Authorship in the Seventeenth Century

The bookseller Humphrey Moseley was taking a chance in 1645 when he published Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin. In a dedicatory epistle to the collection, Moseley suggests that Milton had already achieved some fame in manuscript as an academic poet—Moseley writes that Milton’s “more peculiar excellency in these studies, was too well known to conceal his Papers, or to keep me from attempting to sollicit them from him”—yet prior to the 1645 volume, Milton was mostly known in print as a sectarian and defender of divorce.¹ None of his poems had previously been published with his name except for Lycidas, which had appeared with his initials seven years earlier in a Cambridge collection commemorating his late friend and classmate Edward King. We can detect the bookseller’s uncertainty about the profitability of Milton’s Poems throughout the introductory epistle. Moseley admits that in the expanding marketplace of print, “the slightest Pamphlet is now adayes more vendible then the Works of learnedest men,” and he attempts to reassure himself by taking the long view: “Let the event guide it self which way it will, I shall deserve of the age.”²

Moseley in his dedication also emphasizes his proprietary rights to the 1645 volume. Within the next ten years, he would become a leading figure in the seventeenth-century book trade, but in 1645 he had only begun to earn his reputation as a literary bookseller.³ Following the favorable success he had achieved a few months earlier for publishing Edmund Waller’s verses, Moseley was apparently eager to produce a companion edition. He accordingly designed a book that emulates the title page and layout of Waller’s collection. As Moseley writes in his dedication, he had encountered so much “incouragement … from the most ingenious men in their clear and courteous entertainment of Mr. Wallers late choice Peeces” that he decided once again to “adventure into the World, presenting it with these ever-green, and not to be blasted Laurels.”⁴

Part of the bookseller’s strategy for making the new book vendible was to foreground Milton’s identity as a precocious talent. The 1645 Poems begins with a frontispiece portrait of the author in his twentieth year, and the Latin poems in the second half begin with the announcement “ELEGIARUM Liber primus,” as if other books of elegies by Milton were forthcoming (none were).⁵ The broader implication is that the collection’s readers can here witness the author’s poetic development, a premise encouraged by the seventeen explanatory tags attached to some of the texts, which state either the date or the author’s early age when he wrote a specific poem or briefly describe the circumstances surrounding the composition. Perhaps most striking, the 1645 volume includes Milton’s incomplete “The Passion.” As the note at the end of this poem explains, “This Subject the Author finding to be above the yeers he had, when he wrote it, and nothing satisfi’d with what was begun, left it unfinisht.”⁶ The assumption—audacious, but ultimately prescient—was that Milton in time could complete such an ambitious work and that readers should therefore take interest in even his less successful youthful efforts. He had only begun to prove what he would achieve.⁷

In this essay, I wish to use Milton’s Poems to discuss seventeenth-century authorship more generally. Because the 1645 collection foregrounds his poetic development, the volume would seem to endorse the model of authorial autonomy most often associated with the Romantic ethos. Louis Martz in the 1960s first argued that it is “Milton’s … arrangement” that creates the book’s “guiding, central purpose,” namely, to “convey a sense of the predestined bard’s rising powers,” and, although subsequent critics have emphasized Moseley’s contribution to the 1645 Poems, the perception persists that Milton was somehow single-handedly responsible for the publication.⁸ Writing as recently as 2013, Stella Revard and Steven Zwicker, for example, have continued to treat the book as if Milton alone created it. Revard assumes that Milton “designed his editions in 1645 and 1673,” and, while Zwicker helpfully reads the collection in the context of other printed works being sold in January 1646, the date when Poems was likely first published, he assumes that Milton even dictated the language on the title page.⁹

The value of the 1645 collection for my present purposes stems in part from its paradoxical status as a collaborative creation and an expression of authorial authority. In addition to the contributions of the publisher Moseley, we can add Ruth Raworth, who printed Milton’s book and whose name also appears on the title page; William Marshall, who engraved and signed the poet’s portrait on the frontispiece; and Henry Lawes, a member of the King’s Private Music, whose name appears on the title page like a celebrity endorsement and who composed the music for the volume’s centerpiece, A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle. On the one hand, the printed text clearly emerged from a shared process of creation in which Milton’s participation was limited; on the other hand, Milton’s identity represents the chief organizing principle for the 1645 volume’s diverse occasional poems. While sociologists and psychologists have argued that all human beings attain a sense of “personal autonomy” only in relation to a larger community, this process became especially important with the advent of print publication. To develop their individual authority, authors not only continued to draw on their relationships with friends, patrons, and acquaintances but also had to work with members of the book trade and engage a new, unseen group of readers. Milton, I wish to argue, is important for our understanding of seventeenth-century authorship because his career allows us to trace the rising status of writers within the burgeoning culture of print. Milton may have never aspired to supervise the printing of any of his works, but a comparative analysis of his 1645 Poems and his later publications reveals a significant cultural shift: the dawning awareness of the material text’s significance in shaping both the meaning of a literary work and the endurance of an author’s reputation.

Much of the scholarship on Renaissance authorship published in the past three decades has demonstrated in various ways the paradox that Milton’s 1645 Poems embodies: the author’s growing symbolic presence versus early modern writers’ limited practical authority. Pioneering studies published in the 1980s focused in particular on the intellectual context and social circumstances that influenced writers’ identities and utterances. Most notably, Richard Helgerson examined poets’ strategies of self-construction—as he put it, the attempt to “maintain an ethically normative and unchanging self”—but he concluded that this urge was not a uniquely personal expression.¹⁰ On the contrary, Helgerson argued, the self-identifying strategies that writers deployed were influenced by religious reform, a nascent nationalism, and concomitant changes in patronage and print that were entangled in class politics.

Even more influential was probably Stephen Greenblatt, who, in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, also posited that a greater self-consciousness about the formation of individual identities occurred in Renaissance England. Focusing on earlier, sixteenth-century figures—such as Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt, and Edmund Spenser—Greenblatt followed Helgerson in arguing that such constructions were not acts of a poet’s isolated will. Instead, they were shaped by family, religion, and society—cultural forces that are forever beyond an individual’s control.

Dovetailing with if not directly informing books such as Helgerson’s and Greenblatt’s was Roland Barthes’s 1977 poststructuralist obituary for the author and Michel Foucault’s theory of the author as an interpretive construct, published in the same year. Barthes specifically claimed that a text finds unity in its destination, not its origin.¹¹ According to Barthes, “writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it,” and thus the author is “dead,” by which he seemed to mean that a writer’s intentions are irrelevant for interpretation because “every text is eternally written here and now” in the minds of its latest readers.¹² Foucault, like Barthes, accepted that authorial intentions ought not to dictate the way readers experience texts.¹³ In answer to the deceptively simple question “What is an Author?” Foucault focused on the theoretical idea of an author—what he called the “author-function”—that readers assign to texts so as to classify and interpret them. How does the name printed on a title page, Foucault wondered, affect the ways that readers experience the content of a book?

But whereas Barthes and Foucault ultimately had little to say about the activities of actual authors and the impact of writers’ changing cultural circumstances, subsequent studies have emphasized a more historically conscious approach. Following Helgerson and Greenblatt, the author would still matter as a subject for literary criticism, but gone was the Romantic myth of the sovereign creator. Critics began to examine the social matrices of experience that necessarily influenced early modern writing and reading and to analyze the ways in which the physical forms of texts necessarily affected poetic meaning. Roger Chartier, for example, investigated the history of the conditions of production—legal, social, and economic—that contributed to the author’s rising status, while Gérard Genette examined what he called paratexts, previously neglected, liminal sites such as titles and dedications that accompany texts and regulate approaches to reading.¹⁴ The 1990s, as Chartier observed, accordingly marked “the return of the author” as a subject of critical inquiry.¹⁵ But instead of asking, “What is an author?” the dominant questions became “When?” and “How?”

Perhaps because editors of Renaissance drama had long accepted the collaborative nature of the theater, some of the earliest work on the complexity of authorial practices and the implications of printed attributions focused on dramatic writings. That Thomas Heywood refers in 1633 to The English Traveller as one of 220 plays “in which I have had either an entire hand, or at least a maine finger,” and that the diary of theater manager and financier Philip Henslowe mentions 282 plays of which nearly two thirds are created by more than one author suggest how commonly dramatic texts were written collaboratively.¹⁶ By comparison, title pages of printed plays point to an emergent notion of individual authorship as they often simplify their dramas’ collaborative origins in favor of promoting a single authorial identity.¹⁷ In the case of William Shakespeare, critics discussed how his 1623 posthumous folio helped to establish his prestige as separate from the collaborative world of the theater, while seven years earlier Ben Jonson helped to construct his own textual authority in print. As Joseph Loewenstein and Richard Newton argued, Jonson in supervising the publication of his 1616 folio Workes was self-consciously attempting to found a unique identity against the theater’s collaborative practices.¹⁸ For example, the seriousness of Jonson’s title—The Workes of Benjamin Jonson—sounds as far removed from the unruly crowds who enjoyed “plays” as it was from the spectacle that, Jonson believed, marred “entertainments” at court.

But in addition to relatively straightforward instances of shared writing that many Renaissance plays reflect—and that their printed forms then disguise—critics began to analyze the various associations and material conditions that enabled and influenced dramatic authorship during the 1500s and 1600s. Most notably, Jeffrey Masten argued for a broader, widespread process of collaborative playwriting, one that relied on contributions from not just fellow authors but also book holders, copyists, managers, musicians, and patrons. Describing “an everyday world suffused with, structured by, collaborative textual practice,” Masten attempted to tease out correspondences between early modern conceptions of writing and contemporary models and rhetorics of sexual relations.¹⁹ The discourses of eroticism, gender, and social class, Masten argued, both facilitated and reflected collaborative theatrical productions.

Writing about nondramatic texts but also interested in the rhetoric of publication in connection with sexual politics, Wendy Wall examined how the relations between writers, texts, and readers became gendered as masculine within the book trade. Whereas early Renaissance poets may have modeled themselves as amateurs disdaining the “stigma of print,” Wall showed that the new literary authority of printed texts also adapted long-standing practices of manuscript circulation associated with aristocratic coteries.²⁰ Especially through the representation of women and the appropriation of Petrarchan rhetoric and courtly gender politics, writers attempted to sanction the author’s new status and to deflect some of the social controversies surrounding the book trade.

Wall’s emphasis on the intersection of manuscript and print publication complemented important work on scribal culture by, among others, Arthur Marotti and Harold Love. Like Wall, Marotti in Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric primarily concerned himself with changing constructions of writers’ authority in the context of lingering anxieties about print. Marotti argued that anthologies of verse and single-author editions of poetry—such as John Donne’s Poems and George Herbert’s The Temple, both published in 1633—conferred a new prestige on literary authorship and helped to make print the “normal and preferred” means of transmission.²¹ Marotti also concluded that conventions of print ultimately influenced scribal circulation so that, for example, ascriptions of authorship in manuscripts began to increase in the middle of the sixteenth century.²²

Harold Love’s work on manuscript publication concentrated instead on practices of authorship and the ways in which reading and writing were often communal activities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He introduced the term scribal community to describe the already existing social groups that, even after the advent of print, exchanged handwritten texts as “a mode of social bonding.”²³ Building on Marotti’s earlier book on Donne’s method of scribal circulation, Love showed that sharing poems in manuscript was an inherently collaborative process because it invited indefinite response and revision.²⁴

Other studies of manuscript culture reached a similar conclusion, reinforcing the premise that an author’s work is necessarily influenced by its practical and material circumstances. Craig Monson, for example, examined the collaborative nature of verse anthems and consort songs that survive in manuscript collections; Mary Hobbs showed that poets such as Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell regularly borrowed from and responded to manuscript poems by other writers; and Timothy Raylor analyzed how burlesques and mock poems emerged from the competitive club culture of royalist wits and poets.²⁵ Certainly the humanist tradition of culling loci communes or commonplaces would have encouraged such a collaborative approach to authorship, regardless of whether a writer’s works were published in print or shared in manuscript. Walter Ong was one of the first critics to emphasize how writers throughout the Renaissance borrowed ideas or even specific diction from another writer’s work without attributing a source, “for these were all taken to be—and most often were—part of the common tradition.”²⁶ Jonson, for example, vehemently attacked plagiarism (as in his epigram “To Prowl the Plagiary”), but he distinguished between such thoughtless appropriation and effective “imitation,” one of the requisites, he believed, for becoming a true poet.²⁷

Ong’s formative work on manuscript and print—what he called “technologies of literacy”²⁸—anticipated how studies of early modern authorship would ultimately overlap with studies of early reading. Just as critics disavowed the fiction of the author as a solitary creator, they came to reject the theoretical construct of an idealized, transhistorical readership, as initially supposed by some feminist and reader-response criticism. Scholars instead turned to the archive to piece together how early readers actually used their books, and many of the first studies focused on the habits of individual readers—most notably, Jonson, Gabriel Harvey, and John Dee.²⁹ Subsequent work on seventeenth-century reading has cautiously reached more general conclusions about interpretive strategies and reading practices that can shed light on early assumptions about authorship. As William Sherman has shown, for example, readers often signed their names or added an anathema or book curse to prevent a text from becoming stolen or lost.³⁰ These two gestures suggest that readers assumed considerable authority over the books they purchased. As owners of imposing volumes or expensive libraries, readers could also collect and exhibit books as symbols of their own—not the author’s—learning and status. And, in the most extreme cases, as Adam Smyth has described, a “culture of cutting” arose in which readers became authors by cutting up manuscript and printed pages to fashion new texts—a “potentially quotidian mode of textual consumption,” most famously practiced by Nicholas Ferrar and his family in the religious community of Little Gidding.³¹ Ferrar and his family created at least fifteen so-called Biblical Harmonies—that is, single, amalgamated accounts of the four gospels.

Critics writing about early modern reading—such as Sherman, Kevin Sharpe, Eugene Kintgen, and Heidi Brayman Hackel—have also offered new insight into contemporary attitudes about authorship by analyzing the marks that early readers left behind in their printed texts. Seventeenth-century readers seem to have responded to the apparently less personal experience of print (as opposed to manuscript) by freely appropriating their books. Although not all Renaissance readers were able to write, some took license with a book’s blank spaces and added their own commentary. Perhaps motivated by the expense of paper in early modern England, readers often used their books even to pursue interests that have no clear relation to an author’s subject. Surveying 151 copies of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia printed before 1700, Hackel found legible handwritten marks in 70 percent of her books, “ranging from signatures to a few stray scribbles to elaborate polyglot marginalia and indices.”³²

The wide array of scribal traces that Hackel discovered in Arcadia is representative of the complete archive of hardwritten marks left by Renaissance readers in all types of texts. Yet Renaissance literary publications more generally contain far fewer annotations than legal and religious publications from the period.³³ Critics have not yet explained this disparity. Were fewer marginal notations written in literary texts because early readers were less engaged with a play or lyric poem than they were with a topical tract on, for example, coffee houses or church governance? Alternatively, the most heavily annotated copies of literary works may have been used up and thrown out during the intervening centuries, as libraries and collectors pursued pristine versions of prized texts.

I would suggest that at least in some cases printers and booksellers may have dissuaded readers’ appropriation of literary texts by enhancing authors’ symbolic status. If the new distance that print imposed between a writer and readers prompted readers to make texts their own, stationers also found ways to personalize their books and to make authors seem more immediately present.³⁴ As we have seen with Milton’s 1645 Poems, some title pages and prefatory materials highlight a poet’s identity and emphasize that the volume contains the writer’s authentic works—“in their pure originals and true genuine colours,” as Moseley writes, for example, in the introduction to Waller’s Poems (1645).³⁵ Publishers also began to include authors’ portraits in some editions, and, as Kevin Pask and Alan Pritchard have observed, composing biographical accounts of poets gradually supplanted the medieval tradition of writing saints’ lives.³⁶ Following the prefatory biography of Chaucer first published in the 1500s, Izaak Walton’s life of Donne was included in the folio edition of Donne’s sermons in 1640, Fulke Greville’s life of Sidney began appearing as a preface to Arcadia in 1652, and Thomas Sprat’s life of Abraham Cowley was published in a folio edition of Cowley’s works in 1668.³⁷

Other, more broadly applied conventions of printed texts also may have enhanced authors’ symbolic authority and compensated for the potentially less personal experience of encountering a work in print. Printed marginalia, for example, could imply how readers ought to understand a text, and some seventeenth-century books begin with a stationer’s prescriptive appeal to an ideal audience—“the discreete Reader,” “the Iudiciall Reader,” “the knowing Reader”³⁸—or include more specific, forthright instructions that explain how a book should be read. Thus, while Herrick’s Hesperides (1648) begins with a sally of self-conscious poems explaining, for example, “When he would have his verses read,” the author Laurence Sarson instead requests at the start of his Analysis (1650) that the “less skilfull Reader” should “omit what is contained between page twenty five, and page sixty nine,” an apparently sincere request for readers’ self-censorship, or, perhaps, a playful taunt for inquisitive readers to seek out pages 25 to 69.³⁹ The general assumption seems to have been, following the tradition of elaborate humanist theories of interpretation, that only through this type of directed effort could stationers expect readers to understand a book’s true meaning and to gauge accurately an author’s merits.⁴⁰

But if the sometimes significant interventions that stationers made in printed texts must have influenced early readers’ responses, modern editors and critics have not always agreed whether to treat printers and publishers as tantamount to coauthors of the books that they helped to produce. Should textual editors creating modern editions attempt to preserve or purge such contributions? Whereas Jerome McGann, writing in the 1980s, reasoned that the “arrangements” required to produce all literary works inevitably influence poetic meaning, a long-standing alternative theory of editing maintains a more limited definition of authorship: this older approach concerns itself exclusively with the person in whose mind a literary work originates.⁴¹ G. Thomas Tanselle, for one, has argued that all outside influences contaminate the ideal text as it existed in the author’s imagination and the goal of the textual editor is to reproduce the ideal text.⁴²

Encouraging critics of early modern literature to adopt instead McGann’s more inclusive approach to authorship is probably the lack of practical authority that writers had over the publication of their works for most of the seventeenth century. Even as the name recognition that came with the spread of print culture increased writers’ symbolic presence, a stationer who put up the capital for a book could choose the format, determine the layout, add prefatory materials, and design the title page, while compositors, working from an authorial or scribal manuscript, regularly made essential, hands-on decisions about a text’s spelling, punctuation, and changes in type. As the printer Joseph Moxon explains in his 1683 manual, a compositor “is strictly to follow his Copy” but also may incorporate changes according to “a Custom, which among them is look’d upon as a task and duty incumbent on the Compositer, viz. to discern and amend the bad Spelling and Pointing of his Copy, if it be English.”⁴³ Moxon goes on to explain that each compositor should also “have so much Sence and Reason, as to Point his Sentences properly” and should “Set some Words or Sentences in Italick or English Letters” so as “to render the Sence of the Author more intelligent to the Reader.”⁴⁴ D. F. McKenzie’s pioneering study of the late-seventeenth-century dramatist and poet William Congreve suggests that stationers also developed individual styles as their names became associated with specific types of printed texts. Congreve, as McKenzie showed, collaborated with the printer John Watts and the bookseller Jacob Tonson to create an edition of Congreve’s plays that uniquely reflects each man’s contribution.⁴⁵

Milton’s 1645 Poems similarly seems to represent such a collaboration. In practical terms, Milton certainly had a motive for helping to design the text: if Moseley was trying to produce a vendible book that would help him establish his reputation as a publisher of fine literature, Milton was just as likely hoping to use Poems to dispel his reputation as a divorcer.⁴⁶ But it is primarily the joking Greek epigraph below the frontispiece portrait that suggests Milton’s abiding presence in 1645. Whereas the third-person headnotes that accompany some of the texts sound as if Moseley is introducing us to the poet’s corpus, the epigraph fleetingly captures the author’s voice as he speaks directly to readers: “That an unskillful hand had carved this print / You’d say at once, seeing the living face; / But, finding here no jot of me, my friends, / Laugh at the botching artist’s mis-attempt.”⁴⁷ The rest of the layout keeps the author at arm’s length: even as the text foregrounds Milton’s identity by referring repeatedly to the timing of individual poems, nowhere in the volume is the poet’s current age revealed, and thus the book obscures the works’ specific relevance for his growing poetic maturity. We learn, for example, that “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” was “Compos’d 1629,” but we don’t know how old the author was in 1629; or we read that the frontispiece portrait depicts the poet in his twentieth year, but we don’t know when the engraving was done.⁴⁸ The cumulative effect is to cast the collection, not as personal pronouncement but as a reliquary—which was often the actual case with poetic collections in the seventeenth century, most notably, such posthumous volumes as Thomas Carew’s Poems (1640) or John Suckling’s Fragmenta Aurea (1646). Readers in 1645 may page through Milton’s early works, but the design promotes the bookseller Moseley as our guide, and the poet himself seems removed from the immediate process.

Yet that we can refer to the 1645 Poems as both a chronicle of Milton’s poetic development and a characteristic publication by the bookseller Moseley points up a potential problem with the social approach to authorship that has come to dominate early modern studies in the past three decades. The emphasis that critics have put on the various associations and material conditions that enabled and influenced early literary production may obscure different types and degrees of authorial authority. Surely we can plot a continuum of more versus less collaboration so as to distinguish between, say, Milton’s relatively solitary creation of his personal sonnet “Methought I saw my late espoused saint” and the shared creation of his 1645 Poems or even the collaboration required for A Mask Presented a Ludlow Castle, the courtly entertainment that in 1634 the Earl of Bridgewater commissioned Milton to write and for which Lawes composed the music. As Heather Hirschfeld has recently cautioned, critics who argue that all writing is collaborative still need to define the specific mode of a collaboration, recognize the integrity of each individual who participated in a collaborative endeavor, and find another word to signify “shared writing,” the unique literary practice of two or more writers who deliberately contributed to the same text.⁴⁹ I would add that discussions of early modern authorship—and, perhaps, authorship during any period—ought to distinguish as well between practical and symbolic authority, and to recognize various ways of measuring authorial rights—such as legal responsibility, financial investment, and monetary reward.

Milton’s Poems helpfully reminds us that one form or model of authorship also can give rise to another, so that not just the 1645 collection but Milton’s status as an individual author arose from a collaborative effort. Milton in his only account of the book’s production suggests that he had little say in the design. Responding ten years later to the criticism that the volume’s portrait was self-indulgent, Milton reiterates that he thought the frontispiece unflattering and claims that Moseley insisted on including it: “But if, at the suggestion and solicitation of a bookseller, I suffered myself to be crudely engraved by an unskillful engraver because there was no other in the city at that time, that fact argues me rather more unwilling to trouble myself with matters of that kind than too fastidious, as you object.”⁵⁰ Writing in 1655, the republican Milton naturally would have wished to distance himself politically from Moseley and the engraver Marshall, both of whom were royalists. But the author’s rebuttal nevertheless indicates that he did not preside over the book’s production.⁵¹ Doing so, Milton implies, would have been too much trouble.

The irony is that Milton in 1645—and for years afterward—greatly benefited from the trouble that Moseley and the other creators of Poems took on the author’s behalf. That 10 years later one of Milton’s detractors would cite this volume as part of a political attack on Milton’s commonwealth prose indicates the verse collection’s ongoing influence in establishing Milton’s identity. The 1645 Poems continued to appear in catalogues of Moseley’s books as late as 1660, which suggests that the collection never became a bestseller but also reveals that the Stationer doggedly marketed Milton’s volume.⁵² The book also evidently sold well enough to prompt the bookseller Thomas Dring in 1673 to finance an expanded second edition.

For modern readers of Milton, the individual poems included in the 1645 collection benefit from examining the concept of authorship that the volume implies. Both the collaborative creation of Poems and the insistently social context of the verses included in the collection provide a welcome countermeasure to the refrain of Milton’s self-concern. Milton may frequently meditate on himself and his career in his works, but poem after poem in the 1645 volume limns the author’s coterie—not just members of the book trade but a constellation of friends, acquaintances, and public figures for and about whom Milton repeatedly writes.

More important, an analysis of the 1645 Poems as a text allows us to assess both Milton’s changing notion of authorship and the increased financial and practical authority that poets began to achieve by the end of the century, two points that I wish to focus on for this essay’s last part. If the emphasis on collaborative authorship over the past 30 years has threatened to overwhelm historical distinctions between various kinds and degrees of authorial control, a comparison of the 1645 volume with the surviving contract for Paradise Lost shows how at least some authors in practice moved closer to the ideal of poetic authority implied by Milton’s Poems. His career provides a useful case study for tracking the effects of the increased status that authors enjoyed within the seventeenth-century marketplace of books.

According to Milton’s contract for Paradise Lost—the earliest surviving formal agreement of its kind in England—authors within the early modern book trade began to achieve a newfound economic power that corresponded to the new emphasis on individual identity afforded by printed texts. Although we don’t have specific information about the possible remuneration that poets received for collections of verse, that a few writers were compensated for their work suggests that authorial rights emerged gradually with the demise of patronage and the rise of a market system. As early as 1593 Edwin Sandys, a close friend of Richard Hooker, paid Hooker £10 to publish the first four books of Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie and added £20 in 1597 for the fifth book, along with an unspecified number of complimentary copies of each installment.⁵³ By comparison, 100 years later, John Dryden made a far tidier sum for his 1697 translation of Virgil. Dryden apparently earned between £910 and £1,075, in addition to the gifts he received from patrons.⁵⁴

The surviving evidence is insufficient for charting a steady increase in authors’ economic authority during the 1600s, in part because publishing terms depended on the type of work and its potential marketability.⁵⁵ Most members of the book trade would have paid a writer if they expected that a work would sell well, but for even the most vendible books the author usually received only a minimal fee or a set number of complimentary copies. Forty years after Hooker’s publication, for example, William Prynne was paid in kind, with 35 or 36 copies of Histrio-mastix (1633), while in the last part of the century Henry More received only 25 copies of his folio Opera Theologica (1675). More then had the option of purchasing either 100 additional copies at the publisher’s price of 15 shillings apiece or fewer copies at the bookseller’s price of 16 shillings.⁵⁶

In the case of Paradise Lost, the printer Samuel Simmons agreed to pay £5 for the right to publish Milton’s epic and promised to pay the author another £5 at the end of the first, second, and third impressions.⁵⁷ While these sums seem modest when compared to Dryden’s ample profits, the contract for Milton’s epic outlines a mutually beneficial, working arrangement: the printer was agreeing to pay for three editions of Paradise Lost at a time when other printers and booksellers still assumed perpetual rights to publish writers’ texts. Moreover, the contract limits each impression to 1,500 copies, thereby ensuring that, if Paradise Lost sold well, Milton would receive his subsequent payments.⁵⁸ And the author, the contract stipulates, could submit “from time to time upon every reasonable request” an accounting of the book’s “Disposing & selling”; if Simmons failed to provide this information, he had to pay Milton £5 for the complete impression.

In the two decades that separate Milton’s first collection of verse and the first edition of Paradise Lost, the poet had apparently became more concerned with the material creation of his texts. I do not mean that he began to control his books’ production; both the 1645 volume and Paradise Lost represent collaborative material enterprises, and writers—long after the end of the century—continued to depend on members of the book trade for the printing and circulation of literary works.⁵⁹ But just that Milton had a detailed, formal contract for his epic and that this agreement took into account the rights of both the author and publisher indicate that, at least by the late 1660s, a writer could take an active interest in the way that his printed publications would preserve his works and, by extension, might preserve his reputation.

As early as “On Shakespeare,” a poem written in 1630 and included in the 1645 volume, Milton praises the dramatist’s accomplishments exclusively in terms of poetry and publishing—Shakespeare’s “easy numbers” (line 10), “Delphic lines” (line 12), and “unvalued book” (line 11).⁶⁰ That Milton never mentions the theater fits his poem’s original bibliographical context: “On Shakespeare” initially appeared in 1632 as one of seven encomiastic verses at the start of Shakespeare’s second folio. Yet we may also infer from the poem’s emphasis that Milton felt a twinge of envy for Shakespeare’s prestigious volume. The poem concludes, “so sepulchered in such pomp dost lie, / That kings for such a tomb would wish to die” (lines 15‒16). If even kings, we might reason, why not Milton?

The author of Paradise Lost would go on to anticipate his own poetic fame in other early verses—most notably, Ad Patrem and Epitaphium Damonis, both included in his 1645 collection—and 3 years before the publication of Poems Milton was already tentatively wondering in one of his antiprelatical tracts whether he “might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die.”⁶¹ But after the publication of the 1645 volume, Milton consistently frames his poetic aspirations in terms of printed texts. Thus, in a Latin ode to John Rouse, Milton calls on the librarian of Oxford University to preserve the 1645 Poems among the library’s “eternal works” and “famous monuments of men” (“Aeternorum operum,” “virum monumenta,” lines 54, 51). Despite the “unruly tongue of the mob” and “degenerate crowd of readers” (“lingua procax vulgi … longe / Turba legentum,” lines 79‒80), Milton sounds sanguine about the fate of his collection. He anticipates that “future descendants and a more sensible age will perhaps make fairer judgments with an unprejudiced heart” (“At ultimi nepotes, / Et cordatior aetas / Iudicia rebus aequiora forsitan / Adhibebit integro sinu,” lines 81‒84).⁶²

That Milton’s portrait appears after 1645 in three other texts published during his lifetime must have further helped to establish his early identity in print. At a time when portraits in books were still most often reserved for posthumous editions, Milton’s image was printed in The History of Britain (1670), Artis Logicæ (1672), and some copies of Paradise Lost’s second edition (1674).⁶³ We don’t know whether the poet had any say in his picture’s inclusion in any of these texts, but the presence of these later engravings seems consistent with Milton’s strident autobiographical digressions in Of Reformation (1641), An Apology against a Pamphlet (1642), and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (1654).

In practical terms, Milton apparently attempted to oversee at least some of the material aspects of his later books. As his nephew Edward Phillips recollected about the composition of Paradise Lost, “I had the perusal of it from the very beginning; for some years, as I went from time to time, to Visit him, in a Parcel of Ten, Twenty, or Thirty Verses at a Time, which being Written by whatever hand came next, might possibly want Correction as to the Orthography and Pointing.”⁶⁴ Even as blindness must have limited Milton’s supervision of his texts’ creation, this account suggests that before he handed over his manuscript to the printer, he understood spelling and punctuation as having a correct form and he took pains to repair these elements.

The lists of errata included in Milton’s later books also suggest a striking attention to detail and support Phillips’s recollection of his uncle’s fastidiousness. The errata in The History of Britain, for example, include substantive changes that seem to have been made under the author’s direction. Here we are told, among other corrections, to replace “Cuthred was dead two years before” with “Cuthred was dead two or three years before,” and to change “death of Elfred his Brother” to “death of Elfred his half Brother.”⁶⁵ More notable, the errata page includes detailed instructions for ignoring the use of italic case in two places, in a pair of sentences near the end of Book 1 (E3r, E3v) and in the volume’s final six lines before the index (Rr2v).⁶⁶ The precision of these latter entries suggests that the book’s use of Roman or italic case is authorial: either Milton took a keen interest in the printing of The History of Britain and requested the changes, or a member of the printing house inserted the corrections in an effort to reproduce exactly the author’s copy.⁶⁷

Milton’s 1673 Poems, to take one more example, has traditionally been dismissed by critics and editors because this second edition introduces various printing errors and lacks the strong sense of authorial presence conveyed by the frontispiece and title page of the 1645 volume.⁶⁸ Yet if the collection lacks the kind of extensive authorial revision that Jonson evidently pursued in refining his works for publication in his 1616 folio, Milton’s second collection of poetry still contains sometimes subtle revisions to individual works—in particular, to A Mask, In Quintum Novembris, Psalm 136, and “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”—that further indicate the author or one of his agents paid close attention to at least some of the volume’s details. In the 1673 edition of “Christ’s Nativity,” for example, Milton has changed two lines out of 244, and in the 1673 edition of A Mask he has revised four lines out of more than 1,020. Admittedly, Milton could have made some of the revisions found in the 1673 Poems years earlier, any time after the publication of the first edition. But that so many of the book’s identifiable revisions occur in the errata suggests once again that Milton was reviewing and fine-tuning some of his works shortly before or during the printing process.

The first item in the errata most clearly indicates that Milton actively participated in the book’s publication. We are told that “At a Vacation Exercise” ought to have appeared directly after “On the Death of a Fair Infant” (B1r-B3r) and directly before “The Passion” (B3r-B4r)—instead of where it actually is printed, after Milton’s translation of Horace’s fifth ode (D8r) and before “On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament” (E3r).⁶⁹ The corrected organization seems to be chronological: according to the tags that precede some of the titles, Milton wrote “On the Death of a Fair Infant” at age 17 and “At a Vacation Exercise” at age 19. The next dated item in the collection is “On Shakespeare,” which he wrote, according to the book’s layout, in 1630 at age 21 or 22.

We cannot know why the poems were originally printed out of order, but most likely the compositor inserted “At a Vacation Exercise” among the other new poems because that was the most convenient choice. The compositor has added 12 of the book’s new poems at once (D4v-E3r), and, by spacing them out generously, has fit them onto exactly 14 pages so that he could resume composing from the 1645 edition at the top of a new page (E3v).⁷⁰ This arrangement would have expedited production by permitting multiple printers to work on different parts of the book at the same time.

The ordering of the poems in Milton’s 1673 collection thus reflects the author’s and the printer’s combined influence. The printer has determined part of the organization, but because the errata attempt to correct the order of the texts, Milton was apparently involved in the book’s production. The poems do have a proper order based on the poet’s, not the printer’s, preference. Regardless of what caused the misplacement of “At a Vacation Exercise” and regardless of who first spotted the error, the attempt to re-organize the book indicates that Milton did not just hand over his earlier poems to the bookseller. He continued to refine some of his works and also concerned himself with something as seemingly incidental as the arrangement of the 1673 volume.

It is in this context that, by fits and starts, the modern author emerged within the English book trade. As the courtly tradition of authorship continued to disappear, writers initially gained new prominence in print and slowly began to experience greater financial and practical authority. The first copyright law of 1710 also contributed to authors’ increased status. Prompted by London Stationers who wished to restrict booksellers in the provinces from reprinting the Stationers’ copies, the new law recognized literary works as property. Stationers who wanted exclusive rights to a work were thus conceding that authors must posses such rights before turning over their works to be published.⁷¹

Yet if, by the early eighteenth century, a work’s value came to depend on a visible author, already in 1645, as we have seen, Milton seemed to use the Greek epigraph below the frontispiece’s portrait to overcome the limits of his practical control. Twenty years later, in Paradise Lost, he inserted another caustic prefatory remark, addressed to his book’s audience. Added to a reissue of the epic’s first edition, this later note on the verse justifies the lack of rhyme in Paradise Lost while dismissing the “jingling sound of like endings” as “the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter.”⁷² In this note, Milton seems to distinguish—and to herald—his unique poetic style. The inclusion of the note itself seems characteristic of Milton: Once again the poet attempts at the start to speak directly to his unseen audience.

Yet, according to another note in the reissue of the epic’s first edition, the printer/publisher Samuel Simmons and the book’s earliest readers prompted Milton’s comments. Readers requested that the poet justify the lack of rhyme and summarize each of the epic’s books. As Simmons explains, “Courteous Reader, There was no Argument at first intended to the Book, but for the satisfaction of many that have desired it, I have procur’d it, and withall a reason of that which stumbled many others, why the Poem Rimes not.”⁷³ Simmons’s note and Milton’s response provide a valuable final glimpse of the complexity of defining authorship in the early modern period and the ways in which both poetic meaning and individual authority emerged out of collaboration. With Milton’s epic and Poems, we witness an ongoing process as authors during the seventeenth century gradually gained greater authority—symbolically, economically, and practically.