Gutenberg, proto-Hack Writers and Shakespeare.

This Series:

• Gutenberg, proto-Hack Writers and Shakespeare.
• Francois Rabelais and Shakespeare
• The Tempests of Shakespeare and Rabelais.
• Francois Rabelais was Born About this Date in 1483.

Texts in daily-use European vernacular languages dating from at least the 12^th century grace the great archives of the West.  By far most, however, are written out by monastic copyists in Latin.  A smaller number were copied from Greek.  Copying manuscripts was a tedious and enormously time-consuming task.  Latin texts were read far more by the monks and lay brethren in the course of their duties thus the scriptoria spent orders of magnitude more time in their production.

General conversation, however, was spoken in the vernacular.  Poets such as Chaucer put considerable money and effort into pursuing the rare hand-written manuscripts in the vernacular.    They contained the record of the poems and stories that had proven so popular that the time was taken to make copies of them.  Such poems and stories were the raw material of their work product.  In this way, the 14^th century vernacular stories of Boccaccio became an international bestseller.

This was the state of affairs, in a nutshell, until about 1440 when Johannes Gutenberg invented the first fully functional, moveable-type printing press.  But centuries of habit — no matter the source — were not to be overturned in a day.  Latin resoundingly remained the language of learning and leisure.  Greek was suspect super-elitist stuff and begrudgingly respected for it all the more.  Those were the languages of the printed book.

Vernacular texts were not sought out by publishers.  Most who trafficked in the vernacular could neither read nor write.  The few who could would still required third parties to read church and government papers and to do bookkeeping in Latin.

The Reformation rapidly increased vernacular texts.  The movement was made possible by the technology of printing.  It needed vernacular texts in order to rally the common folk.  Somehow those folk managed informally to learn to read — a small number in each social group, at first, who could then read the texts to the others.

A less well known effect of the Reformation was that many young Catholic men who had taken religious orders in order to receive an education began to lead lives at large from monastic discipline.  Like Erasmus and Rabelais they took up the pen.  While Erasmus did not roam too far, the likes of Rabelais and a monk named Bandello began to live by pen and social connections.  They (sometimes nervously) sought to advertise themselves as humanists writing cautionary moral tales but their actions spoke louder than their self-representations.  More and more their networks were filled with wealthy laypersons.  Their tales grew vulgar. 

Never did the Catholic church need such allies more.  The tacit deal was struck.  These monks straddled both worlds, occasionally called upon to defend their lifestyles, those who were good at excuses rapidly becoming a new educated class.

As this generation grew older the likes of Pierre Boaistuau and Francois Belleforest appeared.  They tried to take the same route but the competition had greatly increased thus reducing the value of their work and their social status.  They must write books at a rapid pace in order to keep body and soul together.

As was often the case in such matters, Boaistuau forefronted the petit distinction “surnomm Launay” on all of his title pages.  While he insisted upon the descriptor “humanist,” he selected his subject matter from subjects history would soon associate with hack writing.  

After a number of encouraging successes, Boaistuau chose to edit the stories of Margaret, Queen of Navarre, and next to write translations of Bandello (then in possession of the bishopric of Agen, as a sinecure).  The editor had been a servant at the castle in Agen of the lately deceased Margaret who was then sheltering Francois Belleforest, a young man with far too high an estimation of his own poetic powers.

In an admirable gambit, he passed the Channel, in 1560, to offer his new work for the patronage of the new English Queen, Elizabeth.[1]  She does not seem to have been interested but he advertised nevertheless that she’d complimented it.  A new relationship to the written word was beginning to be born.

While all of this was going on, England was shipping nearly all of its books from the continent.  It’s theater was still dominated by the old Religious Mystery Plays.[2]  Shortly after Boaistuau’s visit, the first English translations from the Latin plays of Seneca began to displace the religious plays.  The old Roman stoic would dominate the tiny stages then available for over twenty years.[3]  The first embers of what would become the Elizabethan stage were only just beginning to glow.

Boaistuau  was very attentive to the desires of the growing reading classes.  The first book of Histoires Tragiques (1559) his translations of Bandello’s stories, was an immediate best seller.   Italian stories were all the rage, not only in France but among the educated French readers in England.  They were hungry for editions they could easily read.

One of Boaistuau’s translations was Bandello’s story of Romeo and Juliet.  Shakespeare’s play about them contains many features from the poem “Romeus and Juliet” (1562) attributed to a young University man, Arthur Brooke, who took his material both from Boaistuau and the original of Bandello.  Shakespeare himself can be shown to have taken features from Brooke (primarily), Boaistuau and Bandello.

An English writer of pamphlets, William Painter, looking for a prospect for remunerative authorship, took Boaistuau’s strategy over in more than one way.  As translator, he, too, could publish best sellers without having to write them — translations of Boaistuau and Belleforest’s Histoires into English.

The first volume of his The Palace of Pleasure (1566)[4] was even a bigger best seller than Boaistuau and Belleforest’s compilations.  Soon plays heavily steeped in Seneca began to have sub-plots from The Palace.  As this grew more and more popular, especially with the ladies, plays had less and less Seneca and more and more Painter.  The general lessons that could be drawn by this progress were not lost on a Court novelist and playwright named John Lyly and the Elizabethan theater that most know began to emerge.

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[1] Doukas, Georgios. Pierre Boaistuau (c. 1517-1566) and the Employment of Humanism in Mid Sixteenth-Century France (2011), 60.

[2] see my “The Journey from Gaufridus to Shakespeare.” 

https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-set-speech-from-gaufridus-to.html

[3] see my “Shakespeare’s Funeral Meats.” https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2020/05/shakespeares-funeral-meats_13.html

[4] see my “Shakespeare and Painter’s Palace of Pleasure.” https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2020/05/shakespeare-and-painters-palace-of.html

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• What About Edward de Vere’s Twelfth Night of 1600/01? January 28, 2020. “Leslie Hotson, who brought the Orsino-Orsino coincidence to the attention of the Nevillians seems to have made one particular mistake that is all to our point.”
• Hedingham Castle 1485-1562 with Virtual Tour Link.  January 29, 2019. “Mr. Sheffeld told me that afore the old Erle of Oxford tyme, that cam yn with King Henry the vii., the Castelle of Hengham was yn much ruine,…”
• Why Shakespeare Appears on Title Pages from 1598.  November 20, 2018.  ‘These he finds unconvincing.  The author’s name having appeared in a number of title pages after 1598, he continues, “it would seem foolish for publishers not to attach the Shakespeare brand to his previously unattributed plays—unless they had other reasons not to do so.”’ 
• The Battle Over Shakespeare's Early and Late Plays. September 24, 2018. “The answers to the post-Oxford dilemma, of course, are three.”
• Shakespeare on Gravity. August 26, 2018. “So carelessly does Shakespeare throw out such an extraordinary divination. His achievement in thus, as it were, rivalling Newton may seem in a certain sense even more extraordinary than Goethe's botanical and osteological discoveries;…”
• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.