them. Copying was a form of reading in those days: a way of becoming one with the text, of tracing its graphic form, much the way art students have copied paintings and drawings as part of their apprenticeship. In 17th century Europe there were still monks who copied scripture as a form of prayer: they spoke the words as they wrote, touched the sacred energy of the script, and created more copies that could be used to save other souls. Transcribing also aided memorization.
The reader would rehearse oral performances of the poems. Probably, like his Chinese counterpart, he had had some musical training, and he may have tried to work out melodies for the poems, or fit them to existing tunes, perhaps accompanying himself on a lute. A poem like
Tell me, where all paft times are,
Teache me to hear Mermaydes finginge,
Or to keepe off Envyes ftinginge,
Serves to'advance an honeft minde.
almost demands such treatment. We have one anonymous 17th century setting for it [Egerton Ms. 2013, f. 586; see John Shawcross's The Complete Poetry of John Donne, p. 91] and certainly other readers composed settings for it. The reader might sing the poem to family or friends and it would become an integral part of social life.
A more difficult poem would require prolonged intellectual effort. Here is the last stanza of "To Chrift":
Sweare by thy felf that at my Death, thy Sunn
The spiritual and intellectual dimensions of this poem are immense - - I will only point out one approach to it that is dependent on writing in the 17th century. "Sonne" is both a person of the trinity and the illuminating sphere in the sky, about which Donne and his fellows speculated endlessly. "Done" is a pun on the author's own name, and "more" is a pun on the maiden name of his wife, who was dead when this poem was written, if our current dating is correct. We tend to scorn puns because our language is not as fluid or as magical as it was in the 17th century. For Donne, however, the links between Christ and the sun, himself and his death, his wife and the joy of living were not crossword puzzle games, but the threads that shaped his life. No one bound by static orthography or a frozen conception of language could have written this poem. Its author might have understood more easily than we do the puns blood = water and flower = heart in the Aztec books, or the origin of writing in the union of light from a star with the footprints of birds in Chinese mythology.
Copyright © 1984 and 1996 by Karl Young.