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Manuscripts and their Makers in the English Renaissance.

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Manuscripts and their Makers in the English Renaissance By Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo London: The British Library, 2002 and Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse By Grace Ioppolo London and New York: Routledge, 2006

Surprisingly (to me, at least), the field of early modern manuscript studies still has a limited number of players, and just about every one of them makes an appearance in Manuscripts and their Makers in the English Renaissance (half of the ten essays are written by members of the annual journal's editorial board and two by the coeditors). As rich and wonderful as Manuscripts and their Makers is, and as distinguished as the contributors are, it is also a cry for a new generation of voices to step up and be heard: so many manuscripts, so few scholars equipped with the paleographical and bibliographical skills to make sense of them. Based on conferences at the University of Reading in 2000 and 2001, this fascinating group of essays introduces new discoveries, new attributions, and new readings of well-known manuscripts. The essays devoted to individual manuscripts read like detective's reports, the authors providing the results of successful and dead-end investigations of dates, scribes, and owners with equal panache. Manuscripts and their Makers is a model of scholarly generosity, with the contributors frequently thanking each other for being pointed in the direction of hitherto unfamiliar manuscripts and leads. The physical descriptions of manuscripts are uniformly thorough and expert, and the essays always sound the same underlying theme: manuscripts must not be overlooked when trying to unravel the often mysterious roles of author, scribe, and printer in the production of literary and historical texts of this period. Many of the appendixes contain edited texts, and the footnotes are helpfully voluminous. The only shortcoming of this volume, and of the journal in general, is not the fault of the contributors or editors: the reproductions of the manuscripts are poor and frustratingly small, making it nearly impossible to read the handwriting.

Peter Beal kicks off the volume with a long essay on his discovery of another contemporary copy of Philip Sidney's Letter to Queen Elizabeth, purportedly sent by the poet to the queen in 1579 in an attempt to prevent her from marrying the Duc d'Alencon. This essay provides a useful supplement to Beal's discussion of the Letter's manuscript circulation in his In Praise of Scribes. None of the surviving manuscript copies are authorial, making the Letter, like most texts transmitted in manuscript, highly unstable by modern standards. What is extraordinary about this new copy (National Library of Scotland, Adv. MS 33.3.11, fols. 104v-110r) is that it can be dated to the earliest period of the Letter's circulation,...

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