“My Printer must, haue somwhat to his share”: Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones, and Crafting Books

摘要

Isabella Whitney’s reputation rests, in large part, on her status as England’s first professional woman writer and her ‘foundational relationship with early print culture’. Whitney’s books are therefore fertile ground for the recent material turn in scholarship on early modern women’s writing. Critical attention has increasingly turned to the study of how women’s texts were mediated by the material conditions of their production and transmission. Acts of publication are understood to be part of a wider communications system involving a series of producers, authorial and non-authorial. Women’s engagement in book production meant that their texts were mediated through the work of booksellers, printers, and other agents in the print trade. We need to remember that writers make texts, but books are made by publishers and printers. Whitney’s own working relationship with her printer-publisher, Richard Jones, is well-known. Yet, the precise nature of Jones’s role in the production of Whitney’s books and her fashioning as an ‘Auctor’ remains shadowy, largely because questions of agency have not been explored through the technologies of book production. In order to understand the ways in which Whitney’s texts were mediated through print, and her participation in this process, this essay will focus on how her books of poetry were made in partnership with Jones. Modes of print authorship were a product of the book trade, of how books were made and sold. Publisher-stationers, like Jones, contributed to the ‘invention of the commodified literary author’ through the work they undertook in producing books and creating a market and readership for these works. Publisher-stationers were not passive conduits between the author and the book; instead their work was constitutive of this relationship. That said, how the author was fashioned in the book was not fully determined by the stationer’s work since multiple agents and different forms of materiality are always involved in the production of meaning – bibliographic markers can only tell us so much about the fashioning of authorial identity. The rhetoric of authorial presence, for example, may be anchored in bibliographic features, but it also points beyond the pages of the book by situating the speaker and her auditors in space and time. We therefore need to pay attention to the complex interplay between different forms of materiality, from bibliographic markers to constructions of voice and the crafting of texts.