Chapter 4

Editing

Anne Southwell’s “Extent of Paper”

Copied into the volume now known as the Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book (Folger V.b.198) is a letter that Lady Anne Southwell (1573–1633) sent to her friend, Cicely Mackwilliams, Lady Ridgeway.¹ Prompted by Ridgeway’s posture as “a sworne enemye to Poetrie,” Southwell conjures three metaphors in poetry’s defense: she calls it the “meere Herald of all Ideas,” “The worldes true vocall Harmonye, of w^ch all other artes are but parte,” and—most evocatively—“the silke thredd that stringes your chayne of pearle; w^ch being broken, your iewells fall into the rushes; & the more you seeke for it, the more it falles into the dust of obliuion” (4). Taken together, the metaphors suggest that poetry promotes invention (herald), represents the orderliness requisite of artfulness (harmony), and maintains a canon of virtuous examples for pious emulation (thread). Southwell’s letter then demonstrates poetry’s ability to forge links by extending an invitation to Ridgeway: “Therefore, (Noble & wittye Ladye) giue mee your hand, and I will lead you vpp the streame of all mankind.” She closes the epistle in a similar vein, proposing a longer discussion: “But noble Ladye, I will trouble you noe further now; yett when I haue your honorable word of reconciliation, I will then delineate out euery limme of her, & how shee is envelloped vpp w^th the rest of the artes” (4). Southwell’s defense of poetry, itself borrowing arguments from Philip Sidney’s, thus emphasizes poetry’s ability to translate instruction and inheritance into tools for building community across time and space.

Though Southwell invokes Sidney’s claims in her letter, she does not seem to have been troubled by the contradictions we saw him deal with in chapter 2. Sidney conceded that poetry could sometimes be a “nurse of abuse” but questioned, “[S]hall the abuse of a thing make the right use odious?” Southwell mirrors this move, suspecting that Ridgeway’s disdain arose because she had been exposed to “[s]ome wanton Venus or Adonis” and consequently allowed a “cloude [to] disgrace the sunne” (5).² Retorting that “[i]t is the subiect, that commends or condemnes the art,” she goes on to echo Sidney’s example of “divine” poets who “did imitate the inconceivable excellencies of God” in observing that poetry’s best works are appointed by heaven: “Then, see the kingly Prophett, that sweete singer of Israell, explicating the glorye of our god, his power in creating, his mercye in redeeming, his wisedome in preseruing; making these three, as it were the Comma, Colon, & Period to euery stanzae” (5).³ Where Southwell differs from Sidney, however, is in how his defense would go on to confound poetry’s special relationship to divinity by distinguishing “divine” poets from “right” ones. Like Sidney, she was an adherent to the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity and understood that one could not rely on the assurance of divine will behind the placement of one’s punctuation marks. This lack of assurance led Sidney to a poetics paradoxically driven by hesitation, blockage, and frustration; he recognized that while a poet might labor to “bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses,” to actually create such a Cyrus the poet needed both a teacher to guide him and readers who would “learn aright why and how that maker made him.”⁴ Southwell, by contrast, saw the encounter forged between poets, their advisers, and readers as a source not of anxiety but of possibility. As none of them—poet, adviser, reader—could guarantee the divinity of their perspective, the “profitable invention” of poesy could consist only of a collective practice of discomposition, of testing out ideas and discovering their limitations.

Joining Anne Southwell’s poetic congregation, this chapter considers what happens to revision when it becomes, like invention, a “social act” whereby a writer learns from a trusted interlocutor. The term we use for the rewriting that one does under advisement, as opposed to that done alone, is editing. Like revision, editing is often treated as a synonym for correction, but to “edit” more accurately means to “give out” or “put out” [e + dare], underscoring that while editors may polish a text, they also participate in the uncertain process of extending private labors into the public sphere.⁵ Even the best editors cannot be assured that their advice will guarantee acclaim. In this way, editors appear in Karen Burke Lefevre’s account of invention as “resonators,” a term she adopts from Harold Lasswell and explains as follows: “Resonance comes about when an individual act—a ‘vibration’—is intensified and prolonged by sympathetic vibrations.”⁶ Distinct from authorial collaborators who may begin a project together, resonators aid the “principal discoverer” by serving as “catalysts who make discovery possible,” but they do not “usurp the writer’s task of evaluation.”⁷ Editors serving as resonators thus multiply Quintilian’s account of the reviser’s “double effort” because, as Susan L. Greenberg puts it, they participate in a process “consciously drawing on the powers of imagination in two ways; a doubling up of points of view representing not only the reader, but also the author.”⁸ The editing process is one whereby authors’ texts are brought into alignment with perspectives other than their own. So long as authors retain the ability to make final decisions, editing becomes a practice of productive and collaborative discomposition. Told where they may need to rethink their work, authors may choose to accept or reject correction.

The first professional editors in Europe were scribes, and in England this vocation emerged around 1200, according to Greenberg, “as demand for books exceeded the ability of monasteries to produce them in sufficient numbers.” With this professionalization rose a “shift in textual authority” away from centralized ecclesiastical settings and toward the accuracy of source materials and “exemplar” texts. This remediation of a text by nonauthorial hands connects, if loosely, the behaviors of medieval scribes to those of printers who aligned manuscripts with printshop capabilities and, eventually, to periodical editors in the nineteenth century who started to enforce house styles as well as decisions about taste.⁹ In the midst of this centuries-long rise of the professional editor were the complicated interrelations between print and manuscript authorship poetry in the seventeenth century. While writers like Ben Jonson were beginning to consolidate a conception of authorship related to property and print—turning one’s work into a collected Works sold with one’s name on its cover—others, and particularly women writers, were developing different strategies for cultivating authorial influence within the social ecology of manuscript composition. Lady Anne Southwell’s works afford a unique perspective on this context of manuscript authorship, then, because they expose the cultural logic of editing in seventeenth-century poetics in two ways. The first is that Southwell wrote and thought about how poetry itself was a form of social interaction that involved discomposing encounters with the perspectives of others. The second is that her texts cannot be accessed—cannot even be read—without provoking questions about what it means to read a poem that has clearly undergone a process of editing.

Southwell’s poems survive in two manuscripts: the Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, which was a private household miscellany/table book, and Lansdowne MS 740 at the British Library, a “fair copy” prepared for the king of England.¹⁰ Taken together, they reveal her to have been both a humble poet and an ambitious one, both introspective and extroverted. Gillian Wright suggests that the writings in the Commonplace Book depict a “direction of textual travel [that] is typically inwards” because Southwell appropriated others’ writings, largely from somewhat unfashionable print sources, for her own development.¹¹ By contrast, the Lansdowne manuscript reveals a desire to directly influence royalty (though it is unclear whether it was prepared for James I or Charles I). Although the Commonplace Book appears to be more akin to a private notebook and the Lansdowne appears to be a fair copy for external readers, even the former witnesses the social embeddedness of Southwell’s poetry. Not merely a journal of her thoughts, it is a document of asynchronous conversation filled not just with letters like the one to Ridgeway but poetic epistles, imitations, and replies.¹² As Sarah C. E. Ross points out, these poems participate in forms of “lyric sociality” built on “the commonality of images, tropes, and poetic lines and forms” and “the operations of communal lyrics as literary tokens and artefacts in a context of socio-poetic exchange.”¹³ Beyond the allusive and appropriative web of manuscript composition, the Commonplace Book also captures how the everyday labor of verse composition was more complicated than a solitary author revising poems in bed. It contains poetry and prose inscribed in a variety of hands, with corrections and insertions appearing throughout; most of the poetic material attributed to Southwell was inscribed by scribes who were likely members of her household.¹⁴ The volume was likely compiled, moreover, not by Southwell herself but by her husband, Captain Henry Sibthorpe, as a compendium of her “works.” Her own difficult handwriting contributes some of the corrections and insertions, though not all of them; the leaves written exclusively in her own autograph drafts were apparently tipped into the book by Sibthorpe after her death.

The complicated provenance and frequent illegibility of Southwell’s manuscript poems clarify, ironically, how early modern poetic composition prior to publication must be understood in terms beyond originality and ownership. As we will see, Southwell invited interventions from collaborators like her husband in ways that allowed her to construct an authorial identity in terms of the ongoing, restless, and fundamentally interactive practice of poesy itself. Joining her in the crowded scene of writing consequently means joining a collective endeavor—one that also enlists modern readers in Southwell’s poetic process. Wright observes that “like other manuscript-based poets of the early modern period, [Southwell] is a corrective to the anachronistic assumption that a poet who took writing seriously must inevitably aspire to print-publication.”¹⁵ Taking writing “seriously” for early modern poets had more capacious connotations than aiming to produce something that would endure and win fame, renown, or approbation. In early modern manuscript culture, Arthur Marotti explains, “it was normal for lyrics to elicit revisions, corrections, supplements, and answers” as they proceeded through coteries of trusted peers, because poems were “part of an ongoing social discourse.” The manuscript system was, as a result, “far less author-centered than print culture and not at all interested in correcting, perfecting, or fixing texts in authorially sanctioned forms.”¹⁶ While Harold Love describes the process of “scribal publication” as one tracking the “movement from a private realm of creativity to a public realm of consumption,” bringing this definition into conversation with Marotti’s account of the poem as “social text” suggests a writing practice that wavered between public and private, between individual author and discursive community.¹⁷ Between private creativity and public consumption was an intermediary stage of creative collaboration that our classrooms might foreground for student writers, a stage wherein writing becomes more like a jam session, a period of open-ended collective experimentation, exploration, and inevitable discomposition.

The first section below recovers traces of the social approaches to writing in early modern manuscript culture, emphasizing how scholarship on women’s writing in particular offers crucial correctives to the affiliation of authorship and legitimacy with individualism and originality. In recovering a more crowded scene of writing, I situate writers like Southwell amid the development of poetic editing as a social and professional practice. The chapter’s second section unpacks how, for Southwell, poetry, like salvation, required relinquishing oneself into others’ hands, and how she appears to have embraced the prospect of being edited—by her husband, her priests, her friends—as one of poesy’s redeeming virtues.¹⁸ Though a defender of poetry and a critic of misogyny, she was also sometimes ambivalent about poetry’s role in a reformed Protestant society and about women’s place in public life.¹⁹ Writing to and with others allowed her to think through these ambivalences. Her forthrightness about the collaborative nature of early modern authorship in this way enabled her to use her own presumed lack of authority as a social instrument; asking for help became a pretext for developing and sharing her own ideas. Her work consequently demonstrates how the scene of editing can provoke the discomposition not only of the text being examined but also of the relationship between authors and readers.

Examining this complex relationship as it applies to the Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book itself, the chapter’s third section discusses how the physical documents on which Southwell’s poesy occurred afford opportunities to open pedagogical conversations about editing’s affinities with critical reading and writing. The traces of several hands on Southwell’s two manuscripts reveal that her work has always availed itself of interlocutors—ones she consciously enlisted, ones who amended and arranged her works after her death, and ones she could never have imagined. The materials of the Commonplace Book may be seen as a space within which Southwell’s poesy remains continuous with an ongoing editing process. As such, they reveal that in the scene of editing, the practice of composition (a word that in early modernity also meant “agreement”) reveals itself to be a simultaneously textual and social practice, a means by which individual expression blurs with those of communities of enthusiasm, affinity, and interpretation.

Before moving into the body of this chapter, I want to openly recognize those readers who served as my editors in the composition of this book. The earliest draft of this chapter was read by Dianne Mitchell. The earliest readers of chapter 1 were Debapriya Sarkar, Laura Kolb, David Hershinow, and Caralyn Bialo. The earliest reader of chapter 2 was Jenny Mann, and of chapter 3, Phil Pardi. The earliest reader of chapter 5 was Wendy Beth Hyman, who was also the first reader of the entire book (!) and a gentle influence over many pivotal decisions. Mahinder Kingra, editor extraordinaire at Cornell University Press, shepherded this book into its final form, and Eric Levy offered many thoughtful recommendations while gracefully copyediting away my most embarrassing errors. I recognize these readers—who must not be blamed if they could not always usurp my own poor judgment—here as well as in the acknowledgments to underscore that this work of critical writing was produced within a community marked by mutual aid, collaboration, generosity, and shared investment.

Academia, when it lives up to its ideals, represents a shared endeavor that not only cares about knowledge production but also strives to care—materially, psychologically, and politically—for those willing to join the fold. Do we not want our students to be, even if only for the duration of the semester they may spend with us, part of the same academy we hope to inhabit, the academy that believes that thinking closely, deeply, and slowly about things, and even disagreeing about them, is essential to whatever better world we may want to build? The way that literature scholars commune over a shared interest at academic conferences, usually in conversations predicated on and mediated through writing, is for many of us the best part of the job. What might the feedback, advice, and instruction we give our students look like if we chose to treat what they write as part of a disciplinary field that is open to them? How might this feedback make it clear to them that the field explicitly needs their perspectives and their feedback to uphold its commitments to poesy?²⁰ In the reflection following this chapter, I convene a discussion about what resisting competitiveness, practicing humility, and taking student writing seriously—a pedagogy of generosity, to borrow Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s framework—might look like.

Marked by Thy Hand

Around the turn of the sixteenth century in Italy, vernacular books started announcing that they had been “revised,” that they contained “additional material,” or that they had been “newly corrected.” This signals, according to Brian Richardson, the emergence of what today we understand as editors in vernacular literary production.²¹ The role of these early editors was that of the correctore, whose textual emendations “tended to achieve not authenticity but conformity to contemporary standards” of spelling, punctuation, grammar, and style, even despite the shifting nature of those standards.²² Editing was a manner of constructing and conferring legitimacy; going through the editing process afforded authors authority they could not always claim on their own. As Richardson explains, “During the first century of printing, an in‑ vestment in editing came to be seen as one of the keys to success both by ambitious printers and publishers and by authors.”²³ These attitudes migrated across the continent during the Renaissance, and editors quickly became active participants in the construction of modern authorship. Robert Iliffe suggests that during the seventeenth century in England, “the manifestation of the ‘editor’ was intimately bound up with the appearance of the ‘author’” because the former’s role and function were “connected by virtue of their ability to make ‘names’ for their authors and construct public ‘identities’ for them.”²⁴ Beyond helping authors encounter the reading public on better terms, moreover, a culture of editing also informed the way those readers would ultimately receive texts. For the Elizabethan author, John Kerrigan observes, the “reader has an incipient editorial function” that sometimes “becomes explicit.” Editing was part of an “unfamiliar nexus of relations” that also included writing and reading, and practices such as correction and commentary were not only anticipated by authors but also generative of new authored texts.²⁵

In the transition to print, authors’ manuscripts were necessarily manipulated in order to accommodate printshop capabilities. Early modern authors were attentive to these manipulations: John Lyly explains in a letter to Thomas Watson that he resisted sending his manuscript to the printer because he was “loth the printer should see, for that my fancies being neuer so crooked he would put the[m] in streight lines, vnfit for my humor, necessarie for his art.”²⁶ When editors—teachers, reviewers, publishers—have to make decisions about setting a line according to house conventions and standards while also taking into account the author’s goals for the original text, they continue the process of poesy. A microcosm of this appears in the printer Joseph Moxon’s explanation of how to manage verse indentation when setting type. First he explains the basic house style: “[W]hen Verses are Indented, two, three, or four m Quadrats [or blank spaces] are used, according to the number of the Feet of the Verses.” Because verses and verse makers are fickle, however, he acknowledges that the print house must also be flexible and indent lines “according to the fancy of the Author.”²⁷ There were “rule of thumb” procedures for setting verse, evidently, but even printers understood that those rules needed to be somewhat sensitive, but not subservient, to the restless engines of authorial fantasy.²⁸ Compromise between what was possible, habituated, or conventional, and the little bit of ingenuity that such compromise might provoke, was (as seen throughout this book, from Gascoigne’s “patched” verses in chapter 1 to Davies’s account of Prince Henry’s invented scribal hand in chapter 3) a hallmark of poetic discomposition, of how poetry could discompose the world built around it.

That poetry’s path from author’s pen to reader’s apprehension was mediated by hands invisible to both was not simply a function of print publication. Horace’s Ars Poetica, here in Ben Jonson’s translation, acknowledged the importance of working and reworking a poem in consultation with trusted advisers:

If to Quintilius you recited aught;

He’d say, “Mend this, good friend, and this; ’tis naught.”

If you denied, and had no better strain,

And twice, or thrice, had ’ssayed it, still in vain:

He’d bid blot all, and to the anvil bring

Those ill-turned verses, to new hammering.

Then: if your fault you rather had defend

Than change; no word, or work, more would he spend

In vain, but you, and yours, you should love still

Alone, without a rival, by his will.²⁹

Quintilius Varus was a poet Horace memorialized in Odes book 1, poem 24, for his “Modesty, and incorruptible Good Faith (sister of Justice), and naked Truth,” and it is worth noting that Horace recognized that even once the wise reader makes recommendations, a poet may still rather “defend / Than change” the work. The choice, however foolhardy or stubborn, remained with the original author.³⁰ Jonson’s translation of Horace unsurprisingly aligns with the critique that we saw Jonson make of Shakespeare in this book’s introduction: that poets who do not blot their lines and do not seek the advice of learned critics are in love with themselves. Jonson himself seems to have taken this advice to heart, despite his notorious condescension toward readers he regarded as unequal to his talent.³¹ In an epigram addressed to John Donne, he reveals his pride in merely engaging in such peer review: “Who shall doubt, Donne, whe’er I a poet be, / When I dare send my Epigrams to thee?” Remarking that Donne “alone canst judge” because he “alone dost make,” Jonson brandishes Donne’s editorial capacities as proof of his own commitment to the ongoing work of poesy. While other readers may censure and criticize based on presumptions about what to “allow” and “disallow,” Donne, Jonson trusts, will approach censure “evenly” and with “free simplicity.”³² The implication is that Donne is the sort of reader that Jonson conjures in his opening epigram: one who would, in taking Jonson’s work in hand, labor “to understand.”³³ “Read all I send,” Jonson requests, outlining his hopes; if he “find[s] but one / Marked by thy hand” and “with the better stone,” he promises to wear this mark as a badge of the renowned poet’s approbation.³⁴

Without ceding the “integrity of individuals participating in collaborative ventures,” which Heather Hirschfeld cautions against, some scholars have recognized that a traditional view of collaboration as a product attributable to two (or more) names only mystifies collaboration in ways that perpetuate the mystification of authorship itself.³⁵ The problem is partly the allocation of works to names in general—the supposed doers, the poets, take precedence over the doing, the poesy, once more. When Jonson published The Workes of Benjamin Jonson in 1616, which included his epigram to Donne, the role the latter might have hypothetically played in marking up Jonson’s verses became even more obscured. Margaret Ezell argues that just like “so many other nineteenth-century depictions of the act of authorship” (including “the natural spontaneous writer who never revises but instead channels inspiration directly to the page”), a “model of collaboration based on a personal affective relationship does not fit well with what is found when one examines early modern textual production.”³⁶ For Horace and Jonson, according to Karen Burke LeFevre, Quintilius and Donne function as “resonators,” as “enabling agents” in the process of invention, who could “[furnish] the writer with additional information on which to base decisions.”³⁷ Yet mentioning this interaction in his epigram to Donne and then printing that epigram for audiences other than his collaborator also cultivates Jonson’s name. By suggesting that his work had passed over Donne’s table, Jonson’s poem becomes a strategy by which he could shape his public identity as someone who took writing seriously. There were other ways of being legitimized as an author, he realized, than merely printing one’s name on the cover of a book.

One of the most severe consequences of prioritizing names in print, then, is that it perpetuates ignorance of other kinds of authorship—and other kinds of authors. Ezell points out that the “at times hyperbolic celebration of masculine, commercial literary collaboration is one of the agents that helps to block twenty-first-century perceptions of early modern authorship, and in particular, how women participated in it.”³⁸ There are now many studies of the ways in which early modern women turned to poetry, epistolary correspondence, translations, and pamphlets to participate in the world of letters, and these studies note that such work happened within a manuscript system driven by private circulation, which often treated individual works as “social texts.”³⁹ As Patricia Pender and Alexandra Day suggest, however, emphasizing early modern women’s authorship as often primarily social—and as such characterized by appropriation, responsivity, and enforced occasionality—may come to threaten “the hard-won legitimacy of the women writers we have already recovered.” A basis of writerly legitimacy that rests on “the conventional categories of originality, autonomy, and authority” can suggest that women’s work was somehow, by its collaborative nature, less legitimate.⁴⁰ The mythologization of original male geniuses—and the attendant mystification of how their works reached our tables—thus creates opportunities for bad-faith denials of women’s agency, such as those trenchantly recorded by Joanna Russ: “What to do when a woman has written something? The first line of defense is to deny that she wrote it.”⁴¹

Yet Pender and Day also observe that the role of women as participants in the social project of literary production exposes alternative means by which literary authority was cultivated. Reconsidering Mary Sidney Herbert’s “role in editing, revising, and publishing her brother Philip Sidney’s works,” they propose, can “position her in more authorial roles than previous centuries of scholarship have been willing to imagine.”⁴² Studies such as Julie Crawford’s Mediatrix furthermore show how women like Herbert and Mary Wroth managed “structures of affiliation” in the form of literary communities that became “at once heuristics of interpretation, and materially real.”⁴³ Literary enclaves centered on women could determine interpretive communities that shaped aesthetic tastes and political affiliations. Invention and composition were consequently not limited to what happened on the page; they extended to the broader sphere of literary production, in which women often played pivotal roles as curators, editors, patrons, and critics. Scholars of early modern women’s writing such as Pender, Day, and Crawford have themselves cultivated a community of critical work resistant to the dominant, patriarchal strain of how authorship is conceived in the literary canon. Still, this work of resistance sometimes operates uncomfortably within the modern academy, as Kate Lilley points out: “As we have mapped the rhetorical strategies and generic interventions through which early modern women defended or regretted their entry into discourse and/or circulation, so we have been forced to defend (and, perhaps, sometimes regret) our deviation from canonical practices and justify our activities according to indices of academic value and prestige which continually fold back into the discourses of authorization we set out to critique.”⁴⁴

The work of Anne Southwell, I propose, presents an opportunity for scholars who wish to contest the “indices of academic value and prestige” while nevertheless demanding that the study of writers underrepresented in the literary canon be legitimized in the modern academy. Southwell was a defender of poetic writing more than she was a defender of poets and poems. Her works underscore how legitimacy rooted in poets and poems rather than in poesy not only misrepresents the active contributions of women writers but also misrepresents how all early modern writers undertook their work.⁴⁵ Embracing representations of authorship rooted in collaboration, resonance, and a culture of editing can in this way prompt us to revise what kinds of writing “belong” in an undergraduate course on early modern literature—both in terms of texts on the syllabus and in terms of the writing we ask our students to do.

Emphasizing the collaborative nature of early modern authorship is not meant to imply that no writers could lay claim to any of their words. It is simply to reaffirm, as Jonson’s poem and Mary Sidney Herbert’s role in shaping her brother’s canonical fame imply, that collaboration informed textual production even for figures who have become central to the literary canon.⁴⁶ Even as we recognize the ways in which women participated in these alternative avenues of authorial practice, though, reading their poetic exchanges with men reveals them reckoning with the patriarchal premise that corrections made by men were to be prioritized over words written by women. Jonson could approach Donne with a fantasy of equal footing, but opportunities for women to do so in the same way were necessarily restricted. Against this context, Southwell’s commitment to poetic discomposition found ways to turn the unfinished page into a platform for reaffirming the uses and goals of poetry itself. As Gillian Wright observes, for Southwell, “composition in manuscript created opportunities that print-publication could not feasibly afford.”⁴⁷ The creation of these opportunities entangles poetics with politics in a material sense: the imaginative restlessness of poesy, the license to indulge in verbal play and self-reflection, became for Southwell a foundation for satire and ideological critique. As we will see in the next section, she extended repudiations of misogyny before readers who might otherwise have ignored them, partly by asking for their editorial help. Asking a reader to follow one’s train of thought means that both readers may arrive, at least provisionally, at the same place. Enlisting them as editors in a project of reading carefully and reflecting on her words, she conceived of editing as a means of empowering herself. She reminded her editors that taking their own authority seriously meant recognizing that authority itself is contingent, constructed, and most vulnerable when most assured of itself.

Condemn, Amend, or Ratify

Anne Southwell, née Harris, was born in 1573 into a well-connected, noble, and politically important family. Her father, Sir Thomas Harris, was both an MP and a sergeant-at-law in the Middle Temple. She married Thomas Southwell in 1594, and he was knighted, along with her father, by King James I in 1603. Sarah C. E. Ross speculates that Southwell “may have served as maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth in the 1590s,” and it seems likely that she sought the favor of James’s queen in a potentially embarrassing affair that ended in her being escorted away from court.⁴⁸ She appears to have moved with Southwell to Ireland shortly after James I’s coronation, presumably because of financial difficulties, and after Thomas died in 1626, she remained in Ireland and married Captain Henry Sibthorpe, though she retained Southwell’s more prestigious name. “In a status-conscious world,” Wright explains, “Anne Southwell—and her less eminent second spouse—consistently ascribed to her the most impressive designation she could plausibly (if not quite accurately) claim.”⁴⁹ During her time in Ireland, Southwell may have exchanged gossipy pieces of witty writing with members of the literary circle around Thomas Overbury, whose death in 1613 was the source of courtly scandal. Such exchanges with the London literati suggest, for Erica Longfellow, that Southwell “used her literary skill as a means of establishing networks of influence”—a pattern of practice that Southwell would recreate in Ireland.⁵⁰ As a transplant in Ireland, however, her situation was somewhat less than enviable. According to Longfellow, she “enjoyed some influence,” but with limited reach; some addressees of her letters, such as Lady Ridgeway, “may have been important in Ireland,” but others, like the Countess of Somerset, had “suffered serious political upsets.”⁵¹ We might read the social orientation of many of Southwell’s poems, then, against this context of ambitious networking.

It is unclear whether Southwell ever discussed poetry with Ridgeway in the manner she proposes at the end of her letter. What is clear is that the letter was not the end of her attempts to reach her friend. A separate epistle to Ridgeway takes the form of a mock elegy, “An Elegie written by the Lady A: As: to the Countesse of London Derrye. supposeinge hir to be dead by hir longe silence,” requesting a reply from her long-silent correspondent.⁵² Her playful (and, as will become clear, misguided) conceit—that only Ridgeway’s death and ascension to heaven could explain her silence—lets Southwell ponder the fundamental inadequacy of sinful humans left to their own devices. As she imagines Ridgeway’s ascension from the “vaute circular” of Earth to a “large heaven,” she asks her friend to report back: “Yet in thy passage, fayre soule, let me know / what things thou saw’st in riseinge from below?” (“An Elegie,” 10, 19–20). After she makes some imaginative queries about the cosmos, she turns to reflect on the limited knowledge attainable by fallen humanity:

Fayne would I know from some that haue beene there?

what state or shape caelestiall bodyes beare?

For‘ Man, to heauen, hath throwne a waxen ball,

In w^ch hee thinks h’hath gott, true formes of all,

And, from the forge howse, of his fantasie,

hee creates new, and spins out destinye.

And thus, theise prowd wormes, wrapt in lothsome rags,

shutt heauens Idea upp, in letherne baggs.

(“An Elegie,” 51–58)

The poem then reflects on the imaginative operations of poetry itself, equating poetic fancy with Catholic delusions: “Poets, and Popelings, are aequipolent, / both makers are, of Gods, of like descent” (“An Elegie,” 77). This condemnation, albeit one specifically targeting writers of love poetry, rehearses doctrinal views of humanity’s need for divine correction as well as women’s particular fallibility. “In Eue’s distained nature, wee are base,” she writes, “And whipps perswade vs more, then loue, or grace” (“An Elegie,” 89–90). This reverberates in her comment that “when a Lythargye, o^r braynes doth fetter, / the onely way, to rouse againe o^r witts, / is, when the Surgions chiefest toole, is whips” (“An Elegie, 96–98), echoing Calvin’s account of how divine law “acts like a whip to the flesh, urging it on as men do a lazy, sluggish ass.”⁵³ As her own poem comes to a close, then, Southwell jokes that she has grown wayward in her own attention:

But stay my wandringe thoughts? <a>’las <whether>^where wade I?

In speakeinge to a dead, a sencelesse Lady

Yow Incke, and paper, be hir passeinge bell,

The Sexton to hir knell, be <Answer’d well, >Anne Southwell

(“An Elegie,” 117–20)⁵⁴

In the manuscript (figure 4.1), the revisions and insertions in these lines show Southwell’s own ink and paper recording the nonlinear, “wandringe” progress of her pen. The last line, in retrospect, appears like the performance of correction: the final words synesthetically clang like a bell, first tolling a response (“Answer’d well”) before substituting that “answer” with Southwell’s own name. The fair copy of this manuscript draft, sent to Ridgeway, might have suppressed the blotted lines, but here we can see the poet materially, if inadvertently, emphasizing her own unheard status. In the context of a poetic conceit about not receiving answers to her correspondence, these final lines go to the extreme length of joking that the only explanation for Ridgeway’s lack of response is that she had died.

Conversation is one of the only bright spots in Southwell’s sustained critique of human frailty and depravity; it is the sole element of earthly experience that she imagines capable of transcendence. She mourns it by asking, indirectly, if Ridgeway will miss it when she ascends to heaven. “Good Lady, freind, or rather louely Dame,” she asks, imagining Ridgeway to have transcended in imagery recalling Donne’s Anniversaries, “if yow, be gone, from out this clayie frame, / tell what you know, whether th’ Saynts adoration? / will stoope, to thinke on dusty procreation” (“An Elegie,” 61–64). Though the angels may disdain to pay any attention to the earthbound business of “prowd wormes,” Southwell suggests that they may nevertheless have reason to eavesdrop on the exchanges between herself and Ridgeway: “The Angells ioy in o^r conversation, / yet see vs not, but by reuerberation” (“An Elegie,” 67–68). The closing lines, read as a culmination of these claims, dramatize their silenced conversation as a one-sided echo—a sexton ringing a bell over an empty grave—and equate Southwell’s ruminations on the relationship between earth and heaven with the relationship between herself and her absent friend.

Southwell’s doubt about poetry’s limited ability to transcend the “vaute circular” of earthly existence was immediately and bracingly affirmed: while she was preparing the above mock elegy, Lady Ridgeway really did die of dropsy. Upon learning of this, Southwell wrote another poem, this time the earnest and stunned “An: Epitaph vppon Cassandra MackWilliams Wife to S[ir] Thomas Ridgway Earle of London Derry”:⁵⁵

Now let my pen be choakt w^th gall.

since I haue writt Propheticall

I wondred‘, that the world did looke,

of late, like an vnbayted hooke

Or as a well whose springe was dead

I knew not, y^t her soule was fledd

Till that the mourneinge of hir Earle

did vindicate, this deare lost pearle.

(“An: Epitaph,” 1–8)

Again invoking the physical stuff of poesy by citing one of the ingredients of ink in the line, “Now let my pen be choakt [with] gall,” Southwell registers the frivolousness of her “Propheticall” earlier verses. The image of Ridgeway as a “lost pearle” recalls her epistolary defense of poetry, and so connects poetry’s archive of exemplars with Southwell’s own community of interlocutors. As Ross observes, Southwell’s inspiration for parts of this elegy appears to have come from a sonnet by Arther Gorges that is also transcribed in her Commonplace Book. She would also return to that sonnet’s imagery in another epitaph for a different friend, the Countess of Somerset: “Since shee fled hence see how y^e world doth look / naked, and poore, like an unbayted hoocke / Or‘ as a ringe, whose Diamont is lost / Or as euidence‘, whose lines are crost” (“An Epitpah vpon the Countess of Sommersett,” 3–6).⁵⁶ Within the volume of assorted drafts, then, Ridgeway and Somerset appear as precious jewels chained together in a poetic network that also includes both Southwell and Gorges. Her “social” poems, even in their apparent metaphysical maunderings, endeavor to compose and recompose relationships not just with earlier writers, but with potential readers who would place her with certain communities.⁵⁷

The entanglement in Southwell’s work between literary endeavor and social striving is even more explicit elsewhere in the Commonplace Book. On folio 18r, positioned just prior to her mock elegy for Ridgeway, appears a poetic epistle, “A Letter to Doctor Adam B^pp of Limerick,” addressed to Bernard Adams, bishop of Limerick.⁵⁸ Ross observes how this piece “fuses religious and social discourses” by conflating the biblical Adam with her addressee and culminates in reminding Adams that “virtue consists in action.”⁵⁹ If the bishop will follow the divine precepts of faith, hope, and love, Southwell suggests, he might “singe / An Halleluiah to heauens glorious Kinge / whose sweete resultance cordinge w^th the spheres / may w^th delight rauish o^r mortall eares” (“Letter to Doctor Adam,” 120–23). In the middle of the epistle, however, Southwell modestly confesses her own diminished capacity to sound such music:

If this extent of paper could suffice

to show how Adam fell how hee might rise

Good reuerend Father I will doe my best

and where I fayle doe yow supply the rest

A songe of eight tymes three parts I would singe

assist my feeble Muse heauens mighty Kinge

And grant my pen portraict true harmony

w^th out a discord in Diuinitye

(“A Letter to Doctor Adam,” 13–20)

This is a performance of modesty, but it is also a concession of incapacity at odds with Southwell’s own exhortations to the “reuerend Father” to heed her earlier advice. Yet in pointing Adams to the divine precepts, Southwell tacitly affirms Calvin’s instruction that even believers sometimes need to be reminded, perhaps by whipping, of divine laws. She also extends the image of poetry she presented to Ridgeway as “vocall Harmonye” by combining editing, expansion, and collaboration. A “songe of eight tymes three parts” is too much for one person to sing by herself; Adams is meant to “supply the rest,” with “heauen’s mighty Kinge” perhaps completing the trio.⁶⁰

Bishop Adams was not the only theological adviser Southwell would consult for poetic assistance in this manner. She repurposes parts of the epistle to Adams in another poem copied on folio leaves 26r–v. Victoria Burke points out that this poem was likely addressed to Roger Cox, who was an assistant curate at Acton.⁶¹ Southwell praises Cox in a separate poem in her Commonplace Book, her household owned a pamphlet written by him, and he appears to have grown familiar enough with Southwell herself to have written an elegy for her after she died. (This, too, is transcribed in the Commonplace Book.) Thanks to Jonathan Gibson’s careful attention, we know that the poem to Cox was tipped into the Commonplace Book backward and begins on page 26v.⁶² Read in this way, it begins with a rather bold appeal to its intended reader:⁶³

S^r. giue mee leaue to plead my Grandams cause.

 and prooue her Charter from Iehouæs Lawes.

Wherby I hope to drawe you ere you dye.

 From a <peruerse> ^resolu’d and wilfull herresye.

In thinkinge ffemales haue so little witt

 as but to serue men they are only fitt

(“S^r. giue mee leaue,” 1–6)

Citing the crime of Eve, her “Grandam,” Southwell offers the curate a different interpretation of the events of Genesis that recalls Aemelia Lanyer’s apology for Eve in Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum (1611). She underscores how because Eve was made out of Adam’s rib, she was actually made of purer stuff than that “read claye” (S^r. giue mee leaue,” 11) from whence Adam himself was made. She also argues, pointing to the strict language of the source text, that “God made a helper meete” and that it would consequently be foolish to “think / a foole a help” (“S^r. giue mee leaue,” 23–24). Shifting the ground of her defense a little, she then says that “God called them Adam both,” and so the curate may “either count her wise, or him a foole” (“S^r. giue mee leaue,” 25, 29). After establishing this premise, she goes on to argue that while women may want “witt for stratagems of state” or “skill to purchase Crownes and thrones,” these concerns are “but guades that makes men proude and iollie” (“S^r. giue mee leaue,” 35–39). As Danielle Clarke notes, this manner of “identification with the figure of Eve is daring, and only possible because of Southwell’s adherence to the idea that the consequences of Eve’s fall extend to all mankind, not just to women.”⁶⁴ Southwell’s concern thus ultimately does not appear to be blame or resentment, but rather leading her addressee to sense how human judgment—even his own—was constrained and limited.

This lament for humanity’s general fallen state prefaces the material repurposed from Southwell’s poem to Bishop Adams. In elaborating on the same lines, she also suggests that if such reading no longer engages Cox, he can pass it along to another potential reader:

If this extentt of papar could suffice

 to show how Adam fell, how he must rise

My noble Neighbour I will doe my best

 and wheare I faile, please you supplye the rest,

Who hath a minde and hoards it vp in store

 is poorer then a beggar at the doore

Let your cleare Iudgment, and well tempored soule

 Condemne, amend, or rattifye this scrole

Twi’ll prooue your fairest Monument and when

 your Marble ffailes, liue with the best of men

If you haue lost your fflowinge sweete humiddities

 and in a dust disdaine theise quantities

Pass it to oure beloued Docter Featlye

 his tongue dropps honnye, and can doe it neatlye

Meanetime a Durge of aight times three I singe

 assist my ffeeble muse, heauens mightie Kinge

And grante my penn portraite true harmonye

 Without a discorde in deuinitye

(“S^r. giue mee leaue,” 65–82)⁶⁵

Southwell explicitly requests that Cox “Condemne, amend, or rattifye this scrole” as an act of collaborative creation, in the way Jonson asks Donne to mark up his verses. This, it is worth repeating, is immediately after she has criticized him for his “<peruerse> ^resolu’d and wilfull herresye” (“S^r. giue mee leaue,” 4) relating to the intelligence of women. The prudent strikethrough softens her tone, and she also flatters him by suggesting that the result of their collaboration would be a monument not to her achievement, but to his own. Southwell sought feedback, but also sensed that in asking for correction, she would be appealing to his ego. The poem thus becomes both the premise and the purpose for the exchange with Cox and serves as a means by which she might have expanded her literary network. She even sensed the potential to expand this network; the “beloued Docter Featlye,” Burke explains, was Daniel Featley, the rector of St. Mary’s, who “was a scholar, writer, and prominent disputer, both in Europe and England.” Southwell’s closer correspondence with Cox perhaps emboldened her to think that he “had enough contact with Featley to enable Southwell to ask him to act as a type of literary mediator.”⁶⁶ She understood that poetic labor was continuous with Calvin’s recommendation that humans relinquish pretensions of knowledge and mastery, and consequently appears to have anticipated the prospect of being edited as one of poesy’s redeeming virtues. Editing, in this light, was a gesture of concession and self-effacement—one that she hoped Cox, with his own claims to piety, would be able to embrace with respect to his own past statements.

That [Not So] Secret Book

Invitations to editing were not simply a performative social gesture for Southwell. Editing was, quite evidently, a part of her composition process. On folio 47v of the Commonplace Book begins one of her extrapolations on the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not commit Adooltery.”⁶⁷ It appears, primarily, to be a condemnation of Southwell’s first husband’s infidelities and again reiterates a defense of Eve. It also does not suggest that Eve was without flaw. Southwell concedes that “Oure lazy grandome Eve in paradyse” had succumbed to vanity in “yeelding to the serpents toongg” (“Adooltery,” 25–28) but also argues that because Adam also ate the fruit, he is “the slaue to evill” while Eve was merely “commanded to obey his will” (“Adooltery,” 37–38). Turning her ire toward the contradictions of conventional masculinity—“The man that for gods cause forbears to kill / to sweare, lye, steale, or ^{droune his soll} <be made drunck w^th> in wine,” she notes, is “scornde and calde a femynine” (“Adooltery,” 43–46)—she complains that those who subvert God’s will in defending these behaviors have no grounds to criticize women. On folio 48v, she appears to revise a stanza about how men and women alike will be redeemed:

Thou onely strongg in ill: thy lost renowne

the second Adam will agayne repayre

take houlde of it and with it take thy crowne

that sinne pulls off and le<f>ues thy forehead bare

so shall ^^the <a> female as be^{fits her <in> duti}<hioues a wife>

houlde thee hir lord ^hir <and> comforte < of this lyfe>

^{croune and beutie}

(“Adooltery,” 67–72)

To clarify what is happening here: Southwell has revised the final couplet from “so shall a female as behioues a wife / houlde thee hir lord and comforte of this lyfe” to “so shall the female as befits her duti / houlde thee hir lord hir comforte croune and beautie.” We know, thanks to Jean Klene’s editorial eye, that Southwell made these corrections with her own hand. Further down on the same page appears another revision at the end of another stanza. Here, Southwell seems to have reconsidered the same rhyme she replaced in the stanza above:

_{<wherfore the anchor houlde of a good life>}

in this presept woulds thow liue fre from blame

^{<is to be Ioyned to a vertuous wife>}

in holy wedlocke tacke sum uertious fame

(“Adooltery,” 83–84)

Recovering the rationale for revisions like this is always speculative, but in this instance, the Commonplace Book offers a substantial clue in the margin of folio 49r (figure 4.2).

This marginalia, written in Henry Sibthorpe’s hand, reads,

wyf

 to ofte

lyfe

Alongside a draft of a poem about virtuous marriage as a mutually nourishing partnership, Sibthorpe apparently offered his wife some gentle constructive criticism. His note indicates that Southwell was rhyming “wife” with “life” too often (she was), a note that she apparently took in stride—the evidence of her revisions, discussed above, appears on the facing page. Setting aside the irony that she replaces “wife”/“life” with “duty”/“beauty”—another rhyming pair that she arguably deploys “to ofte”—the revisions underscore a view of poetry as an opportunity to improve one’s work through conference with trusted eyes. While we do not know much about Southwell’s relationship with Sibthorpe, it is at the very least clear that he encouraged her poetic activities. He originally supplied her with the leaves for the Commonplace Book, and in addition to his editorial suggestions, appears to have been responsible for the state of the Commonplace Book as it exists today. While he may or may not have been Anne Southwell’s first “resonator,” he was, in more formal respects, the first editor of her collected “workes.” Later in the poem, Southwell describes idealized marriage in terms of Christ’s relationship to the church, lines that may also describe a generous editor and teacher: “Christ doth not curse, sweare, rayle, at spouses error / but with softe voyce, with humble woords and teares / and his good life, becomes hir gratious myrror” (“Adooltery,” 133–35).

At this point, it is perhaps necessary to properly introduce the Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, or Folger MS. V.b.198—the name of which identifies it as a product of collaboration. Klene, who diplomatically transcribed the entire volume for the only complete print edition, supposes that its present state reflects Captain Sibthorpe and Lady Anne Southwell’s “attempts to gather her compositions and favored selections into an existing volume.”⁶⁸ Moving through the manuscript, readers witness poetic writing situated alongside prose letters, copies of sermons, and documents of early modern household affairs. Danielle Clarke suggests that the book is more a “table book” than a “commonplace book” because of its eclectic mix of poems, letters, notes on reading, and household records.⁶⁹ Also included are an inventory of the family’s library of 110 volumes, prose writings, and epitaphs written for her after her death.

Jonathan Gibson, taking issue with the seeming coherence suggested by Klene’s print edition, argues that her printed presentation makes it “hard for readers to appreciate the shifts in structure and function through which the manuscript passed.”⁷⁰ His scrutiny reveals that the book first functioned as the account book of John Sibthorpe, Captain Henry’s father, at the end of the 1580s. After Henry’s marriage to Lady Anne nearly forty years later in 1626, a scribe entitled the volume “The workes of the Lady Ann Sothwell/Decemb. 2^o 1626.”⁷¹ Gibson avers that these additions show that “the function of the manuscript changed, from (a) a paper book in use by Southwell, gradually accumulating material by way of blank casting-off, into (b) a full collection of texts by Southwell.”⁷² Where Gibson would prefer editions that present manuscripts like Southwell’s “less as single, coherent texts and more as a sequence of disjunct forms,” Clarke sees the volume as possessing a “kind of coherence” as “a gathering, an anthology” that represents “an attempt to create a specific textual locus for a series of writings identified purposely as those of Lady Anne Southwell.”⁷³ The book itself may consequently be understood as a coherent testament to the incoherent and often collaborative nature of textual production in the early modern manuscript system.

A poem inscribed in a commonplace book necessarily participates in a polyvocal view of poesy. Transcribing another’s poem often introduces accidents and interventions, and these changes, however small, index the movement of poesy within a community of witness and participation. The title, “workes,” implies to modern eyes a kind of authorial possession—but such possession is belied by the fact that the very first poem, transcribed under the title “Fly from the world, o fly, thou poore distrest,” which is labeled “Sonnett 1.a,” is a transcription of one of Alphonso Ferrabosco’s Ayres (1609). The volume’s second poem, “Sonnett: 2^a” (figure 4.3), affords a close look at the Commonplace Book’s fundamental polychrony and polyvocality.⁷⁴

Sonnett: 2^a. When. I sitt reading all alone that secret booke

Wherein I sigh to Looke

^{How many blotts there be.} I wish I could not see, <or from my selfe might fly>

Or from my selfe might flee.

Heauens I implore, that showes my Guilt

To hell I dare not goe

The World first made me rue, my selfe my woes renue

To whom then shall I sue.

Is there no hope in death^e, yes: Death ends all our woes.

Death me ^from <will> ME <vnlose> will lose, myselfe ^Am <from> all my foes:.

Like the opening poem, “Sonnett: 2^a” is also a copy of an earlier song, this time one that appeared in Robert Jones’s A Musicall Dreame (1609)—but there are some differences between Southwell’s copy and the original in terms of both layout and language.⁷⁵ Perhaps misremembering the song, Southwell or her scribe first wrote “or from my selfe might fly” before dashing this out and cramming “How many blotts there be” in the margin. It is ambiguous whether this insertion should be read before or after “I wish I could not see,” because both phrases are metrically equivalent and share a rhyme. In Jones’s version, the lines read, “How many spots there be / I wish I could not see / Or from myself might flee,” implying that the reviser did want “How many blotts there be” to be placed before “I wish I could not see.” The effect of these corrections, especially coupled with the amendments in the last line, “Death me ^from <will> ME <vnlose> will lose, myselfe ^Am <from> all my foes,” creates a presumably inadvertent material metaphor: Jones’s “spots” become Southwell’s “blotts.” As if reflecting briefly on the very apparent contents of the very book being compiled, the author—Southwell, or the scribe, or both—appears to regret the imperfections the process itself has wrought. It is most likely that “how many blotts there be” was introduced before the scribe ever arrived at transcribing the final line, but from a retrospective vantage—noticing the blots before the words—the association is difficult to shake.

The Commonplace Book’s blots indicate a poet navigating her own creative impulses, her aesthetic and formal touchstones, her religious fervor, and a desire for recognition. Danielle Clarke argues that for this volume, “it is the process of textual creation that is the point, not solely or exclusively the production of a finished text.” Such “open-ended fluidity is obviously a feature of manuscript culture more generally,” Clarke continues, adding that, for Southwell, such fluidity was also a “logical extension of the minute engagement with the word that [her] faith prescribed and encouraged.”⁷⁶ Southwell obviously wrote poems that she wanted people to read, and her reckoning with what it would take to achieve that goal comes through in the traces of her self-reflection. Her poetics attempt to reconcile questions of faith with literary activity, and one way she does this is to consider the interrelations of blots as signs of missteps in faith and as totems of the continual labor of self-reformation. Clarke observes that “in her insistence that she will not sell God’s grace cheap she effectively elevates her work above earthly preoccupations with ‘wealth or fame.’ She insists throughout her work that poetry should be a pure, uplifting medium—not least because of its link to God’s imprint—and that it shouldn’t be pulled down by ‘amorous Idiotts’ (l. 310) by sloppy or hypocritical phrasing (again, perhaps one explanation for her revisions upon revisions). The poetic process is central.”⁷⁷ Within “Sonnett: 2a,” blots analogize instances of the pious soul losing control over her own will, leading her to desire being cleansed only by the death of worldly doubts. Yet, as discussed in the previous chapter, blots also evince writers trying to distance themselves from their errors by amending them (just as pressing the delete key is not the mistake but the remedy). Southwell’s revised final line thus reflects the blot’s twofold function as evidence of both error and correction.

As it sits in the Commonplace Book, “Sonnett: 2^a” records an encounter between Jones, Southwell, and her scribe, provoking our own reflection on how the practice of composition leads to deliberation, to other books, and to other witnesses. To even begin to recover the process that led to the creation of this artifact, we must imagine ourselves in the room with them, see them transcribing Jones’s poem, see them pausing, changing the transcription, and maybe even smiling at the incidence of blots that this supposedly private practice has generated. Reading a tidied-up version of this poem—or even a page that puts Jones’s version alongside Southwell’s—inevitably restricts this opportunity for such imaginative exercise. What would it take to “give out” the poesy or process of this artifact, to show not the final poem but the activity of those who participated in making it?

Klene’s diplomatic transcription, she explains, “concentrated primarily on the textual content of the original, reproducing as closely as possible the exact spelling, punctuation, and capitalization of the document.”⁷⁸ Throughout, deletions and cancellations are marked by angle brackets (< >), which results in documents that collapse the turbulent nature of these drafts into considerably more legible texts. Figure 4.4 shows what “Sonnett: 2^a” looks like in Klene’s edition.

Every effort has been made to enable those without a talent for paleography to decipher the original manuscript page. These efforts make the edition incomparably useful to researchers (this chapter would not have been possible without it) and evince a tremendous amount of care and effort—attentiveness that characterizes academic study in general. Klene’s edition is the only edition of Southwell’s complete “workes” currently available in print, though some of her poems have been printed in Early Modern Women Poets (2001), edited by Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson, and in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry (2005), edited by Jill Seal Millman and Gillian Wright. In both volumes, only a handful of poems appear; in the latter, Southwell’s offerings are edited by Jonathan Gibson. Both anthologies endeavor to create accessible texts by women writers from the period, putting to rest any doubts that women were not actively involved in early modern literary production. The former modernizes spelling and punctuation, while the latter does not; both separate critical apparatus and annotations from the text itself. Reading Southwell’s poems in this way thus makes them considerably more accessible to lay readers—they look like poems by Donne or Marvell one might encounter in the Norton Anthology—but this format also reduces the reader’s ability to access the traces of poetic labor.

How would something like “Sonnett: 2^a” even make it into a modern edition of her poems, given the fact that we cannot really attribute it, or even the corrections made to it, to her? A tidied-up version that modernized spellings, accepted all revisions as final, and regularized formatting would erase the negotiations visible here between Jones’s poem and this transcription. Klene’s edition tries to show some of the messiness of this negotiation, but Gibson’s complaint about the linear progression of the edition in general stands. This complaint extends, of course, to his own editorial renderings. This is not to critique either of them, but to recognize that the work of editing early modern manuscripts like Southwell’s involves continuously making decisions about intention, audience, and even authorship. The rhetorical situation of a modern edition is both informed by and distinct from that of the original text. Whatever “text” we end up reading has necessarily been produced via collaborative endeavor. The page cannot help but be a static artifact, and there are consequently few options for editors who wish to render poesy’s lively activity; a critical edition must pause the circulatory energy of poetic activity into a provisionally stable form.

Textual scholars and bibliographers who prepare early modern texts for modern readers engage with questions of materiality, intention, and reception when deciding what to include. They also, inevitably, face the complication of having to disentangle their own material situatedness, desires, fears, and technical limitations from those of the original authors. Critical editions are, like the original texts they are working with, often also made possible only by funding structures, technologies of production, and cultural contexts. The predominant strain of early twentieth-century textual scholarship, following the work of W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers, prioritized the ideal “copy text” representative of an author’s final intentions.⁷⁹ Such approaches met a challenge from D. F. McKenzie, who took into account the ways in which authorial intention both collides and aligns with historical conditions and technologies of production in order to promote a perspective organized around the “sociology of texts.”⁸⁰ Jerome McGann pressed this perspective further, arguing that a fixation on authorial intentions produced an “underdetermined concept of literary work.”⁸¹ In the wake of these debates about editorial practice, textual criticism began attending to each individual text as an “event” representative of a plenitude of historical and material forces. McGann argues that “every text, including those that may appear to be purely private, is a social text,” and that a “text” is “not a ‘material thing’ but a material event or set of events, a point in time (or a moment in space) where certain communicative interchanges are being practiced.”⁸² G. Thomas Tanselle would respond to McGann by insisting that an author’s intentions cannot be erased from the rooms in which a text was composed, and that the same applies for the editor’s intentions when he or she decides to produce a new edition.⁸³ Even edited texts are always reflections of historically contingent theorizations of authorship and collaboration.⁸⁴

As technologies of production evolve, the possibilities for representing texts to readers also evolve. “In a hypertext edition,” Tanselle envisions, “one can have as many full texts as one wishes, regardless of the length of the work involved, and one can easily switch from a given word in one text to the variant at that point in another text, having the whole context available in each case.”⁸⁵ Such digital editions may also make it possible for readers to access different perspectives toward the same object—versions, for example, that reconstruct poems in different ways to show “what editorial emendations should be made to produce other critical texts besides the one presented as a full reading text.”⁸⁶ This fantasy tracks with Gibson’s recommendations for editing the Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book. At first, Gibson imagines “a very unwieldy sort of edition presenting successively a number of different ‘versions’ of the manuscript, providing the reader with a clear sense of the evolution of the manuscript as a whole,” but he discards such a proposal as unlikely to materialize (“Would the Renaissance English Text Society ever sponsor such an edition?”). A more likely electronic edition, he reasons, might be “designed in such a way as to allow users to click to change the view on their screen from one version or state of the manuscript … to another.” With an edition wherein a user might “watch the successive stages of copying unfold before her or his very eyes,” volumes like Southwell’s Commonplace Book would appear “less as single, coherent texts and more as a sequence of disjunct forms, a text (or, more accurately, a number of texts) in constant process.”⁸⁷

Recent born-digital editions of early modern women’s writing serve as models for making collaboration—and editorial creativity—central to the way the texts are apprehended. This ethos informs the Digital Cavendish project, started by Shawn W. Moore and codirected by Moore, Jacob Tootalian, and Liza Blake. An “edition” that is also a meeting ground, Digital Cavendish aims to “build a collaborative space for Cavendish scholars and students” and “become a space for those who wish to share their work to build and continue to analyze the multitudinous networks of Cavendish scholarship.”⁸⁸ A feature of the project is a digital edition of Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, annotated using Hypothes.is, a plugin for web browsers that allows editors to unobtrusively mark variants in the text via highlighting that can be turned off. In the first annotation, the project leaders encourage users to “collaborate in this editorial process, replying to these notes or adding annotations of their own.”

A similar emphasis on editing as a collective practice is fundamental to The Pulter Project: A Poet in the Making, spearheaded by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall. Convening an international team of scholars in the production of a modern edition of Hester Pulter’s collection of manuscript poetry, the Pulter Project places images of Pulter’s original manuscripts alongside both legible “elemental” transcriptions and “amplified” editions that draw attention to each editor’s choices about what features of the text they wish to emphasize. Effectively making the mediation of Pulter’s text central to its attempts to put the text out into the world, the Pulter Project is as much about editing as it is about Pulter’s verses. “Owing to the relatively recent discovery of Pulter’s work after centuries of silence upon it,” the project leaders explain, “Pulter’s manuscript affords scholars of literary history the rare opportunity to reflect on the creation of a writer’s profile in the making.” Bearing witness to the creation of a writer’s profile, the website explicitly acknowledges, is also a participatory act: “The Pulter Project makes Pulter’s poetry public while publicizing the making of Pulter as a poet: a creative process being carried out on an ongoing basis by a collaborative crew of contributors, editors, advisors, and readers.” On the site’s home page, the editors state their hope that this work will not stop with their edition: “We invite you,” they say, “to continue the making.”⁸⁹

Projects like these emphasize that scholars have come to think about the material conditions of composition, authorship, and publication as far more complicated than just the way in which writing is presented to undergraduates. The editorial maneuvers they employ are, in this way, closer to the writing habits of early modern authors themselves; they are attempts, sometimes self-consciously, to join with and empower the original authors as a continuation of the coterie. In an article reflecting on her own contributions to the Pulter Project, Fran Dolan links Pulter’s “dunghill poetics”—one that recognizes an affinity between poetic composition and the way that dunghill compositing is “a process as much as a thing, a collective described as a discrete entity”⁹⁰—to her own editorial practice: “I lay up in a kind of parallel operation to Pulter’s, which does not aspire to reproduce her process but rather to model a virtual version of it, imagining and practicing a creative, open-ended collection and construction process, a labor that is grubby but purposeful. Like Pulter, I might go back later to tweak and add… . Rather than what precedes poetry, the dunghill is poetry; dunghill poetics invites dunghill editing as a similarly creative act, a process of making and mucking that attaches one to this dunghill earth, to the future, and to one’s co-muckers.”⁹¹

Dolan’s reflection recognizes how, at the core of textual scholarship, perhaps as a function of the wealth of specialized historical and bibliographical knowledge that it demands, is an awareness of the limitations of knowledge. Academic writers are all, in effect, “co-muckers”—not just with those who help process one’s rubbish into something productive, but with those who came before, the genealogy of names we know only from our reading but with whom we come to feel a continual bond. Susan L. Greenberg describes editing as “the art of seeing a text as if it is not yet finished” (emphasis in the original),⁹² which is, by implication, also an art of recognizing one’s own limitations and the imperfections of the work at hand. Such humility not only recalls Southwell’s blend of conviction and caution, but also reveals how the experience of editing, like authorship, can be a laborious process that may nevertheless yield its own intellectual rewards. “All editors,” Tanselle notes in a telling aside, “have recognized that their own experience was richer, as a result of working with primary records, than that of the readers of their editions, who were generally limited to what was presented in those editions.”⁹³ The richness of this experience is one of discovery, corroboration, and collaboration; its value lies in the process of searching, confirming, and reconfirming.

What would happen if students in an early modern literature course were challenged to edit a piece of manuscript verse—to decide, for themselves, what it would mean to “give it out” to future readers? One example they might be presented with is the second recto of the Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book: a transcription of some verses of Sir Walter Ralegh’s “The Lie.” Ralegh’s poem very frequently appears within commonplace books from the era, though what is notable about this iteration is not only that Southwell appears to have selected only certain verses (or had only certain verses available to her to select from), but also that she added some of her own. Figures 4.5 and 4.6 show what the page looks like in the Commonplace Book.

In rendering this manuscript, Klene’s print edition makes some very pointed interventions. It adds an attribution to Ralegh at the top, though it signals, with an S in the right-hand margin in square brackets, which changes were made by Southwell’s own hand. It does not, however, suggest which of the verses were not composed by Ralegh—these are the final three lines at the bottom of the page. These were not inscribed in Southwell’s own hand, however, so they do not even receive the marginal attribution of the [S], as her signature does.

Most obviously, the edition also loses the compositional symmetry created on Southwell’s page, in favor of rendering the poem’s stanzas in one vertical line rather than as two columns. What Klene’s framing gains in legibility, it loses in terms of capturing the complex dynamics of authorship represented on the manuscript page. Southwell’s treatment of the poem, as Gillian Wright observes, is “largely typical of most contemporary compilations [in] remaining close to the ‘core’ version at the beginning and end of the poem, while varying her satirical targets in the middle stanzas.” But it is also, Wright joins Gibson in observing, “almost unique among contemporary copies in representing the text not as a legacy but as an answer poem.”⁹⁴ Southwell did not just transcribe Ralegh’s poem; she made space for herself within it. Examining how the couplet closing the first stanza changes the context of the soul’s journey to one in which the speaker remains alive, Wright suggests that Southwell’s version “depicts the poem as a conversation, which she herself initiates and dominates and in which she awards herself the triumphant last word.” She “explicitly claims it as her own” by “adding her own distinctive signature at the end of the scribal copy.”⁹⁵ Yet this conversation, if understood as a conversation, does not and cannot end with Southwell’s manuscript. Klene’s version (of Southwell’s version of Ralegh’s version) can offer only so much in the form of context and information about what is happening here. Readers of Southwell need an editor’s willingness to make some decisions about what to show and how to show it, and only in the process of making such decisions might they trace the dynamics of Southwell’s own exchanges with Ralegh, her scribe, and herself.

The way this manuscript leaf and its diplomatic transcription exposes the complexities of authorship and challenges of editing makes them extremely useful for teaching. I have presented students with Ralegh’s “original” (it usually appears in the anthology assigned as a class textbook), an image of Southwell’s manuscript leaf, and Klene’s transcription—and then challenged the class to edit Southwell’s work for inclusion within their textbook. What would they want it to look like? What might be gained and lost by making this poem appear to be a “collaboration” between Ralegh and Southwell? Is Southwell authoring, appropriating, plagiarizing, stealing? What would be gained and lost by presenting only Southwell’s added lines, isolated in the anthology, perhaps dozens of pages away from Ralegh’s poem? More simply: how would they format the page? Would they acknowledge the scribal hands as well as Southwell’s hand? Would they indicate the corrections and amendments to the parts Ralegh wrote? At the center of this discussion is a metapedagogical question: what would they want readers of their anthology—other students—to think about during their encounter with a text like this? I followed this exercise with an examination of how, in Reading Early Modern Women (2004), Victoria Burke edited this leaf by transcribing it, adding Ralegh’s poem as an appendix, and situating it alongside another answer to Ralegh by Anne Bowyer.⁹⁶ As Burke observes in her commentary, Southwell’s engagement with “The Lie” reveals her to be “one of many people who personalized, rewrote, even ‘improved’ existing poems, since when texts entered the realm of manuscript transmission, contemporaries often interacted with this material as they recorded it in their volumes.”⁹⁷Upon recognizing how participatory engagement was pervasive within the manuscript system, some students have even been inspired to add new verses of their own to their editions of “The Lie,” continuing Southwell’s method and “lay[ing] up in a kind of parallel operation,” to borrow Dolan’s phrase, with her model.

The goals of this exercise are (1) to share with students the different ways in which the texts on the syllabus have been edited and designed, and (2) to introduce the Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book less as an editorial problem to be solved than as an invitation to modify our relationship not just to literary texts but to what it means to author a text. Radically destabilizing the different ways in which students think about what they have been asked to read then creates the possibility of destabilizing more familiar early modern texts, like those by Donne or Shakespeare. There are affinities between appropriating Southwell’s poetics through re-presenting her words in our own hands and adapting Shakespeare’s plays into the constrained theatrical space of a classroom. What would happen if we approached texts in the same way we approach plays during those days when we shuffle the seats around to make a makeshift stage? What signals do we give our students about how writing works if we treat written work as necessarily finished? Why must our students’ writing be something that aspires toward a state of completion, as opposed to something they might approach as a platform for thinking with others?

Reflection: Generous Thinking

“Writing is a technologically displaced form of conversation,” writes Kenneth Bruffee, adding that “we internalize conversation as thought; and then by writing, we re-immerse conversation in its external, social medium.”⁹⁸ Promoting the virtues of collaborative work in the classroom, Bruffee borrows Richard Rorty’s categories of “normal discourse” and “abnormal discourse” to explain the internal dynamics of communities of writers and readers. Normal discourse describes the nature of conversation within “a community of knowledgeable peers,” a community such as an academic field (or a cohort of regular theatergoers). Abnormal discourse, by contrast, “occurs between coherent communities or within communities when consensus no longer exists with regard to rules, assumptions, goals, values, or mores.” In an educational setting, conversations first aspire to consolidate a normal discourse, but the virtue of allowing students to collaborate and converse with one another—such as in seminar discussions or small groups—is that this also enables abnormal discourse, which “sniffs out stale, unproductive knowledge and challenges its authority, that is, the authority of the community which that knowledge constitutes.” Like quick capacity, like rhetorical kairos, like restless fantasy, like humility, abnormal discourse, Bruffee says, “cannot be directly taught”—but it can be given space to flourish.⁹⁹

It is through exposure to abnormality that conversation may become generative. It is when students do not know what they are supposed to do, when routinized interactions grow discomposed, that they contribute most to the construction of knowledge. While one of our goals as teachers may be to help students internalize the discursive expectations of our discipline, having this be the only goal absolves us from being receptive to what students may have to offer. It also prevents our discipline from extending the conversation at its core—the debates about method, about inclusivity, about canonicity, about affect—to students who may find the conversation invigorating and who may, themselves, reinvigorate it. What would it mean, then, to genuinely become our students’ interlocutors, rather than their evaluators? How might we become for them the kind of readers Anne Southwell sought for her own verses: readers who take writing, and not just writers and things written, seriously? Here we might take Carolyn Matalene’s cue and imagine the “teacher as editor”: a figure who is “the writer’s best and most helpful reader.”¹⁰⁰

We might reframe our approach to student writing in terms of our own approach to the writings at the heart of our profession. For professors of early modern literature, editing encompasses a host of domains: we teach with (and sometimes create) scholarly editions, work with (or as) scholarly press or journal editors, rely on heroic copyeditors, take advice from peer reviewers, and, of course, help students revise their papers. We might even say that by supplementing literary texts with our own expertise through lectures, discussions, and curricular juxtaposition with other texts, the literature classroom itself is predicated on seeing texts as if they are “not yet finished.” Our classes are consequently places that might robustly connect the unstable workings of invention, drafting, and revising to both the evidentiary instability of fragmentary textual artifacts and the instability of manuscript poesy. The early modern literature classroom, in other words, might become a space that elucidates not only how perfect mastery is itself a fantasy, but also how perfect mastery is often a historically, epistemologically, and politically motivated construct. Recognizing that criticism and correction are strange bedfellows, we might then reconsider the gap between the sort of reading we encourage students to do during their encounters with poems—exploratory, imaginative, attentive, close—and the sort of reading to which we often subject their writings.

When we read a poem, according to Louise Rosenblatt, we do not read it as “an object or an ideal entity.” For the reader, a poem “happens during a coming-together, a compenetration, of a reader and a text.” Poetic events stimulate the reader’s memory of “past experiences” via “concepts linked with verbal symbols.” Then, as the reader “seeks a hypothesis to guide the selecting, rejecting, and ordering of what is being called forth, the text helps to regulate what shall be held in the forefront of the reader’s attention.”¹⁰¹ Read without any context, the first line of a poem might call forward a network of associations, some of them indicative of shared discursive patterns and touchstones and some of them particular to the reader’s life experiences and expectations. A reader may find, in utterly misreading “Goe, sole the bodies guest,” the beginnings of a poem about how footwear (soles) might be treated hospitably by a body, and may contrive a hypothesis that the poem will examine the reciprocal service that humans and material objects offer to one another. Or the reader may get hung up on the spelling and punctuation and begin to wonder whether “bodies” is plural, or possessive, or both. For the attentive and humble reader, the subsequent elements of the poem will hopefully correct such wayward associations—but they will not necessarily fully eradicate the role the false starts played in the poem as an event. The reading of the poem may ultimately prove even richer for these false starts, because while soles or plural bodies may not be anything near what Southwell intended, the elevation of questions concerning materiality, hospitality, and plurality by happenstance may well lead the reader to think about embodiment and identity within “The Lie.” A failure of apprehension may in this way become the beginning of the process of critical reading, rather than its end.¹⁰²

The process of peer review in literary studies, the collaborative crux of academic discourse, continues the dialectic of stimulation and regulation by treating new critical arguments as avenues for intellectual exchange. Ideally, peer review both affirms and expands the discursive terrain of an academic field. There are many ways to be “right” in one’s reading of a poem (just as there are many ways to be wrong), and one can certainly imagine a persuasive reading of “The Lie” that interrogates how its treatment of embodiment and materiality relates to the theme of hypocrisy. New readings are meant to broaden a field’s horizon of expectations, after all; writers of criticism want, hopefully, to teach their reviewers something—even as they seek the advice and instruction of those reviewers. Speaking on behalf of journal referees, Ramón Saldívar observes that “[a]s we read, we perform the thought experiment of testing the aims, methods, and conclusions presented in the article by comparing them with our own understanding of the textual, historical, or analytical problem. This doubly reflective process—the self-conscious reflection by the referee, who also examines the level of self-consciousness in the article being assessed—requires a degree of self-reflexiveness that resembles nothing less than Schlegel’s notion that ‘[t]hinking that reflects on itself in self-consciousness is the basic fact.’ ”¹⁰³ Saldívar’s account of the “basic fact” of humanistic inquiry lying in self-consciousness recalls the “doubling up of points of view” that Greenberg places at the core of professional editing. It also recalls Annette Federico’s definition of close reading as “the cultivation of self-consciousness about the reading experience,” which was discussed in the introduction.

What literary scholars are best at is thinking together about reading and writing together. We are our best selves in seminar rooms that spin single metaphors around in the air for half an hour, at Q&A sessions after paper presentations that lead to follow-up emails and schemes for future collaboration, and when we are enthusiastically commenting on one another’s work. How might we build, model, and affirm this sort of community in our classrooms? If we want to cultivate the intellectual terrain of the disciplinary fields we call “Shakespeare” and “early modern literature” rather than simply defend them, our classrooms might take lessons from writers like Anne Southwell and study the collaborative, conversational, uncertain work of writing itself. The more people who take writing seriously, I believe, the more interest there may be in confronting the so-called greatest writers ever to have lived on their own terms, and on their own turf.

Consider what might change in students’ relationships to their own writing if they trusted that their first readers were there primarily to help them. Consider how such generosity might provoke them to think more broadly about the practices of education in general, and what sorts of policies they might support after graduation, for their own future children. Such generosity toward student writing, however, must not mean that professors exhaust themselves with individual conferences and comments on essays. To reclaim not just our labor but our pedagogy from the imperatives of competition, productivity, and individualism that stifle poesy, we must model the labor conditions and expectations we would want our students to see as worth defending. If we spend as much time in class focusing on students’ writing as we do on the texts on the syllabus, we must create time for this work. We might reclaim that time from coverage and instead focus on specific problems pertaining to critical writing. We might ask ourselves, what are the educational benefits of requiring students to write three essays in a semester, rather than producing, over several weeks of sustained attention, revision, and discussion, one thoroughly revised paper? This project may involve the teacher’s input every few weeks and may become something like a directed study in which both teacher and student have a stake.

If we strive to care about the student writers in our classrooms as much as we do the field we represent, the students may also come to care about the field. Like Southwell reaching out to Lady Ridgeway to connect her to the “streame of all mankind,” our task is to extend to our students an invitation to conversation. The modern academy, forced to professionalize to survive, has come to prioritize competitiveness and condescension in ways that undermine the most important service it provides to the public: a space to think slowly and carefully with others. In Generous Thinking, Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues that cultivating “a mode of engagement that emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, collaboration over competition, and lingering with the ideas that are in front of us rather than continually pressing forward to where we want to go” may be one of our last hopes in orienting the university that can model and support “generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.”¹⁰⁴ One of the most (the only?) potent forms of civic agency that Shakespeare professors wield as Shakespeare professors lies in our ability to show the hundreds of thousands of students we collectively teach every year that the study of literature is worth defending—and funding—because it believes in tethering the hard work of intellectual inquiry to practices of collective generosity and care. We can make our classrooms spaces where soliciting and acquiring feedback is the point and profit of the study of writing, where students feel secure in seeking out challenges to their habits of thinking, where the aim is to provoke conversation by asking new questions rather than to reassert old answers. The slow, collective study of poesy might in this way become practice for the slow, collective labor required to remake this far-from-golden world, and to keep our chain of pearls from breaking.

1.Klene, Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book. All references to works by Southwell, unless otherwise noted, will be to this edition, and indicated in-text by title and line numbers, and in footnotes by page number. Klene’s edition refers to folio pages in its margins; the original commonplace book may be found at Anne Southwell, Henry Sibthorpe, and John Sibthorpe, Miscellany of Lady Anne Southwell, Call # V.b.198, MS V.b.198, Miscellany of Lady Anne Southwell, manuscript (ca. 1587–1636), Folger Shakespeare Library.

2.For more on Southwell’s debts to Sidney, see Clarke, “Anne, Lady Southwell,” 64; and Clarke, “Gender,” 116.

3.Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney, 217. Danielle Clarke and Marie-Louise Coolahan argue that Southwell “prioritizes subject matter over technique and, in rejecting secular in favor of divine love, makes a claim for a different kind of aesthetics” wherein the “poet’s authority is derived from the devotional subject matter rather than from its poetic treatment.” Clarke and Coolahan, “Gender, Reception, and Form,” 147.

4.Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney, 216–17.

5.Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Edit, v.,” accessed July 20, 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/59546.

6.LeFevre, Invention, 65.

7.LeFevre, Invention, 68–69.

8.Quintilian, Orator’s Education, 353 (10.4.1). Greenberg, Poetics of Editing, 19. An editor’s contributions thus entail “asking similar questions about the text as the author” but “com[ing] to the text with a fresh human consciousness and therefore the potential distance to break habitual patterns.” Greenberg, Poetics of Editing, 14, 19.

9.Greenberg, Poetics of Editing, 88–91. As Carlo M. Bajetta points out, “[S]ince its inception” in the authorizing practices of ancient Greek editions of Homer, “editing was a negotiation of authority.” Bajetta, “Authority of Editing,” 308.

10.Klene identifies Anne’s hand in published writings related to the Overbury circle; see Klene, introduction, xxvii–xxix. Also see Clarke, “Pamphlet Debate.”

11.Wright, Producing Women’s Poetry, 46.

12.Sarah C. E. Ross finds the tension between private and public writing even within the Commonplace Book, arguing that the way Southwell transcribed, emulated, and appropriated others’ words reveals her “use of poetry simultaneously to forge networks and to assert her socio-political affiliations.” Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics, 80.

13.Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics, 79.

14.Klene suggests that the “sometimes indecipherable lines illustrate how a woman could know little about penmanship even though she was very well read,” though she acknowledges that at times Southwell “does write correctly and legibly.” Klene, introduction, xxxvi.

15.Wright, Producing Women’s Poetry, 28.

16.Marotti, Manuscript, 135.

17.Love, Scribal Publication, 36.

18.Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics, 65. Elizabeth Clarke identifies her as a “Calvinist conformist in the pre-war Church of England” and suggests that her “attitude to intellectual pursuits, and to poetry in particular, is one of cautious enthusiasm.” Clarke, “Anne, Lady Southwell,” 68.

19.The Commonplace Book shows direct engagement with poems by Walter Ralegh, Henry King, and Francis Quarles. Southwell includes an unattributed copy of Walter Ralegh’s oft-copied “The Lie,” and adds a few stanzas apparently of her own composition. Elsewhere, she would include copies of poems by Henry King and put them to use in a personal process of mourning. See Burke, “Medium and Meaning,” 101. Despite her mainstream Calvinism, Southwell evinces some sympathies with Puritanical views, and moderates her response to James I’s more licentious proclamations, such as the Declaration of Sports, which sharply divided the Arminians from the Puritans who, like Southwell, valued the sanctity of the Sabbath. See Clarke, “Anne, Lady Southwell,” 59–60.

20.Nancy Dejoy asks similar questions of composition studies in Process This.

21.Richardson, Print Culture, 1.

22.Richardson, Print Culture, 7.

23.Richardson, Print Culture, 7.

24.Iliffe, “Author-Mongering,” 168–69.

25.Kerrigan, “Editor as Reader,” 116–17. Kerrigan observes how Thomas Lodge’s Workes of Seneca acknowledges that readers might “Correct” but requests that they “bee considerate,” and points to an example of how John Suckling supplemented an “imperfect Copy of Verses” by Shakespeare in order to compose a “Shakespearean pastiche” in the style of The Rape of Lucrece. “Instead of an author producing a text, inflected by publication, which ‘calls out’ responses to readers,” Kerrigan observes, “we have materials rendered ‘profitable’ by the editorial reading-interventions of writers (e.g. Phineas Fletcher’s notes to The Purple Island), their annotators (e.g. Selden’s commentary on Drayton’s Poly-Olbion), their printers (e.g. the marginal summaries added by Thomas Snodham to The Rape of Lucrece), and, of course, individual readers… . If commentary is generated by correction, rewriting follows from both.” Kerrigan, “Editor as Reader,” 117–18. As William Sherman documents, during the first centuries of print, English Renaissance “readers continued to add to texts” via marginalia and other interventions. Sherman, Used Books, 9.

26.Lyly, “Lyly to the Authour,” 8. Marotti discusses this passage alongside a similar example from Gascoigne. Marotti, Manuscript, 165–66.

27.Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, 218.

28.See Maruca, “Bodies of Type”; Jacobson, “How Should Poetry Look?”

29.Jonson, Complete Poems, 370 (lines 623–32).

30.Horace, Odes and Epodes, 69. As Mark Edward Clark suggests, the balance between “modesty” and “naked truthfulness” that Horace prizes in Quintilius fits “the description of a truthful friend who knew the limits of his criticism.” Clark, “Quintilius’ Ethos,” 230.

31.For Jonson’s relationship to readers, see Meskill, Ben Jonson and Envy, 20–22.

32.Jonson, Complete Poems, 67–68 (epigram 96).

33.Jonson, Complete Poems, 35 (epigram 1).

34.Courting criticism and revising verses were the behaviors that constituted true poets and emboldened poems. Garth Bond explains that “Donne’s discerning judgment is here imagined as embodied in the physical marking of Jonson’s manuscript” and that these marks “serve as physical proof that Donne finds Jonson a legitimate poetic peer.” Bond, “ ‘Rare Poemes,’ ” 384–85.

35.Hirschfeld, “Early Modern Collaboration,” 619.

36.Ezell, “Afterword,” 246.

37.LeFevre, Invention, 69.

38.Ezell, “Afterword,” 247.

39.Some examples are Phillippy, Early Modern Women’s Literature; van Elk, Early Modern Women’s Writing; Pender, Gender. For an anthology of diverse writings by women, see Ostovich and Sauer, Reading Early Modern Women.

40.Pender and Day, “Introduction,” 1.

41.Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing, 20.

42.Pender and Day, “Introduction,” 2.

43.Crawford, Mediatrix, 6.

44.Lilley, “Fruits of Sodom,” 177–78.

45.Dianne Mitchell makes a similar case in a discussion of the “several begetters” of sonnets like Shakespeare’s and Donne’s. Mitchell, “Shakespeare’s Several Begetters.”

46.Much work has been done on how collaboration shaped theatrical authorship, and how thinking about theatrical collaborations may provoke reconsiderations of authorship in general. See Hirschfeld, “Early Modern Collaboration”; Brooks, Playhouse to Printing House; Masten, Textual Intercourse.

47.Wright, Producing Women’s Poetry, 28. While Wright suggests that the focus of Southwell’s manuscript is a poetic practice that looks “predominantly inward” (44) and was not for sharing with others, I join Ross and Coolahan in seeing Southwell’s participation in the social dynamics of poetic exchange as reflected throughout the Commonplace Book. See Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics, 80; Coolahan, “Ideal Communities,” 71.

48.Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics, 67; also see Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing, 96.

49.Wright, Producing Women’s Poetry, 30.

50.Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing, 98.

51.Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing, 98–99. Marie-Louise Coolahan for this reason groups Anne with a cohort of “planters’ wives” who settled in Ireland and confronted both “alienation and cultural incomprehension.” Coolahan, “Ideal Communities,” 84.

52.Klene, Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, 24–27.

53.Calvin, Christian Religion, 225. Lilley reads these lines as an “erotic sadomasochistic burlesque” exemplifying an interplay of queer desire and religious piety within early modern female sociability. Lilley, “Fruits of Sodom,” 180.

54.Angle brackets are Klene’s method for denoting text that, in the original, was struck through.

55.Klene, Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, 27–28.

56.Klene, Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, 34; Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics, 71–74.

57.On Southwell as a “metaphysical poet,” see Wilson, “Anne Southwell, Metaphysical Poet.”

58.Klene, Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, 21–24.

59.Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics, 88.

60.As Dianne Mitchell pointed out to me in private correspondence (on February 25, 2021), augmenting existing texts was a pretty common phenomenon in both verse miscellanies and narratives like Sidney’s Arcadia and Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander.”

61.Burke, “Medium and Meaning,” 100.

62.Gibson, “Synchrony and Process,” 90–93.

63.Klene, Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, 40–43. The poem begins on the middle of page 42, continues to the middle of 43, picks up again on 40 and runs through 41, and ends, incomplete, again at the top of 42.

64.Clarke, “Animating Eve,” 165.

65.These line numbers correspond to the poem read as if begun at “S^r giue mee leaue …”; Klene’s edition treats this as a poem beginning on page 40 at the line, “Vnless himselfe against himselfe weare bent” (line 57 read in the right order); in this edition the line numbers are 9–26.

66.Burke, “Medium and Meaning,” 100.

67.Klene, Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, 76–84.

68.Klene, introduction, xxxiv.

69.Clarke, “Gender,” 115.

70.Gibson, “Synchrony and Process,” 89.

71.Klene, Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, 1.

72.Gibson, “Casting off Blanks,” 221.

73.Gibson, “Synchrony and Process,” 95; Clarke, “Gender,” 117.

74.Klene, Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, 1.

75.Here is the poem as it appears in Jones, Musicall Dreame, sig. Kr–K2r:
 When I sit reading all alone that secret book
 Wherein I sigh to looke
 How many spots there bee
 I wish I could not see
 Or from myself might flee
 … … … … … … … .
 Heauens I impore, that knowes my fault, what shall I doe,
 To hell I dare not goe,
 The world first made me rue,
 My selfe my griefes renew,
 To whome then shall I sue.
 Alasse, my soule doth faint to draw this doubtfull breath,
 Is there no hope in death,
 O yes, death ends my woes:
 Death me from me will lose,
 My selfe am all my foes.

76.Clarke, “Gender,” 118.

77.Clarke, “Gender,” 121.

78.Klene, introduction, xxxviii.

79.See, for starters, Greg, “Rationale of Copy-Text”; Bowers, Textual and Literary Criticism.

80.McKenzie, Bibliography.

81.McGann, Critique, 122.

82.McGann, Textual Condition, 21.

83.See Tanselle, “Textual Instability.”

84.Gary Taylor proposes that, in response to recognizing the impossibility of “unediting” historical texts and divorcing them from editorial mediation, editors “begin by re-conceptualizing editorial theory as a specialized subset of translation theory” and recognize that such an approach may help bridge the chasm between “foreignizing” and “domesticating” approaches to textual editing. Taylor, “In Media Res,” 98.

85.Tanselle, “Textual Instability,” 53–54.

86.Tanselle, “Textual Instability,” 54.

87.Gibson, “Synchrony and Process,” 94–95.

88.Shawn Moore and Jacob Tootalian, “Welcome!,” Digital Cavendish Project, April 16, 2019, http://digitalcavendish.org/welcome/.

89.“The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making,” accessed July 22, 2021, https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/.

90.Dolan, “Hester Pulter’s Dunghill Poetics,” 19.

91.Dolan, “Hester Pulter’s Dunghill Poetics,” 34.

92.Greenberg, Poetics of Editing, 14.

93.Tanselle, “Textual Instability,” 57.

94.Wright, Producing Women’s Poetry, 40.

95.Wright, Producing Women’s Poetry, 41.

96.Burke, “Lady Anne Southwell.”

97.Burke, “Lady Anne Southwell,” 338.

98.Bruffee, “Collaborative Learning,” 641.

99.Bruffee, “Collaborative Learning,” 648.

100.Matalene, “Teacher as Editor,” 11.

101.Rosenblatt, Reader, 17.

102.Rosenblatt’s understanding of transactional poetic reading draws on John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley’s account of knowledge making, which she summarizes in a manner reminiscent of Jonson’s discussion of poesy: “a ‘known’ assumes a ‘knower’; a ‘knowing’ is the transaction between a particular individual and a particular environment.” Rosenblatt, Reader, 15. As McGann puts it, a work of art “is fundamentally an action” that “tries to call out in the reader/viewer/audience a reciprocating response.” McGann, Literature of Knowledge, 13.

103.Saldívar, “Work of Criticism,” 965.

104.Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking, 5–6.