Mind Blown

I thought I would emerge from my application hibernation to write about something everyone who reads my blog has to check out. One of my sources (a very kind colleague) has informed me of a new exhibit at the Folger. Bill Sherman, a curator at the Folger Shakespeare Library, has put together an exhibit called Decoding the Renaissance: 500 Years of Codes and Ciphers. Awesome. Or, as Sherman says here of William Friedman’s encoded drawing of a flower, it is “mind-blowingly clever, and fun.” This exhibit is a testament to not only the widespread use of cryptography in the Renaissance but also to our own age’s increased awareness of and fascination with the world of the clandestine services. Of particular interest to me is the unusually firm connection between Renaissance methods of encoding and our own. While Sherman is surprised by the fact that “Renaissance principles of cryptography are still its guiding principles in the 20^th century,” I have been finding this in my research for a few years now. Even in the shift to dataveillance, the underlying assumptions and modus operandi remain the same: attaining total knowledge through covert methods of acquisition. Although they are backing off this claim now, the NSA and GCHQ asserted that they sought to “own” and “master” the internet in the years following 2001. After all, humans are still needed to parse and interpret the intelligence provided by machines. Rather than rendering humans obsolete, dataveillance only intensifies their work and shines a new light on age-old questions about the epistemological underpinnings of surveillance.

I even learned from another source, who shall remain nameless (actually a renowned scholar in the field of Renaissance literature), that a former student of hers (or his) was a retired government operative who chose to do a paper on surveillance in the worlds of Hamlet, Shakespeare, and modern America. With firsthand knowledge of contemporary practices in counterespionage, this student was well-suited to compare Walsingham’s tactics with those of this age, and the conclusion was that almost nothing had changed. The tactics and overarching strategies that this student experienced as a secret agent were actually quite similar to those narrated in the biographies on Walsingham—which are flourishing now, by the way. Even though the life of Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster always makes for a good, marketable book, biographies of the father of English counterintelligence have mushroomed since 2001. This is in addition to the fictional “Kit Marlowe” and “Ursula Blanchard” mysteries and the “Spymaster Chronicles.” Since 2005 there have been five different biographies on Walsingham in English and more in other languages. It is a sign of the times—and now it has come to the Folger. This stuff is really important because we as a nation are trying to process what all this spy stuff means, and we can learn quite a bit about it from the past, especially since that past is not all that different from the present. 

    

Chaucer's House of Rumour and the Internet

I have already written about how Ovid’s House of Fame in the Metamorphoses could be read as a precursor to the Internet here. For this post I am going to talk about how Geoffrey Chaucer’s homage to Ovid’s House of Fame, a surreal dream-poem fittingly titled The House of Fame, not only resembles the internet but can help us understand digital technologies in a new light. 

Chaucer, circa 1380

Ganymede and eagle

So, The House of Fame. This is a dream-poem, which means it is about as coherent and credible as a dream would be. The narrator dreams that he is taken up to the heavens, Ganymede-style, by Jove’s golden eagle. This pricey raptor is a pompous, know-it-all philosopher type, claiming to be a master of acoustics who knows all about the physics of how all words that are ever spoken go to the House of Fame. He claims that every single story ever told goes to that House to be judged and either commemorated by the goddess Fame or consigned to Trotsky’s dustbin of history. But, before these stories get to Fame’s House, they stop at the House of Rumour, which is like a way station on the road to Fame.

Now, the House of Fame rests on top of a mountain of ice (it gets weirder/better). The House of Rumour, meanwhile, spins in the air right below the House of Fame. Think of a carousel, but one that floats, is made out of wood, measures over sixty miles in diameter, and, instead of plastic horses, is full of people standing around and gossiping. 

a la Under the Table and Dreaming

Every word ever spoken comes here and the gossips spread the word, so to speak. It is literally the opposite of Bill O’Reilly’s “No Spin Zone.” All stories, from water-cooler talk to the narratives like the legend of Troy that define and celebrate cultures and nations, arise in the House of Rumour, a place where nothing can be believed because everyone is augmenting, distorting, and fabricating narratives. This is the House that I feel resembles the Internet. Both are loci toward which all verbal communication gravitates. Both are also known for their credibility gap. But what is most intriguing is that Chaucer defines all those gossips in the House of Rumour as “spies” overlooking the world (they are up in the heavens) in lines 701-6 of the poem. Fame is able to know every single narrative ever told because of these spies. Rhetorically, surveillance grants its practitioners omniscience. It is fitting that Chaucer would imagine these gossips in the House of Rumour to be spies informing Fame of all the stories they come across. What I feel is important from this is the way we think about the credibility of the dataveillance and the data mining occurring right now. Technology lends an aura of credibility to its users. But, we should not be so quick to differentiate the unreliable web from the reliable dataveillance that is mining the web. After all, it is working with information that is about as reliable as the tales fabricated in the House of Rumour. Here’s what it’s all about: we live in an era of dataveillance, and we think it is the wave of the future. We should probably start thinking about it more as a newer version of the low-tech surveillance techniques used in the past, a digitization of rumor. 

Canon Confidential Time:

J. D. Salinger was a counter-intelligence operative for the U. S. Army in Europe. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and interrogated German prisoners of war. His transition from counterintelligence to counterculture hero was in part aided by his keen eye for subtle details. Is it too far-fetched to say that his use of the catching metaphor could have been inspired by his experience trying to catch all sorts of information on enemy combatants?  

New Find for Marlowe and Faustus?

I like to start each day by reading a scholarly article that is somewhat related to what I am working on. For my Ben Jonson chapter, I am doing reading on works about secrecy, and I came across in an article by Carlo Ginzburg, titled “The Theme of Forbidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” (in Past & Present 73 (1976): 28-41), a poem in Alciati’s famous emblem-book, Emblemata, that could relate to another famous dramatist I am writing about for my dissertation, Christopher Marlowe. Alciati’s Emblemata was perhaps the most famous emblem book of the early modern era, published in multiple languages over a hundred-year period. The particular poem I am intrigued by is “In Astrologos,” which accompanies a woodcut of the fall of Icarus from the sky. 

 Combined, these form an emblem (above) warning against seeking the forbidden. “In Astrologos” addresses Icarus, “Icare per superos qui raptus et aera, donec / In mare praecipitem cera liquata daret. / Nunc te cera eadem fervensque resuscitat ignis, / Exemplo ut doceas dogmata certa tuo. / Astrologus caveat quicquam praedicere, praeceps / Nam cadet impostor dum super astra uehit.” A rough translation is, “Icarus, you who were snatched from the air by the gods and sent precipitously into the sea after your wax melted, now that same wax and burning fire revive you, so that you may teach certain truths with your example. The advanced astrologer should beware whatever he predicts, for the imposter falls while he is borne above the stars.”

This brings to mind two Marlovian moments. The first is the end of Doctor Faustus, where the scholar realizes that he does indeed have to fulfill his obligation to the devil and be taken to hell. In a last-gasp attempt to avoid the lake of fire, he tries anything: repeating an Ovidian tag (if any divine author should be appealed to in the Marlovian universe, he is the one), calling on God, and absurdly trying to jump up to heaven:

This is from the 1604 A-Text, courtesy of EEBO

What strikes me about his attempts is that they show him to be an "impostor." He recites a line from Ovid’s Amores, which reads in Ovid “O lente currite noctis equi!” (1.13.40). Marlowe’s straightforward translation of that line in the Elegies reads, “stay night and runne not thus.” It is spoken by a lover who wants the night to last longer. Faustus has good reason to use this line. Magicians should be able to do exactly this: manipulate nature, especially the moon. The Ovidian persona in the Amores claims his songs will “Carmina sanguineae deducunt cornua lunae / Et reuocant niueos solis euntis equos” “Verses deduce the horned bloudy moone / And call the sunnes white horses backe at noone” (2.1.23-4). But, as A. R. Sharrock has persuasively argued (“The Drooping Rose: Elegiac Failure in Amores 3.7.” Ramus 24.2 (1995): 152-180), the Amores is predicated on failure. That particular line in Ovid is what the narrator thinks Dawn herself would say if she were in his place. Ovid implies that even Dawn would not be able to stop the coming of, well, the dawn. The line is really about helplessness. One would expect an experienced reader like Faustus to have read Ovid better. Marlowe here ironizes Faustus, and furthers the irony by having the scholar not only use a spell that has been hopelessly ineffective for thousands of years—he also commits a cardinal sin among magicians and says it incorrectly! He adds an extra “lente,” invalidating an already powerless spell. I think it is significant that Marlowe’s ironic portrayal—almost a satire of astrologers and magicians and the like—comes right before the famous question, “who pulls me down?” This line alludes to Marlowe’s translation of the Amores, where, at the end of book 1 he transforms Ovid’s  

               This comes from a 1675 edition, ex typographia Societatis Stationariorum

into a bold, combative affirmation of the persona’s verbal powers:

So, the Latin line “Nam cadet impostor dum super astra uehit” relates to both Doctor Faustus, presented as an “impostor” at the end of Marlowe’s eponymous play, and to the persona of the Amores. It suggests that Marlowe interpreted the narrator of the Amores as an "impostor," and I think the real upshot from all this is that we have another piece of evidence that Marlowe mocks his narrator in the Elegies. This argument, that Marlowe does not identify with the Ovidian persona but in a way undercuts his bombast and hilariously hyperbolic boasts, is not a new interpretation—many have made this argument (M. L. Stapleton has done so most recently in his excellent Marlowe’s Ovid: The Elegies in the Marlowe Canon). What I am asking is whether this more firmly connects Faustus to the persona in the Elegies and if this suggests that traces of this Ovidian persona are more pervasive in Marlowe’s other plays than scholars have previously acknowledged. Although many have noted that Marlowe does not identify with his persona in the Elegies, even more have made the opposite argument—and the same goes for the Tamburlaine plays, Faustus, and other works. This find could possibly help to wrest the scholarly consensus free from readings that see Marlowe in his protagonists and do not see the many shades of irony, mockery, and (quasi-)satire that distinguish Marlowe from his protagonists.

Canon Confidential Time:

I knew this one was coming. Yes, Marlowe was a spy. Everyone knew that already, so this one is the least interesting entry in Canon Confidential. I'll have more surprising entries on authors you never thought were spies coming up soon.

Considering How My Dissertation-Writing Time is Spent and "Ladie Astrey"

As a new semester begins, and as I have no classes to teach (since I have been awarded a Ballard-Seashore Fellowship), I thought I would take a moment to reflect on the process of writing a dissertation chapter (since I am starting to write one today—that’s the last parenthetical (Maybe)). I like to think of writing a chapter in geologic terms. A chapter is a creation, after all, and, not to be too grandiose about my own work, but its magnitude resembles the earth itself. Its development resembles the history of the earth. For example, a lot of stuff happens before the actual writing. It is mainly gathering all the disparate elements of a chapter into one place. All the dusty books on the topic once scattered throughout the library, through a gravitational process of selection, recalling, and making some poor undergrad get my books for me, slowly converge on my place of study and revolve around me (not literally. Well, sometimes it seems like it). It is a process of accretion, and takes what feels like eons. 

Once a sufficient amount of information has accumulated, I feel a core of knowledge has been obtained. 

Then, a new phase begins: the rapid-fire flow of ideas to write about. These ideas just bubble up to the surface, erupting like so many volcanoes (I’m thinking of that scene from The Tree of Life here--5 minutes in). 

Once I have settled on a cool idea, everything starts to solidify, and I develop a thin outline. When I get a first draft done, I promptly (prematurely) send off to my committee who slices it up like moon from earth. 

Once the dust settles after that, the chapter is more focused, and I can get into revisions. The argument flourishes with nuance, crackling with wit and verve, evolving in sophistication and sustaining greater and more compelling argumentative life. Then, when I feel I’ve read it so much that it’s a dinosaur, I send it off to my committee again …

Canon Confidential Time:

“Ladie Astrey” was the famous personification of justice in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who fled the earth during the brutality and carnage of the Iron Age. In Arthur Golding’s translation she is the “last of heavenly virtues, from this earth in slaughter drownèd passed” (1.169-70). The original Latin is “virgo caede madentis / ultima caelestum terras Astraea reliquit,” and Golding seems to misread uirgo, maiden, as uirtus, virtue, but it still works (1.149-50 in Ovid). Astraea, or Lady Justice, shares her name with an unlikely author, Aphra Behn. She used it as her code name when she worked as an agent for the Crown during the Restoration. Behn got her start during the Interregnum, likely as a copyist for noted spymaster Thomas Killigrew, who went on to become one of Charles II’s preferred courtiers. During his reign she traveled to Dutch-held Suriname with her family and immediately got involved with the unsavory character William Scot, the son of Thomas Scot, who was executed for regicide. William was a person the Crown was anxious to keep eyes on. She is referred to as Astrea by other spies on Suriname and in correspondence from Antwerp, another home of exiled relatives of regicides. After getting fed up with spy work, Behn from Antwerp “passed” to England. She chose to keep the name Astrea as her nom de plume, smoothly transitioning from spy to writer as she translated her espionage experience into plays about slavery, rebellion, intrigue, romance, and kings. She was a wildly successful playwright (the theater was likely a good fit for her because the theater is a world of surveillance, with spectators spying from behind the fourth wall, spying occurring onstage to further the plot, and actors going about their business in their various disguises—it’s like what Spottswoode somewhat reductively says to Gary in Team America: World Police, “That’s all spying is: acting”).  Her time as a spy furnished her with not only plots and counterplots to write about, but also a unique perspective on justice and its relationship to the practices of spying and slavery.  

“Avert Your Liking A More Worthier Way”

After a long hiatus over the summer break, I thought that I, too, would weigh in on the recent comments made by Ira Glass on Twitter about the relative quality of Shakespeare’s plays, specifically King Lear. When I graduated from college, I went to see a performance of Lear (because of what I am going to say, I am withholding the name of the theatrical company and its location). When Lear came out onstage at the end with his murdered daughter in his arms, I did not hear gasps. I heard laughter. The same thing happened when I saw Oedipus Rex at the same theater—howls of laughter at the end. Oedipus was so upset that clawed his own eyes out, people! How could two of the most tragic plays in, well, the known body of European literature, be laughed at? Who knows why those people laughed? Maybe they were nervous laughers. Maybe philistines. Maybe the productions were bad (I personally thought both were excellent). No matter what, when people see a production of a play by Shakespeare or Sophocles, they expect it to be the greatest because they have been told their whole lives (and by the program) that it is. It’s like when a friend tells you to go see a movie because it’s the greatest movie he’s ever seen. Inevitably, it will never live up to the expectations, as apparently was the case with Ira Glass.

I have seen other productions of the same plays when the more “appropriate” gasps were heard in the conclusions, but these two performances were unforgettable, and I immediately thought of them when I read about Ira Glass's interpretation of Shakespeare:   

Ira Glass, hero of every ninth-grader suffering through Romeo and Juliet. I already hopped on that crowded anti-Ira bandwagon on Twitter. I don’t want to hate the hater here. Plus, I think the lesson to take from this is pedagogical. Ira Glass has been compared to a “millennial filling out a teacher evaluation.” This insightful comparison helps us to see how to get students to feel like Shakespeare is meaningful, and that does not mean making Shakespeare relatable. Even the type of art that the kids nowadays like is “not relatable.” 

Who can relate to a middle-aged Chemistry teacher with lung cancer and the world’s biggest chip on his shoulder? What Breaking Bad has that King Lear does not is access to our cultural codes of emotion. Lear cannot express his “noble anger” or his “sovereign shame” by looking off-camera with a pouty or angry look on his face, which helped make Walter White and other heroes/heroines of this golden age of TV such round characters. So much emotion is communicated without words. Imagine how popular that show would be if Walter White’s speech followed the Senecan model.

So what is the answer? It is not making Shakespeare new or “relatable.” Ironically, this whole relatability craze is related to the way we teach Shakespeare. He expresses universal themes, after all, and appeals to people across time and space. This leads audiences to think that he should be relatable. But, the onus is not on someone who died 450 years ago. It is on us, the instructors. Students should be given access to Elizabethan and Jacobean cultural codes of emotion—he did not write in an “unemotional” time—and be shown the Shakespearean equivalent of the Walter-White stare. Instead of telling students to appreciate Shakespeare because they’re supposed to and because he comes to you as a brilliant author who already knows how you feel (because he is a genius), perhaps we should focus on his role as an entertainer—you know, before he was a genius or a fraud or a poor actor who surely couldn’t’ve written the plays. I don’t mean we should reductively focus on his status as an actor (try to get through Anonymous if you want to see how that argument plays out). 

I mean, did they only cast Bret Michaels look-alikes for Anonymous?

Shakespeare was a writer, sharer (that is, part owner), actor, and all-around man of the theater deeply involved in multiple aspects of the work his company did. He was a very successful entertainer in his day. He managed to convince many thousands of Londoners for two decades that he didn’t “suck.” Maybe knowing him better will help us “relate” to Shakespeare. True, this is not as easily done in performance as in the classroom, and it won't reform all of those nervous, confused laughers or the puerile, irascible viewers. Still, this will make for a far more rewarding educational and, maybe, theatrical experience. Don't blame Ira Glass. Blame the way he was taught Shakespeare. Instructors have to fight against the deeply ingrained, almost unconscious cultural forces that subtly work on students and warp the ways we interpret and see Shakespeare, whose work is now, more than ever, worth understanding, precisely because of the ways his responses to surveillance can inform our own (see my previous--and, most likely, future--posts on this blog for more on that last point).

Canon Confidential Time:

Frenchman Pierre Boulle worked as a rubber planter in French Indochina in the 1930s. When World War II started, he worked for the Free French and as a British undercover operative in China, Burma, and Vietnam. His experiences and training in how to blow up a bridge and evade or kill guards perhaps inspired his two best-known books, The Bridge over the River Kwai and The Planet of the Apes. Overall, his sense of the morally ambiguous motives driving men to do desperate acts of faith, valor, and duty was informed by his experience as a spy employed by overtly principled but covertly unscrupulous governments  (see this great article on the BBC).

Shameless Plug

Also, I forgot to mention this in my last post: check out this great new website, http://thestudio.uiowa.edu/dpp/! The site hosts the Digital Pedagogy Project at the University of Iowa, which is a tool and resource by and for graduate student instructors interested in incorporating digital assignments into their classes. So, if you are interested in the Digital Humanities and would like to begin integrating technology into the classroom, collaborate on such projects, brainstorm new ones, or browse other people’s DH-themed classroom activities, have a look! There are plenty of creative and engaging ideas on the website, plus an activity from yours truly. The activity I contributed was one that helped me get nominated for an Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, which I won this spring: http://now.uiowa.edu/2014/05/ui-names-outstanding-teaching-assistants. Also, check back in with the Project over the coming months for new ideas.

A History of Secret Printing

What I hope to do in this post is something very speculative and I hope that readers can help me out if they have any information about this topic. I will explore a text that has fascinated me for quite a while now, Davies and Marlowe’s Epigrammes and Elegies. Bound together in this book were the barbed epigrams written by Sir John Davies of Hereford in the style of Juvenalian (rather than Horatian) satire and Christopher Marlowe’s translations of Ovid’s Amores. The Davies epigrams appear first, the editor’s (or someone who wished to go by “Ignoto”) sharply satirical poems follow, and ten of Marlowe’s translations bring up the rear in a section titled Certaine of Ovids Elegies. But that’s not what I want to talk about. Although what is inside the book is part of what fascinates me about it, I want to explore what is on the outside: the title page and its relationship to one John Wolfe, AKA “Il Barbagrigia,” or Graybeard.[1] Wolfe was a stationer (and onetime member of the Fishmongers’ Company) under Queen Elizabeth I, and earned a reputation for printing works of a not-so-savory quality. He self-applied the moniker “Il Barbagrigia” in the prefatory material to the edition of Aretino’s La Prima Parte di Ragionamenti that he printed surreptitiously in London in 1584. The book was the early modern version of pornography, so it had to be printed secretly (to attract more buyers). Wolfe also did not have permission to print and profit off of this text which is why he styles himself as Graybeard, the piratical printer. However, his lack of permission did not bother him and is not why he chose to claim the book was printed in Italy and not London on the title page. Rather (and this is another intriguing element to Wolfe’s practice that deserves its own blog post), he saw a foreign imprint as enticing more readers—it was surreptitious not to avoid punishment but to make a profit. In the early 1580s Wolfe often printed texts that he had no right to print, and even went after the privileged books of the Queen’s Printer, Christopher Barker. He was not only a printer of scandalous Aretino, but a rebellious printer who did not fear consequences of upsetting the Queen’s Printer—Graybeard indeed. What’s more, he became a leader of the movement against monopolies in printing in the 1580s. He was a rabble-rouser, too.

However, something changed in 1586. The Star Chamber decreed in June of that year that the licensing and entering of books would be much more strictly enforced, and the decree eliminated the loophole for books printed wholly in foreign languages. It is no coincidence that Wolfe’s Aretinos, none of which were in English, appeared in the Stationers’ Register after this decree. Another result of the decree was a closer monitoring of not only the licensing and entering of books but also of the printing itself. Many of the texts that the Star Chamber wanted to eliminate, such as Catholic or extremist Protestant texts undermining the authority of the Anglican Church, were printed surreptitiously in mobile illicit presses (think Breaking Bad, but the meth is illicit, sometimes erotic, sometimes religious books). The Stationers’ Company was to root them out. That is, the Stationers’ Company was charged with the surveillance and destruction of illegal presses. Who did the stationers turn to? None other than “Il Barbagrigia” himself, the man who had been deep in the seedy underbelly of London printing since the early 1580s. His extensive contacts among the more desperate sort of printers served him well, and he served as Beadle from 1587 until 1592 (even after this date he was heavily involved in censorship and enforcement of Star Chamber decrees related to illicit reading matter). Everyone knew the Beadle’s real job was to track down “outlaw printers,” and, in the words of Harry Hoppe, Wolfe “showed exemplary zeal” in destroying the presses of his former comrades (265, see note).

Now, what does any of this have to do with the Epigrammes and Elegies? It makes for a crazy story (and I have to admit I get carried away when I talk about Wolfe), yes, but does not seem to be connected to Davies or Marlowe. Here is the part where I get speculative and ask readers to please be patient or share some of their knowledge (which, compared to mine, is vast) of early modern English printing with me and help me feel less crazy. I think there is a tenuous link between Wolfe and the Epigrammes and Elegies. He was the captain of the piratical printers in London and knew surreptitious printing inside and out. He also printed surreptitious works for the Elizabethan regime, especially after the defeat of the Armada. He was so deeply involved in surreptitious printing in London that few texts would have escaped his notice. But I do not want to stop at the claim that he was informed of the Epigrammes and Elegies from afar. I am sure many knew about this book before it was finally printed.

In 1591 Wolfe published an edition of Giambattista della Porta’s 1563 De Furtivis Literarum Notis uulgo, De Ziferis Libri IIII, one of the most famous treatises on ciphers and the use of coded language for spying and espionage in early modern Europe. He dedicated that edition to Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, the “Wizard Earl.” At the bottom of the title page the imprint reads, “Cum priuilegio / Londini, / Apud Iohannem Wolphium, 1591.” 

Dedicatory epistle to Percy:
note the border on the
 top of the page!

1591 title page with Wolfe's name

Wolfe's attempt to curry favor with an influential and intellectually inclined patron, though, seems to have backfired. After all, Percy himself was desperate to gain favor, and he sought it from the Queen. He therefore avoided anything that could lead Elizabeth or her ministers to suspect that he was sympathetic to the Catholic cause like his father and uncle were. He was himself under surveillance and did not want to raise any suspicions or give any hint that he was intent on carrying on the family legacy of covertly (sometimes overtly) opposing Elizabeth’s Protestant state. Percy likely was very upset at being associated with a text that informs people on how to speak and write in cipher—a must for any Catholic communicating with allies on the Continent since all letters were under surveillance at the time. Wolfe quickly published another edition of De Furtivis, surreptitiously, under the original 1563 imprint, without any florid dedication to Percy, and placed before the original 1563 dedication the very ornament on the title page of the Epigrammes and Elegies (see images below). This false-dated edition was printed using the same type and blocks (I am sorry to say I do not have a complete typographical analysis for you, but for an excellent account by someone who did have time to do some typographical analysis, please see http://hiwaay.net/~paul/cryptology/falsedate.html). Wolfe had to have been involved in its printing since he admits to printing the first edition. 

I was lucky enough to find this
 when I went to the U of Illinois 
(UIUC) Rare Book & MS Library. 
This title page bears Wolfe's false 
imprint. It was actually printed 
in 1591, in London,right 
after the edition dedicated to
Henry Percy.

This is the modified dedicatory 
epistle from the edition printed 
right after the edition dedicated 
to Henry Percy. In the middle 
of the page you can see the same 
ornament that comprised the top 
border of the dedicatory
epistle to Henry Percy.

Title pages side-by-side, with the Percy edition on the left, the subsequent 1591 false imprint in the middle, and the original 1563 edition from Naples on the right.

               

Dedicatory epistles side-by-side

This from edition with the 
false imprint 

This is a picture of the
original 1563 dedicatory
epistle and shows that
Wolfe used a different
ornament from the
one used in 1563.

Here is the title page of a copy of the
Epigrammes and Elegies that
is known as O1 or the "Isham" edition,
so named for a previous owner. The
copy is in the Huntington Library.

Another title page for the Epigrammes and 
Elegies. This one is from a copy of O2, 
or the "Bindley" edition, which is likely a 
reprint of O1 (hence O2) and is from 
the British Library.

This is an extra-large image of the dedicatory epistle from the surreptitiously printed 1591 De Furtivis, enlarged so you can get a good look at the ornament and compare it to the dedicatory epistle to Percy and the two copies of the Epigrammes and Elegies.

Does any of this amount to a smoking gun? No. Ornaments and type moved quickly among printers, especially those literally on the move and trying to avoid detection by the authorities. Wolfe could have given this to anyone before the Epigrammes and Elegies were printed.

Furthermore, no one thinks Wolfe himself printed the book. Fredson Bowers posits that Robert Waldegrave or Thomas Scarlet was responsible based on the system of signing the leaves. Roma Gill and Robert Krueger speculate that James Roberts was the printer based on the title-page ornament, making an argument that is as fragile as my own. But this particular ornament was used on many title pages, none of which was attributed to Roberts—or to anyone. It was a marker of surreptitious printing, traceable to no one. Except Wolfe. The first 1591 edition with the dedication to Percy clearly includes Wolfe’s name. The next edition was printed hastily to mitigate Percy’s displeasure at being associated with a text that informs people on how to speak and write in cipher—a must for any Catholic, as I mentioned before, and so something Percy would never want to be associated with. The hastily printed edition has the ornament from the title pages of the Epigrammes and Elegies. All this suggests is that maybe Wolfe grabbed this ornament in a hurry back in 1591.

But, I can’t figure out what to do with Wolfe’s international contacts. He was trained in Italy, printed in London, and sold his books as the famous Frankfurt Fair. Denis Woodfield has found evidence that Wolfe’s Buchhändler, who handled his books for him at the Fair, was based in Middelburg, or “Middleborough” (7). Now, the Epigrammes and Elegies bears a false imprint that says it was printed “At Middleborough.” There are a plethora of reasons why, none of which I can go into now. Wolfe, though, also had a connection to Middelburg. If only the transitive axiom were applicable here. Plus, Wolfe was connected to Marlowe because both worked for the government’s surveillance apparatus, even though they did so in different capacities. I find it difficult to believe that Marlowe was not keeping an eye on the stationers and actors he mingled with. He might have been informing the authorities about what he saw. Marlowe was an informer, and Wolfe relied on informers as Beadle. Finally, who was it who had possession of Marlowe’s texts after his untimely death? We know of one person who had Hero and Leander: Wolfe entered it into the Register after Marlowe died.
All of this is speculation. I have no idea if Wolfe was involved in the printing of this book. I hope, though, to start a conversation and to see if others out there can help me to figure out exactly what is the nature of John Wolfe’s connection to the book titled Epigrammes and Elegies.

Canon Confidential Time:

This is a fuller explanation of how Ernest Hemingway was involved in espionage. Hemingway, who was a member of the CPUSA (even though the Party did not like how he portrayed International Brigades’ chief Andre Marty in For Whom the Bell Tolls) was in contact with KGB agents and spied on by the FBI. He first felt sympathy for the Communist Party when in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Ironically, he also spied for the Americans in China and Cuba, getting information on infrastructure and transportation in China and on German U-boats or anything German in Cuba (Haynes et al. Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America 152-4).

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[1] There are many narratives of this man’s life, all more eloquently written than my hasty

blogging. I recommend you read them all, but, if you cannot (and who has time?), here

is a short list some to check out: Harry R. Hoppe’s “John Wolfe, Printer and Publisher,

1579-1601,” The Library, 4^th Series 14.3 (1933): 241-90 is a great introduction, as is

Harry Sellers’s “Italian Books Printed in England Before 1640,” The Library, 4^th Series

5.2 (1924): 105-125. Denis Woodfield’s Surreptitious Printing in England 1550-1640,

(New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1973), is essential reading for Wolfe, as

is Huffman’s Elizabethan Impressions: John Wolfe and His Press (New York: AMS

Press, 1988). I also recommend Peter Blayney’s “William Cecil and the Stationers” in

The Stationers’ Company and the Book Trade 1550-1990, ed. Robin Myers and Michael

Harris (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1997), for its informative discussion of how

the Stationers’ Company was involved in the early modern English spy apparatus.