We spent some time on the first day of class covering commonplace books, and I said while you were working they would help us think about all sorts of things, among them:
- Book history, print history, and material cultures associated with the book
- Practices associated with saving and categorizing information and stories worth saving
- Invention techniques used by writers including Shakespeare
Some comparable practices you might have encountered include screenshots to save pictures or quotations; notes on a phone; Pinterest boards or the equivalent social media album or playlist; recipe compilations, especially in notebooks or card files; compendiums of inspiring quotations; sketchbooks; scrapbooks; journals; zines.
Too, you might have heard something described as "commonplace"; we continue to use the term, although its meaning has evolved towards something pedestrian, boring, common. In Shakespeare's time, it had different resonances. It could also serve as starting places for invention, or standard categories for sorting.
In this compendium of Invention bestowed at the birth of the Hessian princess Elizabeth, for example, the categories include the "7 Inventio Artes Liberales"; here, your focus is on Grammar and Rhetoric, but the others featured are Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, Music, and Dialectic. The whole collection of images is digitized here: https://bildsuche.digitale-sammlungen.de/index.html?c=band_segmente&bandnummer=bsb00001352&pimage=00089&l=de, and it's a treasure trove for seeing some of these conceptual starting places and for showing us how these categories worked.
These sorts of compendiums existed in order to serve as inspiration for artists, writers, orators, and dramatists.
This mechanical approach to invention via categories is one we'll continue to consider as the semester progresses. We'll do a bit of that work with ON COPIA, by Desiderus Erasmus. In this treatise, Erasmus articulates methodical approaches to variation, expansion, and compression using lines of thought and lines of argument along with patterns of language.
To some extent, Erasmus synthesizes and distills classical and medieval rhetoricians. These systems proliferated, then and now. His approach was foundational for students educated within the humanist system that came to dominate sixteenth century pedagogical practices.
Common Topics
One approach to gathering information asked readers and writers to consider common topics. They often emerge in four or five categories: definition; possibility; circumstance; relationship; and [often] testimony are the groupings most often used, based on Aristotle's original descriptions.
Various rhetoricians expand them or develop alternatives, but these conceptual classifications offer foundations upon which to construct an argument or tools to identify strategies at work within others' explanations.
They sometimes, also, were referred to as "common places" for arguments, although the term "common places" extends conceptually beyond these more narrowly defined "topics."
Common Places
Common "places" might originate in all sorts of gatherings or compilations. They might serve simply as sayings, or proverbs, or maxims--these were one huge category for collection in the sixteenth century. Erasmus published one compendium
Pieter Bruegel the Elder was among the artists who translated them into graphic renderings.
In England, collections of sayings proliferated as well. One author who uses them to inspire components of his epic narrative is Edmund Spenser in THE FAERIE QUEEN (Books 1-3 printed 1593). They were part of an effort to document the vernacular of these European countries as they moved away from the common language of Latin for formal usages in religious practice as well as in trade and in law.
But as this snapshot of a search in the Folger Shakespeare Library's digitized collection indicates, their usage could operate for many other projects as well.
It's worth delving into some of the texts themselves, just to see how they're operating.
In this example, Edward Dering compiles concepts under straightforward letter headings. He's working in Latin, and his handwriting is challenging to a non-C16-reader, but thankfully the Folger has enlisted volunteers who offer this transcription for this page, identified as "Signature 13":
"R. Regis ad exemplum totus componitur orbis Res est solliciti plena timoris Amor. Rivalem possem non ego ferre Iovem. Roscida frondosæ revocant electra sorores. Martial is Rara coronato plausere theatra Menandro. Statius Robora Dalmatico lucent satiata metallo"
Google Translate offers this rendering:
- [for REGIS/king]: The whole world is composed for the king's example.
- [RES. . . AMOR/Things of Love] Love is full of anxiety and fear.
- [RIVALUM] I could not bear Jupiter as a rival. [Google suggests as the source the writer Sextus Propertius, ELEGIES]
- [ROSCIDA/Dewy] The dewy leaves recall the amber sisters. [Google suggests that he's quoting Claudian, one of the stand-out poets of antiquity, a Greek, writing in Latin]
- In this entry, he lists his source: Martial. "The theaters rarely applauded [the dramatist] Menander with crowns."
- Here, the source is Statius, a classical Greek author: "The beams glitter in strong Dalmatian ore" [ROBORA/to make strong]
In all of these examples, Dering is identifying key concepts from classical authors and recording these snippets, probably to help him bolster his own conversation or compositions.
You can see from these examples (thanks, Google!) that he has read widely from a range of classical authors, or has read them in other compilations. However he's collected the material, he's saving it using key words that work for him.
Dering also probably anticipates the occasions for which he might need such support; here, he can talk about leadership and love and authorship or fame.
This page of entries helps us see what might be worth gathering. For this person, classical allusions are worth saving. Less crucial is the authorship or citation, although he does note a couple of the authors.
In a general way, though, the quotation and the concept are the most important aspects of this collections, either because the other quotations are so widely known that authorship is not necessary, or (more likely), that the source is less consequential.
MISCELLANIES
A related category to commonplace books is that of MISCELLANIES. Print was a newer technology at this stage; Guttenberg's press and the European print revolution really took hold beginning mid C15 (so, 150 years before Shakespeare was born). Printed books and manuscript books continued to coexist as mechanisms for circulating information, since it took a long time for the infrastructure to support printing presses to take hold and spread widely.
Some writers preferred to distribute their works only in manuscript versions. Print was tightly controlled; books were supposed to be licensed by the Stationer's Register, in part to restrict some of the more heretical ideas emergent in this period (and, definitions of "heretical" shifted throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.)
Some of the most critical or dangerous or risque materials circulated solely in manuscript. We might make comparisons between what we print in books, on blogs, or distribute via What'sApp or other more ostensibly "private" distribution threads.
Then as now, though, once something left its author's hands, it might be shared beyond close circles, or compiled with materials its author didn't agree with, or be changed in ways its author never imagined or agreed to.
These Miscellanies served to gather many kinds of texts, sketches, and information, but poetry was among the most common, either to be incorporated or to serve as the core of the collection.
Indeed, the first printed collection of poetry in English, SONGES AND SONNETTS, first printed in 1557 and widely known as "Tottel's Miscellany," gathered together English poetry from a variety of authors and is one of our main sources for a lot of those early examples, in English, of poetics.
These compilations gave their collectors the opportunity to save the poems or texts they wanted to keep, or to gather the works of their friends, or to compile particular sorts of songs or topical information to help them in whatever ways they thought necessary.
While people were less likely to record their emotions in journals the way we might now, they did often track their spiritual journey, sometimes under the rubric of "spiritual exercises," which built on the work of Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits and an important influence in this period.
Many of the volumes that survive include cures for plague or illness, or recipes of all sorts--the kinds of things we still circulate in these more personal collections.
CATALOGUE OF BOOKS
The final example here that offers an excellent way to understand how people grappled with collecting and sorting information comes from this volume, printed in 1595, and compiled by Andrew Maunsell.
Maunsell tells readers he wants to help them manage the explosion of information that is one outcome of the European print revolution. Then as now, the new technology overwhelms people, and Maunsell offers a solution.
This volume, and its companion the SECOND PART, are wonders for all sorts of reasons.
From the outset, Maunsell makes clear his priorities: the first book is DIVINITY, which encompasses sermons, translations, treatises, and all sorts of explications of these materials.
The categories include alphabetical listings by author, title, and sometimes by translator.
They also include key topics, and this component of A CATALOGUE is especially interesting. Examine the page and you'll see
- A couple of "ABRIDGEMENTS," one of the "canonicall bookes of the old Testament, written in Meeter" and the other a "holy history of the old Testament"
- a few ADMONITIONS, one to a true pastor, one to the people of England, a third to all Ploughholders
- important topics that someone writing or researching theology might look for. Here, AGAINST ADULTERY AND FORNICATION, is one you're seeing on this first page.
This particular version of Maunsell is especially intriguing and useful for our purposes because someone has set in additional blank pages and used them to catalogue an extensive library.
In other words, after the 1595 printing, someone expanded it for their own purposes and built upon the information and categories Maunsell provided to track treatises he had missed or books that emerged after he offered this compilation.
The handwriting is legible once you get used to it. See if you can identify "A SPIRITUAL ALMANCKE" on the facing page.
Here again, the keywords that emerge are instructive: OF ADVERSITY AND AFFLICTION might not be how you think about trouble, but this volume offers ten resources for those who grapple with issues, or need to offer consolation to others who do.
We might begin to think about what keywords and categories we're using, with hashtags and other sorts of search terms that we take for granted.
These categories, in the commonplace books and Maunsell and works of this sort help us to see some of the habits of mind and patterns of thought at work for Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
They also offer a way for us to realize the ways in which we construct categories and inherit so many of the ways we think about the world.
Your commonplace book is yours to use as you wish--to compile your favorite quotes, or gather the questions that emerge as you read, or to use as a journal for reflection, or to sketch costumes or scenes as you imagine them emerging from the plays themselves.
The practice of commonplacing is one way we can connect to the period and think about how we circulate information, save texts and ideas for later, and create content from the world around us.
IMAGE LIST
- Cover: Miscellany of Lady Anne Southwell, ca. 1587-1636, Folger Shakespeare Library, call number V.b.198, 6v || 7r, 33x22 cm. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection, digital image file name 51010, https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/j47218
- "Grammatica, Rhetorica, Mvsica, Dialecta" [from the 7 Liberal Arts], Beschreibung der historischen und allegorischen Personen der acht Inventionen zum Ringelrennen in den Aufzügen gehalten 1596 anläßlich der Taufe der Prinzessin Elisabeth von Hessen - BSB Cod.icon. 340, ca 1600, Bayerische StaatsBilbiothek. Image link. Creative Commons License By-NC-SA 4.0 DEED
- Desiderus Erasmus, On Copia [De Duplici Copia Verborum ac Rerum Commentarii Duo], 1521 edition, via Internet Archive. Creative Commons License 3.10
- Aristotle, On Rhetorick: Or the True Grounds and Principles of Oratory, Shewing the Right Art of Pleading and Speaking in full Assemblies and Courts of Judicature. The Second Edition. London, 1693. Via Internet Archive.
- Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559. Via Google Art Project and Wikimedia. Public Domain.
- Edward Dering, Commonplace Book, begun ca. 1605. Folger Shakespeare Library call number X.d.530, Digital Image 147269. https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/detail/FOLGER~3~3~19814~289691:Commonplace-book-of-Sir-Edward-Deri?qvq=q:147269&mi=0&trs=2. Creative Commons License 4.0.
© January 2024 | Karen L. Nelson | knelson@umd.edu