Introduction
“His mind and his hand went together,” wrote John Heminges and Henry Condell about the author of Mr. William Shakspeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623). “And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”1 With these words, Heminges and Condell placed William Shakespeare at the center of a literary tradition stretching from classical conceptions of the furor poeticus to the Romantic construction of innate literary “genius.”2 The unblotted lines have become evidence either of someone struck by divine inspiration or, as Virginia Woolf saw it, of someone with a uniquely “incandescent” mind. Either way, they figure their author as free from the clutches of a clumsy material world and as having evaded a social and political life characterized by commitments, responsibilities, and obligations. Woolf suggests that because we know so little about his personal life in comparison to poets like “Donne or Ben Jonson or Milton,” Shakespeare’s works appear as if free from “all desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness to some hardship or grievance,” and he appears as the only human who “got his work expressed completely.”3 His work continues to strike readers as sacred because, as Jonathan Bate explains, “ ‘genius’ was a category invented to account for what was peculiar about Shakespeare.”4 The blotless papers foretell this greatness and also teach each generation of new writers that anyone not born with or visited by the same transcendent genius who presumes a similar “easinesse” will be criticized for laziness and narcissism.
Ironically, Ben Jonson, cited by Woolf above as one of Shakespeare’s more resolutely worldly contemporaries, famously criticized his friend and erstwhile rival for laziness and narcissism. He treated the praise by Heminges and Condell as the setup to a punchline: “I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand.”5 Though laced with the “desire to protest” that Woolf found characteristic of all writers with minds tethered to worldly concerns—and featuring an envy characteristically peculiar to Jonson—his quip also marks the beginning of an ultimately failed project to decouple authorial effortlessness from popular understandings of literary achievement. Jonson’s critique was not just of how, in never doubting himself, Shakespeare sometimes “fell into those things, could not escape laughter.”6 The problem, as he saw it, was that applauding mere “easinesse” betrayed a perspective toward literary production that prioritized superficial rubrics for judgment, on the part of both writers and readers, over the effortful labor of self-reflection. Jonson felt that preemptively approving of the man because of the cleanliness of his papers meant overlooking not just the work that went into his writing but also the work that remained to be done.
The unblotted papers are a myth. Most scholars now agree with Grace Ioppolo that the obvious traces of reworking that appear throughout Shakespeare’s plays reveal him to be a “deliberate, consistent, and persistent reviser who worked in an infinite variety of ways,” and decades of study have confirmed that several of his plays were the result of collaboration both with other playwrights and with the actors in his company who translated his words into performances.7 The only surviving example of his hand at work, pages from Sir Thomas More, is itself a messy thicket that contains blots, corrections, and insertions made by a variety of authors. Valorizing Shakespeare for effortless, solitary writing may consequently be understood as a symptom of how modern—that is, post-Romantic—conceptions of authorship have corrupted understandings of literary production throughout history. As Linda Brodkey observes, modern readers often imagine the “scene of writing” as one in which the author is seen “not as a participant in the act of writing but as a recipient of written language.”8 Despite knowing that writing is “woven into the very fabric of her social life” as a writer and writing teacher, she confesses that even she remains “fatally attracted” to a romanticized image of “a solitary writer alone in a cold garret working into the small hours of the morning by the thin light of a candle.”9 This view of composition, centered on the act of setting words to paper, makes it seem as though writing primarily occurs as solitary flashes of insight. Anyone who has ever written a sentence, though, knows that the error-free transcription of one’s thoughts requires more than simply warding off distraction, habit, and accident. Each sentence culminates time spent not just internalizing the mechanics of transcription but slowly coming to claim a language that no one, not even Shakespeare, innately possesses.
Elizabethan writers acquired the language of poetry by transcribing and imitating many passages from admired authors, studying a variety of forms and styles, reading widely across culturally significant source materials, and even collaborating with other authors.10 Not only did they borrow heavily from classical and contemporary models, but they also treated one another’s texts as invitations to appropriation, repurposing, parody, and response. Their minds and hands, even when working in frictionless tandem, both took a lot of direction from others’ books. As Constance Furey points out, in contrast to views of authorship linked to “assertions of originality and proprietary self-expression,” premodern models “were more often explicit about the importance of collaborative production and social influences.”11 A courtly culture prioritizing sprezzatura may well have incentivized these writers to conceal the painstaking work that went into their verses and boast about their blotlessness, but the ink-stained paper trail was as much of an open secret as the hours a courtier may have put into learning a new dance.12
Even if Shakespeare possessed a “natural” fluency for poetic composition, to assume that the texts we read today have never had their words rewritten overlooks the interventions of generations of editors, directors, actors, conservators, abridgers, and teachers. What happened after he shared his lines with Heminges and Condell is as important as what happened before, at least from our perspective as readers. Shakespeare became “Shakespeare,” Jack Lynch explains, through a process by which his work “continues to be improved” by editors and directors, “continues to be co-opted” by political factions of all stripes, “continues to be domesticated” by bowdlerized volumes and school curricula, and “continues to be worshipped.”13 In reconstructing him in our own image and for our own purposes, it is “we, and our varied engagement,” Emma Smith insists, “that make Shakespeare.”14 Pointing this out does not mean that Shakespeare himself contributed nothing, that he lacked talent, or even that “our holy relics are in reality pigs’ bones.”15 It is merely to reaffirm that the indisputable genius attributed to him owes less to whether or not his works emerged from him already perfect than to how we keep blotting his pages for him so that they might stay perfect.
We do this for him because Shakespeare’s singular status atop the literary canon does not simply reflect the movements of his mind and hand; it also reflects the deft management of those with a stake in his reputation. The folio’s reference to his scarcely blotted pages may have been part of a project of “monumentalizing” his oeuvre; in promoting the risky venture of printing the first folio, Heminges and Condell were also publicists.16 The Romantics’ valorization of Shakespeare’s “native woodnotes wild” may be understood as part of the broader eighteenth-century cultural promotion of the exceptionality of Englishness in general.17 Pride in their homegrown icon corroborated a nationalistic program that emboldened the British against other imperial powers and enabled them to justify their domination over colonized people.18 As Gauri Viswanathan recounts, the use of English literature in educational curricula began during England’s colonial occupation of India at the start of the nineteenth century. As English became the language of British colonial administration, the study of English literature (which had recently installed Shakespeare as its major icon) became a prerequisite for the administrative integration of colonized Indians.19 At the vanguard of imperial hegemony as a “mask of conquest,” Shakespeare’s works became the standard of literary value across the British Empire. This literary curriculum then spread to educational institutions across the Anglophone world.20 In the United States, the evaluation of English composition began with the Harvard entrance exam of 1874, and the first announcement formalizing expectations of “correct” English prose featured Shakespeare atop the examiners’ list of those considered “standard authors.”21 Such ubiquity made Shakespeare “the keystone which guarantees the ultimate stability and rightness of the category ‘Literature,’ ” as Alan Sinfield put it in 1985. Yet if Shakespeare is “representative of a category, of a theory, of which he is the only undoubted instance,” Sinfield argued, this “absurd” status makes him an “instrument within the whole apparatus of filtering whereby schools adjust young people to an unjust social order.”22 A consequence of this hegemonic influence propping up only one indisputably great author is that the signifiers of literary greatness have become difficult to distinguish from the traits of that author. Noting this, Wendy Beth Hyman and Hillary Eklund lament that “Shakespeare, perhaps more than any other literary figure, has been trotted out as a symbol of white cultural supremacy.”23 The “natural” ease with which this early modern poet supposedly wrote has unfortunately implicated him in a centuries-long narrative about supposedly “natural” hierarchies of race, sex, gender, class, and ability.
None of this is Shakespeare’s fault, nor does it necessarily determine whether the texts are, in themselves, rewarding to read. Yet it has become difficult to teach Shakespeare as literature without tacitly corroborating ideological assumptions about aesthetic distinction. Partly in response to a growing ambivalence about canonicity, scholars have for the past half century situated early modern literary texts amid the circulation of social energies and the organization of political and ideological power, most notably under the methodological frameworks of New Historicism and cultural materialism.24 These methods, part of what Joseph North has termed the “historicist/contextualist” paradigm, have meant that the professional study of Shakespeare has involved cultivating skills in research, explanation, and evidence within increasingly specialized domains of cultural and political life.25 While this crucial scholarship has restored early modern literary texts to the social and material world of their origin, what has been left unaddressed is how the precondition of this scholarship is the room and board provided by a prevailing presumption of Shakespeare’s genius. Perhaps nowhere is this dynamic clearer than in the undergraduate classroom, where students approach early modern texts accompanied by contextualizing introductions, explanatory apparatuses, and primary documents curated as textual interlocutors. These encounters take for granted that the greatness of the text warrants not only the time scholars have spent compiling these materials, but the time students must spend poring over them. Doug Eskew puts it plainly: “Students recognize that we tend to ask them to dig deeply into Shakespeare’s life and times for no other reason than to wrap their minds around the Shakespearean text. What is unclear to many students is why the Shakespeare text is worth all of that effort.”26 Compelling students to learn about Shakespeare and his world comes, as do all undergraduate courses, with an opportunity cost whereby students lose the chance to learn about other authors and other worlds. Thus, his privileged place in the category of “literature” reproduces itself.
Valued by proponents across the political spectrum, Shakespeare is perhaps the most unassailable element of what it means to be educated in literary history that our culture still acknowledges. Recognizing that one of the outcomes, intentional or not, of courses bearing his name is the maintenance of this status should give the professors of those courses some pause. The Shakespearean fits Bruce Robbins’s definition of “the beneficiary”: “the relatively privileged person in the metropolitan center who contemplates his or her unequal relations with persons at the less-prosperous periphery and feels or fears that in some way their fates are linked.”27 If the value projected on Shakespeare is for many synecdoche for the value of literary study in general, linking our fates to those of our colleagues, Shakespeare scholars might take it upon themselves to present a more clear-eyed vision of what educational encounters with literary texts can accomplish. We may begin by recognizing that there are pedagogical consequences to affiliating literary merit with inspired genius rather than with the collaborative efforts of individuals, institutions, and ideologies engaging in ongoing work—consequences like the tacit ideological approbation, such as through the elevation of one author over all others, of individualism, hierarchy, and competition. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues, these values undermine the academy’s capacity to promote generosity, openness, and genuinely critical thought.28
When pressed to articulate the role of literature in education, most teachers and defenders argue that literary study cultivates “critical thinking,” which Fitzpatrick defines as “the contemplation of ideas from multiple points of view, the weighing of evidence for and against, the selection among carefully considered alternatives,” arguing that these capacities are weakened by an emphasis on competition.29 John Dewey offers a more fundamental definition, describing critical thinking as “suspended judgment,” the essence of which is “inquiry to determine the nature of the problem before proceeding to attempts at its solution.”30 In practice, critical thinking operates via a “double movement” involving both induction and deduction, discovery and testing.31 Shakespeare’s plays have doubtless afforded generations of students the opportunity to think critically by challenging them to suspend their prior assumptions about concepts like justice, honor, masculinity, or race. How often, however, has Shakespeare’s greatness (a greatness potentially reconfirmed by his seemingly robust ability to promote critical thought) itself been subjected to suspended judgment? Students enroll in our classes to learn about “Shakespeare,” after all—not necessarily about the topics his texts make available—and one topic they are often interested in is his singular fame. This means that many of them arrive having been subjected to the mythology of his genius and in possession of an assumption ready to be tested. As teachers we consequently wield a unique ability to lay bare how the most singular of literary authors did not, in fact, reach the crest of the literary canon without some help. We might elucidate “literature,” then, as cultural process constituted by individuals and institutions working together, and thereby help our students reconceptualize the scene of writing as one in which they have a stake and a future. Doing so means offering students a conception of authorship rooted not in effortless production but in a process of continual critical reexamination, a process characterized by blotted lines, hesitations, and revisions.
This book argues that early modern poets like Shakespeare understood their own scenes of writing as animated by discomposition. Linking composition, “the action of putting together or combining,” with discompose, “to destroy or disturb the composure of (a person, the mind, emotions, etc.),” discomposition describes something previously presumed whole or complete in a state of disarray. Its associated definitions link affective poise (“to perturb, agitate, unsettle”), formal logic (“to disturb the order or arrangement of; to throw into confusion or disarray”), and political practice (“to dismiss, cast out from a position or office”).32 Alongside claiming that experiences of discomposition were fundamental to how early modern writers understood the practice of poesy, in reflective interludes following each chapter I explore how experiences of discomposition might become integral to the pedagogy of early modern English literature. A commitment to unsettling routinized habits thus informs the structure and style of this book, witnessed not just in how it considers the ramifications of historicist scholarship even as it engages in such scholarship, but also in its attempt to translate for modern classrooms how both the practices of early modern poesy and the academic study of literature are both ideally undertaken in a bustling, busy, noncompetitive space in which a variety of writers and thinkers collaborate. By setting aside the alluring image of writing as solitary, blotless transcription, this book examines discomposition at work, such as within the relationship between reading and writing, the generative irreconcilability between guided instruction and free expression, the doubtfulness and thrill of invention, the labor-intensive nature of revision, the relationship between authors and editors, and the necessity of failure.
Discomposition
John Florio’s English-Italian Dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes (1598), translates the Italian discomposto as “uncomposed, shap[e]less, formeless.”33 In 1624, John Donne would deploy the anglicized form of this word (the earliest citation in the OED) in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions to describe humanity’s self-destructive tendencies: “Is this the honour which Man hath by being a litle world, That he hath these earthquakes in him selfe, sodaine shakings; these lightnings, sodaine flashes; these thunders, sodaine noises; these Eclypses, sodain offuscations, and darknings of his senses; these Blazing stars, sodaine fiery exhalations; these Rivers of blood, sodaine red waters? Is he a world to himselfe onely therefore, that he hath inough in himself, not only to destroy, and execute himselfe, but to presage that execution upon himselfe; … O perplex’d discomposition, O ridling distemper, O miserable condition of Man!”34 As Donne’s use implies, discomposition conjures not a brick-by-brick reversal of composition’s steady process, but a “sodaine” affliction: “[I]n a minute a Canon batters all, overthrowes all, demolishes all.” Something that had been put together with intention—a bodily comportment, an artwork, a state—finds itself jolted into disarray.
Yet despite Donne’s hyperbole, discomposition does not always or necessarily imply wholesale destruction. George Crabb, in Crabb’s English Synonymes, first published in 1816, affiliates “discompose” with “derange” and “disconcert,” distinguishing these terms as lending specificity to the more generalizable “disorder”: “To derange is to disorder that which has been systematically arranged or put in a certain range; and to disconcert is to disorder that which has been put together by concert or contrivance… . To discompose is a species of derangement in regard to trivial matters: thus a tucker, a frill, or a cap may be discomposed.” Crabb elaborates that “those who are particular as to their appearance are careful not to have any part of their dress discomposed.”35 As an unsettling of abiding protocols, be they of dress, decorum, valuation, ethics, or law, discomposition lays bare the vulnerabilities, flimsiness, or limitations of those protocols.
Seemingly trivial derangements of form were the lifeblood of early modern poetics. “A sweet disorder in the dress, / Kindles in clothes a wantonness,” intoned Robert Herrick in a lyric emblematic of the period’s aesthetic commitments. Herrick’s “Delight in Disorder” dismisses “art” that is “too precise in every part” and (as students thrill to point out) rustles its iambic meter with trochees and trips up readers with slant rhymes. The poem thus indirectly reflects a broader poetic program that Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld has described as “indecorous thinking”: “Early modern poetic theory … treated decorum as the guarantee of plausibility: decorum was the abstraction of reigning ideological commitments into a principle of design. Indecorum, by contrast, provided poetry with a means of distinguishing itself from the world and its dominant ideologies: rather than mediation, indecorum performed the work of disarticulation.” Rosenfeld locates poetic indecorousness not in “simple inversion or undoing of decorum’s regulation” but in the cultivation of “an alternative method” rooted in the imaginative potential of excessive figuration.36 The conspicuous use of supposedly ornamental figures violated a principle of classical rhetoric—the subordination of elocutio to inventio—thereby threatening to subvert expectations of reason and replace logic with eloquence.
Rosenfeld’s rich claim elaborates on a strain of criticism accentuating how authors in the period recognized chance, error, and disobedience as fundamental to literary epistemology. Michael Witmore’s Culture of Accidents (2001) traces the way that “accidents,” described by Francis Bacon as “intellectual monstrosities,” existed for early modern writers as “halfway between the realms of fact and fiction” and as such linked “with artistic creation.”37 Confrontation with the accidental and previously unthinkable, Witmore suggests, was a catalyst for a shared project of making sense anew, a project linking imagination and intellectual accommodation. In The Inarticulate Renaissance (2009), Carla Mazzio focuses on instances of verbal accidents to elucidate how “departures from rhetorical competence could be seen as enabling new forms of thinking, feeling, and acting.” Events such as a misdelivered phrase, an incoherent muttering, or an aposiopesis, Mazzio argues, “could generate a halting effect in the process of reception as well as transmission, a halting that could make space for alternative temporalities and directions of thought otherwise eclipsed by the flow of verbal fluency.”38 It was precisely at moments when the received or inherited forms of knowledge making were discomposed, when “competence” faded, that imaginative thinking and scientific knowledge making could proceed.
Hit with a sudden shock, confronted by an intellectual monstrosity or by the unexpected allure of an erring lace, how did a person come to carry it off, fashion it into new knowledge, or react gracefully? One response may be to forge ahead without engaging or even changing course, overpowering contingencies through the sheer force of custom and habit. Another may be to crumble and surrender, amazed or astonished into inarticulacy. Another response still, accommodation, may be driven by a variety of creative strategies. Katherine Eggert suggests that early modern thinkers, increasingly aware of the limitations of humanism as an intellectual framework, cultivated “disknowledge,” which she defines as “a deliberate means by which a culture can manage epistemological risk.”39 At the heart of disknowledge is a “conscious act of choosing one system, body, or mode of knowledge over another, even if the one chosen is manifestly retrograde, ill informed, poorly supported, sloppily organized, or even simply wrong.”40 For Eggert, this conscious choice—the choice to extend the lifespan of humanism, or to accredit alchemy alongside emerging empirical sciences—resembles the claims made by early modern poetic thinking. Citing references to alchemy in Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy (first published in 1595), Eggert sees this foundational text in early modern poetic theory as “turning away from fact-based modes and tenets of learning to modes and tenets that are not responsible for the truth in the same way.”41 Sidney’s poet—as I will also argue at length in chapter 2—willingly confronted, even provoked, discomposition because it heralded intellectual and imaginative liberation. Feeling oneself break free of binding commitments, disrupting the presumed stability of the order of things, was for Sidney a prerequisite for poetic insight and artful making.
Most studies of early modern poetic education, including this one, owe an enormous debt to T. W. Baldwin’s William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Less Greeke (1944), but such studies must reckon with Baldwin’s inability to depict the ways that grammar school students came to claim the title of creative poets rather than that of merely emulative versifiers. While literary scholars have tended to attribute the flourishing of literature in the early modern period in part to Elizabethan grammar schools, historians such as Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine have generally characterized the educational regime as stifling, stultifying, and opposed to creativity.42 Neil Rhodes, finding a way through the impasse, has argued that it is perhaps more accurate to say that early modern literature appeared in the form of students’ “creative abuse” of the humanist pedagogical system rather than because of it.43 Jeff Dolven’s Scenes of Instruction (2007) similarly excavates a “counterimpulse” that manifests in humanist pedagogical writings as a “skepticism or despair about the very possibility of teaching.” This skepticism influenced the students who would become poets to “turn against instruction itself as a literary project.”44 Lynne Enterline’s Shakespeare’s Schoolroom (2012) also shows how “Shakespeare’s affectively charged returns to early school training in Latin grammar and rhetoric are so emotionally powerful precisely because these personifications reenact, or reengage, earlier institutional events, scenes, and forms of discipline that were not fully understood or integrated when they occurred.”45 For Enterline, the schoolroom encounter left the poets it produced perpetually at odds with themselves, torn between a desire to satisfy the stern discipline of their schoolmasters and the urge to thwart it. Indebted to these studies, this book explores how poets shaped the dissonance at the heart of poetry’s relationship to education into an ars poetica that may help modern teachers of critical writing creatively abuse the logic of undergraduate education.
Poetic discomposition—generative confusion—arises only through encounters with friction. While Ben Jonson distinguished poetry from other kinds of writerly endeavor in terms of its freedom, in keeping with his Horatian sensibilities, he did not relinquish the poet from experiences of frustration and self-doubt. Imagining a poet struggling at his writing desk, he advises,
If his wit will not arrive suddenly at the dignity of the ancients, let him not yet fall out with it, quarrel, or be over-hastily angry; offer, to turn it away from study, in a humour; but come to it again upon better cogitation; try another time, with labour. If then it succeed not, cast not away the quills, yet; nor scratch the wainscot, beat not the poor desk; but bring all to the forge, and file, again; turn it anew. There is no statute of the kingdom bids you be a poet, against your will; or the first quarter. If it come, in a year, or two, it is well.46
Part of what it took to write a poem was understanding that no one was expected to write poems at all. Bound neither by external laws nor by internal impulses, poetic composition was for Jonson a practice of freedom, which included a freedom from one’s own impulses. He understood “poesy”—the “doing,” rather than the “doer” or the “thing done”—as offering “a certain rule, and pattern of living well, and happily; disposing us to all civil offices of society.”47 In practice, this did not mean that poets could write whatever they liked, but it also did not mean they had to write only what they believed others would like. It meant that aspiring poets put in work for its own sake, trusting the process. “Whither a man’s genius is best able to reach,” Jonson argued, “thither it should more and more contend, lift and dilate itself.”48 Invoking techniques from his grammar school education—debate, elaboration, dilation—but orienting those techniques toward an unknown target, he acknowledged strain as fundamental to poetic craft: “As men of low stature, raise themselves on their toes” and “so ofttimes get even, if not eminent,” poets might attempt to surpass, rather than merely emulate, writers they found admirable.49 Anathema to poesy was complacency; even after much exercise, Jonson cautioned, poets needed to remain wary: “When we think we have got the faculty, it is even then good to resist it.”50 The heart of poesy—and the lesson of discomposition— is that writers recognize the necessity of steering into the skids of difficulty, rather than allowing either external criteria or unreflective impulse to govern their pen. Feeling momentary discomfort about not matching an implicit standard or about making a potentially dangerous new discovery, going backward to move forward, willingly pitting one’s judgment against another’s, cultivating humility: these are the maneuvers of poetic discomposition.
Jonson’s advice that poets return their work “to the forge, and file, again” reverberates in his commentary about Shakespeare’s supposedly unblotted lines. In Jonson’s own contribution to the first folio, moreover, he offers another counterbalance to the idea that Shakespeare’s scene of writing was notable for his effortlessness:
And, that he,
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat,
Upon the muses’ anvil: turn the same,
(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame;
Or for the laurel, he may gain a scorn,
For a good poet’s made, as well as born.
And such wert thou.51
Great poets like Shakespeare may be born with natural talent, but they are “made,” Jonson suggests, through the continual exercise of art.52 Their successes were the product not of the victory of nature over art, but of the sparks between them. Accordingly, anyone who wants to compose a “living line” may be inspired to similar exercise by observing the careful craftsmanship of Shakespeare’s “well-turnéd, and true-filéd” examples.53 The blacksmithing metaphors reflect Jonson’s broader view that good writing required continual labor: “For a man to write well, there are required three necessaries. To read the best authors, observe the best speakers: and much exercise of his own style.” In his elegy, then, we see him advising aspiring poets to emulate the sweaty labors of a writer who had to “consider, what ought to be written; and after what manner”; “think, and excogitate his matter”; then “choose his words, and examine the weight of either”; and finally to “take care in placing, and ranking both matter, and words.”54
Less concerned with either specific poets or specific poems than with the work of writing itself, this book places Shakespeare alongside an array of writers and teachers of writing from both early modernity and the modern academy. Though each chapter observes a different poet at work—George Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, John Davies of Hereford, Lady Anne Southwell, and William Shakespeare—because each of these poets was in some way preoccupied with the dynamics of teaching and learning, their writings collectively enable a broader examination of the relationship between literature and writing instruction. Across the reflections that follow each chapter, I draw on these writers’ experiences to reframe issues relating to writing instruction that still have purchase in the contemporary university classroom. Teachers like John Warner and Susan D. Blum have foregrounded these issues in books like Warner’s Why They Can’t Write (2018) and Blum’s “I Love Learning, I Hate School” (2017), and the field of composition studies routinely reflects on its own methods in ways that literary studies might take more seriously. Geoffrey Sirc’s English Composition as a Happening (2002) challenges compositionists to restore aesthetic sensibilities—as well as risk and chance—to students’ encounters with writing. David Smit’s The End of Composition Studies (2004) argues for further integration between the work of writing and different discursive and disciplinary domains. Hannah J. Rule’s Situating Writing Processes (2019) peers closely at the writing process as physically situated within lived material circumstances, a point Asao B. Inoue, in Labor-Based Grading Contracts (2019), takes to heart in arguing for a writing pedagogy focused on effort rather than outcomes.55 Ideas from scholars in rhetoric and composition studies such as these don’t just inform and shape how this book contextualizes the writing processes of early modern poets; they also, I suggest, provide teachers of early modern literature pathways for rethinking the role of writing in our pedagogy.
In chapter 1, the first published teacher of vernacular English poetics, George Gascoigne, offers a bedrock insight into how the acquisition and development authorial style relies on the free exercise of choice—a point made both by his humanist antecedent Desiderius Erasmus and by modern critics of writing instruction such as Warner and Blum. In chapter 2, Philip Sidney defends poetry by situating experiences of hesitation at the intersection of poetic thinking and rhetorical argument, demonstrating—as the writing teachers Laura Wilder and Wendy Bishop also demonstrate—that like critical thinking, poetic invention stems from the moments when technical knowledge yields to uncertainty. In chapter 3, the self-consciously mediocre John Davies of Hereford, who was also a teacher of ornate handwriting, considers the material conditions that preclude undertaking serious revisions of one’s work. Davies anticipates how compositionists like Inoue critique standards of evaluation that overlook how the time and resources needed to meet them are often unavailable to underprivileged and working-class writers. Chapter 4 studies how Lady Anne Southwell’s poetry, as well as the textual artifacts on which it was inscribed, reveals poetic writing to be an opportunity to exchange ideas and learn from interlocutors, demonstrating how the process of editing might serve as a model for critical engagement aligned with Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s call for “generous thinking.” The final chapter studies William Shakespeare not as a writer who never blotted his lines but as one who, especially in Love’s Labor’s Lost, was preoccupied with the contradictions of “perfection” as they applied to literary composition. Presenting him as someone who understood that the difference between literary and technical “performance” lay in the former’s commitment to failure, the book ends with an appeal to dismantle the ways in which professionalism provokes performance anxiety and stifles critical thought.
Varied in terms of their backgrounds, chosen genres, and imagined audiences, the authors studied in this book’s chapters collectively help us imagine how an early modern literature classroom, even one focused on Shakespeare, might resist a one-size-fits-all account of writerly process. When early modern poets sat down to compose, their experiences were not alike because their social and economic backgrounds were not alike. In their shared commitment to poesy, however, they all understood, as we might help our students understand, that experiences of discomposition were essential to their practice. To further establish the connections between these poets’ experiences and the way we might help our students undertake the written work of literary criticism, the remainder of this introduction reconsiders the relationship between literary epistemology and writing instruction in the modern academy.
Poesy as Critical Pedagogy
To teach Shakespearean literature, professors must also be writers—of syllabuses, assignment prompts, essay comments, and student evaluations, but also of reviews, book chapters, peer-reviewed articles, and monographs like this one. We know that much of our writing requires us to draw on others’ words as prompts, share drafts, ask trusted peers for advice, and imagine our words reaching specific audiences. What Shakespeare professors do as writers, however, often appears quite distinct from what they have historically been asked to do as teachers. This need not be the case.
The disciplinary field of Shakespeare studies now sustains scholars of history, material culture, aesthetics, adaptation, sexuality, politics, race, gender, ecology, science, law, and education; among them are theorists, formalists, philologists, book historians, theatrical practitioners, activists, archivists, poets, artists, and teachers. One thing that brings all of us together is a collection of texts that have accrued around the name “Shakespeare.” These texts include his plays and poems but also, crucially, the works of dozens of writers both major and minor. We study Marlowe and Donne and Milton, but also poets who may never become household names and texts that few others would willingly want to read. Another thing we share is our awareness that when we produce scholarship, we produce it for one another. At our annual conferences, a text may be critiqued for its complicity in settler-colonialist hegemony and may also be studied (sometimes by the same scholar) for the way it discloses relationships between rhetorical figuration and scientific experimentation. Shakespeare studies, as a discipline, thus accommodates both a love for and detachment from its literary objects, in part because its commitments are no longer simply to literary authors but to the world they inhabited and to the world within which their texts still exert influence. Like all humanistic work, ours is driven by scholars making free choices about what to study and what kinds of attention to expend. It also requires that we justify those choices, usually in writing, for other disciplinary stakeholders through processes like peer review. This twinned commitment to freedom and responsibility sometimes generates tension, debate, and even discomfort among members of our discipline, but without risking these outcomes, the field would become barren. The vibrancy of Shakespeare studies as a field of academic inquiry is rooted, ultimately, in the field never being fully comfortable with itself.
An undergraduate course on Shakespearean literature might allow students to similarly access an invigorating interplay between freedom and responsibility. Empowering students lies at the heart of Ayanna Thompson and Laura Turchi’s intervention in Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose (2016), which argues that “Shakespeare needs to be the vehicle instead of the destination for advanced learners.”56 Treating Shakespeare as a destination, Thompson and Turchi observe, precipitates a pervasive educational problem: students end up submitting what they think the professor wants rather than thinking for themselves. Reverberating Paolo Freire’s critique of the “banking model” of education, they observe that teachers who become “dispensers of received Shakespeare” risk restricting their students to “prescribed and closed interpretations.”57 This dynamic is particularly apparent in Shakespeare classrooms because his “cultural capital functions as a structural constraint,” and a symptom of treating literature as cultural capital is that students try to make good on their investment.58 They sense that they must be able to persuasively convey to other wielders of that capital that they “get it,” that they know what the texts are “about” or even what they are “really about,” and this emphasis on acquisition breeds a teacher-centric learning environment. To mitigate this, Thompson and Turchi promote classwork such as translating or imitating Shakespeare’s work, writing about film trailers, doing creative assignments that “finish the scene,” or engaging in student-driven research projects. These exercises, not incidentally, echo early modern writing practices: Shakespeare, too, would have translated and “modernized” older texts, adapted across media, and finished others’ scenes. Yet Thompson and Turchi also recognize that movement from creativity to independent critical thought requires more than creative freedom. It also demands the cultivation of intellectual responsibility. Activities like “write-to-learn assignments,” free-writes, and workshop discussions, they note, “are insufficient as demonstrations of independent facility with complex texts.” One of the markers of independent facility, they suggest, is the student’s ability to “generate a complex text in response.”59
If we want to position Shakespeare as a “vehicle” that enables student writing in our courses, we might consider how a “complex” response to Shakespeare’s texts could begin by asking students to reevaluate why these are the texts under study in the first place. Laying out the history of the ideological domination undertaken under the banner of English literature, however, would be insufficient as pedagogy, because sharing only such critiques would offer students “prescribed and closed interpretations” in a new vein. Regardless of the political content of course materials, the political underpinnings of how the classroom environment has been structured may still undermine critical thinking. According to bell hooks, the “bourgeois values” that “overdetermine social behavior in the classroom [and] undermine the democratic exchange of ideas” reinforce a status quo that silences and marginalizes students who are “unwilling to accept without question the assumptions and values held by privileged classes.”60 Even when professors “embrace the tenets of critical pedagogy,” or even when the “subject matter taught in such classes might reflect professorial awareness of intellectual perspectives that critique domination,” hooks notes that it is often the case that in such classes, the “classroom dynamics remain conventional, business as usual.”61 This business, the business of social reproduction through an institutional logic equating schooling with obedience, means that critiquing a canon to make it more inclusive and representative falls short of revising the terms under which “literature” as a concept can be interrogated and redefined. “It is much easier to make the canon representative [of a pluralist society] than a university,” John Guillory argues. Political reform demands more than revising the contents of the literary canon; it requires addressing how access to “the means of literary production” remains unequally distributed.62
What students read is often less meaningful than how they are taught to write in response to it, as J. Hillis Miller explains: “The danger is that teachers of composition may assume that the reading chosen for the course can be liberating while the formal instruction in the rules of correct composition remains the same. This does not work. It does not work because the formal aspect of composition is even more powerful in imposing an ideology than is the thematic content of what is read.”63 Figures like “Shakespeare, Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf (or, for that matter, Derrida),” Miller suggests, “needed to defy standards of correctness in order to say what they wanted to say.”64 While it doubtless is of crucial importance for students to encounter Shakespeare as situated alongside other writers—those from his period and those from radically different contexts and backgrounds—it is also of crucial importance that students apprehend continuities between the writers on the syllabus and the writing they will be asked to undertake.
Joseph Harris observes that while writing classes may enlist critical readings and critical theory, even when such texts demystify “the workings of literary texts and then the codes of power,” the “workings of this criticism itself have often remained mysterious.”65 To combat this, he suggests that professors and students collectively engage questions such as, “How did Barthes actually go about writing his mythologies? How did Foucault construct his genealogies? What features did they look for in the texts they read? How did they move as writers from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph?”66 Why not ask—and attempt to answer—such questions of early modern literary texts in order to demystify the labor of literary production? Why not ask and attempt to answer such questions of ourselves, as writers authorized to teach students how to read and write about early modern literature? “Unless we share with students how we approach the activities of reading and writing,” Harris warns, “we run the risk of once again casting them simply as the spectators of criticism, who are shown the results of our work but are not engaged in doing it, who are asked to ventriloquize our positions and interpretations but not to form their own.”67
Foregrounding the fact that writing poetry well requires a degree of discomfort will allow us to place literary craft in closer proximity to the method at the heart of critical engagements with literary texts: close reading. Students do close readings so that they might produce close readings—it is a practice as well as a thing, a reading that is also a writing. “The ability to perform close readings,” Thompson and Turchi suggest, “distinguishes between those who think they know what a complex text says (or have previously been told what the text says), and those who can independently grapple, wrestle and tease out subtle details that matter.”68 At the core of close reading is a willingness to read tactically, to make conscious choices, and to go against the grain—and then to test one’s conclusions. Close readers must “grapple” or “wrestle” because they must do more with a text than simply understand it. Annette Federico capaciously defines the practice as “the cultivation of self-consciousness about the reading experience, a desire for more awareness of what’s going on—the kind of reading that opens the door to a deeper, more critical understanding of the particular work being read, and of the experience of reading as a whole.”69 The reader starts with something small and local, and casts lines outward—to other parts of the text, to recollections drawn from personal experience—and fashions a claim that, the reader hopes, will be persuasive to others.
This experimental practice accords with Dewey’s account of the school’s essential function as a “social institution.” For Dewey, school ideally presents social reality in its “embryonic form” so that its overwhelming complexities do not lead children either to lose their “power of orderly reaction” or to become so stimulated as to become “either unduly specialized or else disintegrated.”70 As part of this socializing process, schools utilize literature and language study—but they must not do so merely as “the expression of thought.” They must be “social instruments” whereby the “individual comes to share the ideas and feelings of others.”71 Just as poesy, according to Jonson, disposes its practitioners to “all civil offices of society,” Dewey imagines a practice of education that would prepare students to think on their feet as they engage with the world. Education, as he envisions it, requires discomposition; it “must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience” wherein the “process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.”72 Close reading satisfies this dimension of education because, when done well, it invites readers not just to deconstruct their assumptions, but to restructure their discovered knowledge into something that can be shared.
One way to think about the transition from close reading to critical writing is as paying a great deal of attention to a text before paying a great deal of attention to textual production, but in practice these moves are interlinked and reciprocal. When one is choosing what to quote, what to paraphrase and summarize, or what questions to apply to a text, writing becomes an instrument for reading, and reading becomes integral to writing. Selecting a passage to block quote pushes its features to the foreground of the writer’s attention; pointing out a specific detail amid one’s prose makes that detail part of the latent logic of both the text that is written about and the text that is being written. Substitute “writing” for “reading” in Federico’s definition, and we arrive at something that has many affinities with Warner’s account of a key component of the writer’s practice: “Writers must learn from their experiences. A fancy term for this is ‘metacognition,’ or thinking about thinking.”73 Warner’s writer, moreover, also sounds a lot like Jonson’s account of the poet pounding his desk: “A significant part of the writer’s practice … is recognizing that writing is difficult, that it takes many drafts to realize a finished product, and that you’re never going to be as good as you wish.”74 The writer and the poet thus resemble Federico’s close reader, who confronts a continual “desire for more awareness of what’s going on” and assumes that there are always more questions to ask.
Composing literary criticism constitutes a writing with more than a writing about, a form of writing prompted and provoked by engaging another’s writing in one’s own. Jonathan Kramnick notes that literary criticism is “unique among interpretative practices” in that it “shares a medium with its object.” The consequence of this unique relationship is that “the interpretative act of criticism is inescapably creative.” Writing a critical reading is a practice of making, as Kramnick calls them, “novel artifacts” that register the entanglement of one’s imaginative and creative perspective with those prompted and prodded by the language of the text being studied.75 Criticism is a form of writing that blurs the distinction between reading and writing, and the practice of undertaking it constitutes a set of skills that are not easily acquired or easily explained—even at the level, as Kramnick elegantly demonstrates, of introducing quotations from a text into one’s own prose. The knowledge-making of literary criticism thus often depends on what Ben Knights calls “forms of bewilderment.”76 When a literary critic offers a “reading” of a text, by navigating alongside and against prior readings their reading steers into the skids of a disputable moment. As Knights suggests, “The object of knowledge (whatever the critic, or group, or student essay writer may in fact make out of the text or texts in front of them) is inherently unstable.”77 This instability is often undermined, however, by the way in which literature classrooms are premised on professors’ posture of knowingness, leaving the ways in which literary scholars arrive at their own critical insights mystically beyond the grasp of students.
One thing that professors know that their students may not automatically intuit is that professors are not unveiling what a text means; they are constructing it. The way that professors construct this meaning, Knights explains, involves a lot of trial and error:
Inasmuch as students find themselves longing for the dogmatic, they are perpetually teased with shape-changing complexities, theoretical cross-dressing, one conceptual overlay succeeding another. The whole thing can come to seem to students arbitrary, the safest recourse to lie low. Yet the instability of the object of knowledge (what it is that you might know or be able to do as a result of this lecture, this seminar, this morning in the library) is common to all “high” versions of the English discipline. It resides within a tension between linear, propositional knowledge (which favors accumulation and authority, and is reinforced by the recent explosion of research specialization) and conversation. And it lends itself only very obliquely to calibration against the behaviorist scheme of the “intended learning outcome.”78
Criticism’s objects of knowledge do not carry with them instruction manuals or recipes. When we challenge students to invent their own readings of literary texts, then, how, exactly, are we teaching them to do so? A “curriculum conceptualised in terms of ‘delivery’ drives towards summary interpretation, and safe closure,” Knights argues. Unsettling the logic of delivery leads to the question, “What might be the pedagogic implication of taking incoherence seriously?”79 Scholars and teachers who write know from experience that producing critical writing often involves a dialectic of scrupulous study and imaginative daring. We also know that making the leap from reading to writing is rarely final; we do not just come up with something to say while we read and then produce prose suited to it. It is more likely that we oscillate between our writing and the texts we are working with, read more to write more, delete writing to produce better readings, and reframe our thinking as we check it against that of others.
What if we, professors who are also writers, laid bare for our students that among the hardest and most rewarding challenges of literary study is the relinquishing of readings we already possess? By this I do not mean to suggest that we give away our earned authority or withhold our experience and knowledge from our students, or that we treat students as if they have nothing to learn from us. I only mean that we acknowledge that the seat of critical invention depends on experiences of discomposition, and that these experiences manifest most visibly when we experience surprise. Such surprises are the lifeblood of classroom conversations: what may seem like trivial hiccups, such as when a student proclaims a reluctance to share an observation but proceeds to share it anyway, often throw the whole class into a moment of thoughtful uncertainty.80 Learning to apprehend that there are different systems of interpretation that may be applied at any given moment means learning that what Knights calls the friction of “one conceptual overlay succeeding another” is necessary for constructing an interpretation. Balancing one’s ethical commitments against the logic of the text, or comparing one’s subjective responses to those of others, or sustaining two different paradigmatic frames through which meaning may be constructed—the conflicts between such frames make it possible to constitute a problem that provokes complex writing.
Teaching “process” rather than “product” in courses on early modern literature is easier said than done, however. Literature courses, especially courses organized around historical periods, are often constrained by tacit or explicit imperatives to cover content. In these courses, professors are pressed to treat course design in terms of giving students exciting things to write about, but when and how students learn how to write criticism is often a secondary consideration. While scholars in composition studies have frequently pointed to the mystifying unattainability of canonicity as an occasion to debate the uses of literature in writing classes, literature professors consider the reverse—the role of writing in a literature class—much less frequently.81 If anything, literary studies has quietly assented to the marginalization, in terms of status, visibility, and funding, of rhetoric and composition in the academy. In Textual Carnivals (first published in 1991), a landmark critique of “the politics of composition,” Susan Miller observes that composition is the “low” counterpart to literary study’s “high”; it is a place for “fissures, hesitations, conflicting purposes, and the multiple origins of ideas” set against a “mythologically cool, organized space of univocal ‘statement.’ ”82 As such, composition offers academic institutions “an alternative to reading, and only reading, texts that constitute the quasi-religious ideal of a textual canon.”83 Wendy Bishop similarly argues that the institutional rift between textual “producers” and “consumers” in the academy is made manifest by first-year composition courses being taught primarily by graduate teaching assistants and contingent faculty. In this institutional structure, “the literary enterprise is steeped in self-preservation—the attempt to create a beneficial work environment for its members rather than to offer students, as is often espoused, free access to life-transforming literary texts.”84 Reflecting on this situation, Shakespeare scholars might start thinking more seriously about how undergraduates are taught the craft of critical writing—and how the people teaching them are compensated and enabled to engage in this time-consuming work. With what little institutional authority we have, we might also do more to acknowledge and promote the importance of writing instruction for the future of a more inclusive literary studies.
If we want to make critical writing a part of our pedagogy—if we expect critical writing from our students—the thematic content of what students read in an early modern literature classroom all but demands a shift in our classroom’s formal treatment of the study of writing. This shift may mean embracing a role of departmental service to emphasize that the work of writing with literature is one of the ways that conceptions of the “literary” are constituted. It may mean making part of the course content students’ own writing, because the texts we study are already overrepresented in discussions of what does and does not count as literature. To be clear, when I talk about the early modern literature classroom, I am concerned primarily with undergraduate education in introductory literature courses, and specifically with the paradigmatic Shakespeare or early English literature survey courses taken by prospective majors and students there to satisfy distribution requirements. Shakespeare still attracts students to literary study because he represents literary legitimacy, and we should see this as an opportunity and as an obligation. In my focus on undergraduate education, I am not directly concerned with method wars, graduate students, or even upper-level courses for specialized English majors. Nevertheless, I hope my emphasis on the pedagogy of literary criticism at this foundational stage of literary education can bring about changes in how we think as a field about our critical methodologies, how we train future teachers of early modern texts, and, hopefully, how we arm students to advocate for and defend the educational importance of literary study.
While I offer some concrete practical suggestions along the way, my aim throughout is not to insist on specifics. My suggestions, I know, will be unworkable in many academic contexts. Not all professors will be able to hold individual conferences with each of their students; not all professors will be allowed to trim their reading lists. The circumstances in which we teach Shakespeare are far too varied for a single pedagogical program, and so I instead offer a series of provocations that I hope more knowledge about the practices of early modern writing can help us reflect on more pointedly. Why do we assign students the reading and writing that we do? How might we present ourselves as writers, rather than as experts, when we ask our students to write for us? What goals are served by affixing grades onto student essays? How might we treat our students as we, as writers, would like to be treated? Why do we restrict class time to talking about the course readings rather than about what students might choose to do with them? Finally: how might we grant our students’ writing the advantages that Shakespeare’s papers have been given for centuries, graced not just by admiring and protective readers, but by the belief that they represent a practice—the social practice the early moderns called poesy, but which we might simply call literature—worth protecting?
1.Heminges and Condell, “Great Variety of Readers.”
2.See how Jonathan Bate puts it in The Genius of Shakespeare, esp. 157–86; also see Burwick, “Shakespeare and the Romantics.”
3.Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 63.
4.Bate, Genius of Shakespeare, 163.
5.Jonson, Discoveries, lines 802–5. All references to Ben Jonson’s poetic and prose writings will be to Jonson, Complete Poems.
6.Jonson, Discoveries, lines 820–22.
7.Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare, 5. See Jones, Shakespeare at Work; Taylor and Jowett, Shakespeare Reshaped; van Es, Shakespeare in Company.
8.Brodkey, Writing Permitted, 62.
9.Brodkey, Writing Permitted, 59.
10.William Sherman explains how Renaissance readers were taught, in the humanist schoolroom, to “mark” whatever they read with annotations and marginalia, and to record important claims, pithy phrasings, or moral maxims in commonplace books—like Jonson does throughout his Discoveries. Sherman, Used Books, 25–52. Also see Jardine and Grafton, “ ‘Studied for Action’ ”; Acheson, Early Modern English Marginalia.
11.Furey, Poetic Relations, 23. See especially Marotti, Manuscript. For recent studies corroborating and expanding on Marotti’s account, see Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt; and two essays by Dianne Mitchell: “ ‘Or Rather a Wyldernesse’ ” and “Shakespeare’s Several Begetters.” Even as literary texts increasingly made their way into print, poets and playwrights treated these media as participatory, collaborative, and fundamentally social. For two illuminating studies, see Fallon, Paper Monsters; and Pangallo, Playwriting Playgoers.
12.Stephen Greenblatt suggests that Shakespeare “evidently had a stake in hiding all of the hard work that went into his apparent fluency” because early modern culture, inspired by Baldassare Castiglione’s writings, prized sprezzatura. It was also broadly “understood that the only way to achieve this nonchalance—in writing as in dancing or riding or telling jokes—was through fantastically painstaking revisions that all had to be carefully concealed.” Stephen Greenblatt, “Did Shakespeare Ever Think Twice?,” Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2011, Life and Style, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703960804576120180958916212.
13.Lynch, Becoming Shakespeare, 275–76. Also see Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare.
14.Smith, This Is Shakespeare, 3. Sarah Olive makes a similar point, contending that the “value” currently placed on Shakespeare has been sustained by “editors, directors, conservators, teachers, and the institutions to which they belong.” Olive, Shakespeare Valued, 111.
15.Greenblatt, “What Is the History?,” 469.
16.Chartier, Author’s Hand, 167.
17.Bate explains that “Shakespeare’s rural origins proved invaluable to this process whereby he was reconstituted as the national poet. In the eighteenth century the Bard was seen as a country boy, a genius of the English earth, not a city man.” Bate, Genius of Shakespeare, 161.
18.See Dobson, National Poet. Kate Flaherty points out that Samuel Johnson’s elevation of Shakespeare in the mid-eighteenth century reflected the “priorities of Johnson’s own political and cultural project: establishing ideological supremacy of England through that of the English language.” See Flaherty, “Shakespeare and Education,” 364.
19.According to Viswanathan, exposure to texts like Shakespeare’s promoted, at least in spirit, a program of ideological indoctrination. His plays were a “source of moral values for correct behavior and action” that served as “a convenient replacement for the direct religious instruction that was forbidden.” Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, 93.
20.Kate Flaherty points out that a “recent survey by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC, 2010) found that 65 per cent of countries have Shakespeare as a named author on their curriculum and that a staggering 50 per cent of the world’s schoolchildren study Shakespeare.” Flaherty, “Shakespeare and Education,” 361.
21.Quoted in Elliot, On a Scale, 10.
22.Sinfield, “Give an Account,” 159–60.
23.Hyman and Eklund, “Introduction,” 2.
24.I join Robert Matz in seeing Horace’s injunction that poetry provide “profit and delight” as a central problem for both Elizabethan literary culture and New Historicist approaches to it. The absence of an aesthetic discourse justifying a universalized sense of “delight” meant that the work of writing could at best be equivocally linked to social and economic questions of “profit.” Arguing that a Horatian poetics as the aesthetic principle governing Renaissance literature “compellingly accommodates the wish that literature be both connected and resistant to larger historical structures,” Matz encourages literary scholars to “consider the costs of giving up claims to an aesthetic discourse.” For Matz, “the very historical nature of the aesthetic also means that the category has no absolute set of meanings or effects” and is instead “a site of conflict and contradiction.” Matz, Defending Literature, 15, 23–24. For more context on how the methodological traditions of New Historicism and cultural materialism relate to the literary canon, see Brannigan, New Historicism, esp. 9–13, 19–23.
25.North, Literary Criticism, 1.
26.Eskew, “Shakespeare, Alienation,” 40.
27.Robbins, Beneficiary, 5.
28.Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking, 33.
29.Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking, xi.
30.Dewey, How We Think, 74.
31.Dewey, How We Think, 79–80.
32.Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Discompose, v. Defs. 1, 2a, 3a,” accessed July 27, 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/53849.
33.Florio, worlde of Wordes, 105.
34.Donne, Complete Poetry, 415–16.
35.Crabb, Crabb’s English Synonymes, 273–74.
36.Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking, 7. For more on early modern and classical rhetoric’s relationship with indecorousness, see Rebhorn, “Outlandish Fears.”
37.Witmore, Culture of Accidents, 5–6.
38.Mazzio, Inarticulate Renaissance, 56.
39.Eggert, Disknowledge, 8.
40.Eggert, Disknowledge, 40.
41.Eggert, Disknowledge, 208.
42.Grafton and Jardine, Humanism to the Humanities.
43.Rhodes, Origins of English, 84. Helen Hackett concurs, concluding that while the “sheer number of Elizabethan authors who attended grammar schools points to a connection between grammar school-education and later literary achievement,” this connection should not be understood as “a smooth transition from skills and training enthusiastically imbibed at school to later literary success.” Hackett, “ ‘Better Scholar.’ ”
44.Dolven, Scenes of Instruction, 3.
45.Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 2.
46.Jonson, Discoveries, lines 3019–31.
47.Jonson, Discoveries, lines 2948–60. For the origins of Jonson’s account of “poesy,” see Clark, “Requirements of a Poet”; and Spingarn, “Sources of Jonson’s ‘Discoveries.’ ”
48.Jonson, Discoveries, lines 2148–51.
49.Jonson, Discoveries, lines 2151–53.
50.Jonson, Discoveries, lines 2144–45.
51.Jonson, “To the Memory of My Beloved,” lines 58–65.
52.For a reading of Jonson’s metaphor of the “muse’s anvil,” see Miller, “Ben Jonson,”.
53.Jonson, “To the Memory of My Beloved,” line 68.
54.Jonson, Discoveries, lines 2101–9.
55.Warner, Why They Can’t Write; Blum, “I Love Learning”; Sirc, English Composition; Smit, End of Composition Studies; Rule, Situating Writing Processes; Inoue, Labor-Based Grading Contracts.
56.Thompson and Turchi, Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose, 122.
57.Thompson and Turchi, Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose, 16.
58.Thompson and Turchi, Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose, 16.
59.Thompson and Turchi, Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose, 122.
60.hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 179.
61.hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 180.
62.Guillory, Cultural Capital, 7.
63.Miller, “Nietzsche in Basel,” 315.
64.Miller, “Nietzsche in Basel,” 313.
65.Harris, “Revision as a Critical Practice,” 581–82.
66.Harris, “Revision as a Critical Practice,” 582.
67.Harris, “Revision as a Critical Practice,” 582.
68.Thompson and Turchi, Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose, 15.
69.Federico, Engagements with Close Reading, 9.
70.Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed (1887),” 231.
71.Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed (1887),” 232.
72.Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed (1887),” 233.
73.Warner, Writer’s Practice, 19.
74.Warner, Writer’s Practice, 23.
75.Kramnick, “Criticism and Truth,” 234.
76.Knights, Pedagogic Criticism, 11.
77.Knights, Pedagogic Criticism, 11.
78.Knights, Pedagogic Criticism, 11–12.
79.Knights, Pedagogic Criticism, 158.
80.These experiences are akin to what Joseph Vogl calls “tarrying,” which requires the competition of several forces of “different principles and systems of valuation—different encodings of the social and moral world.” Vogl, On Tarrying, 31.
81.Compositionists routinely allude to Shakespeare as an emblem of writing as a noun and as an example of the limitations of the encounter between writing instruction and literary studies: he is there to “furnish an excellent training for the student’s taste,” he is there as a “brand name” who advertises “not writing but canonical texts,” he is the prompt to an “asymmetrical” conversation that he does not participate in. See Crowley, Composition in the University, 81; Brodkey, Writing Permitted, 66; Harris, Rewriting, 36. For examples of compositionists engaging with literary texts in their pedagogy, see Harris, “Undisciplined Writing”; Isaacs, “Teaching General Education Writing”; Morrow, “Role of Reading”; Fenstermaker, “Literature in the Composition Class”; Hart, Slack, and Woodruff, “Literature in the Composition Course.” For commentary on the role of writing in literature classes, see Jackson, “Connecting Reading and Writing”; Knights and Thurgar-Dawson, Active Reading; Sullivan, “Writing in the Graduate Curriculum.”
82.Miller, Textual Carnivals, 27.
83.Miller, Textual Carnivals, 6.
84.Bishop, “Literary Text,” 449.