15
SCENE II. – The Forest.
Enter ORLANDO, with a paper.
ORLANDO
Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love:
And thou, thrice-crownèd queen of night, survey
With thy chaste eye, from thy pale sphere above,
Thy huntress’ name, that my full life doth sway.
O Rosalind! these trees shall be my books,
And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character;
That every eye, which in this forest looks,
Shall see thy virtue witness’d everywhere.
Run, run, Orlando; carve on every tree
The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she.
From Act III, As You Like It
Georg Joachim Rheticus was a scholar and mathematician whose alma mater was the University of Wittenberg; here also he would be given a Professorship by Luther’s great ally, Philipp Melanchthon. Rheticus’s friendships with printers meant he had probably learnt how good Protestantism could be for business. But he was also a Renaissance man (he taught mathematics) with an eye for new works that might win him money and fame and, in the 1540s, Rheticus spotted an opportunity. Wittenberg’s books and pamphlets were already in huge demand across Europe but he had also seen Luther’s own readership shrink from European-wide to just German; the Reformation had begun as a German movement famous across Europe, but, once it had spread, it had begun to lay down local roots. Luther’s unprecedented popularity with readers across Europe, therefore, had a limited time-span.
In 1539 Rheticus had arrived in Frauenburg in Poland, 400 miles north-east from Nuremberg, to study under the great mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Melanchthon had made the arrangement although he, like many leading Protestants, would write scathingly of Copernicus’s great theory. The theory, which defied established wisdom, argued that the earth travelled around a stationary sun (which lay at the centre of the universe), a model known as heliocentrism. This contradicted geocentrism, the accepted understanding that the sun travelled around the earth, with the earth at the universe’s centre. Copernicus’s idea was opposed by the established Church, but his views had been circulating in manuscript form since 1509. Now Rheticus, after an initial testing of the waters in which he wrote Copernicus’s theory in 1540, wanted the theory printed in full. He persuaded Copernicus to publish the work, first in a tentative and reduced form, then in full. Rheticus found a printer for the work in Nuremberg and a proof-reader called Andreas Osiander, the Lutheran pastor of Sant Lorenz Kirche. However, Osiander added his own, unattributed Preface, which argued that Copernicus’s intentions had not been to assert ‘literal truth’ but simply to demonstrate his methods and to devise hypothesis. The book was printed, in 1543, under a title that offered little more clarity: De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres).
The Catholic Church was not against science in principle or, very often, in practice, although European science had for centuries been backward when set against the advances of China and the Abbasid Caliphate. Rome had encouraged astronomy for decades and generally subscribed to the arguments of Aristotelian science. (The Church did, however, reject the Aristotelian teaching, then widely accepted, that the material universe was eternal.) Yet it was this same loyalty to Aristotle and, in this particular area, to Ptolemy, the second-century AD Greco-Roman astronomer who had written in favour of geocentrism, which would prove so damaging in the Church’s encounter with Copernicus. Moreover, Rome had traditionally interpreted various poetic biblical verses about the sun as supportive of its geocentric view. On this, Luther agreed. Indeed, the Protestant mainstream did not welcome heliocentrism either.
The printing of Copernicus’s work was largely uneventful – in Iberia the Roman Church chose not to sanction it. The first Nuremberg edition of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium in 1543 had a print run of 400–500, an augmented second print run followed in Basel (1566), a corrected third in Amsterdam (1617). The work even found its way to the major astronomy professors and libraries as well as to several kings, a count and an elector. The greater problem came with Galileo Galilei, the Italian scientist who was condemned by a Roman Inquisition in 1633 for making the case for Copernican astronomy. For Galileo it was unfortunate that his ideas were being broadcast in the aftermath of the Lutheran Reformation and in the midst of the Thirty Years War. Rome, defensive in a time of war and loss, reacted badly. Protestant reaction to heliocentrism was not initially warm either, but at its outer reaches dissenters sometimes bucked the trend, but it would soon become more varied. Thus John Milton, whose Protestantism extended not merely to opposition to the Church of Rome but even as far as opposition to the very existence of an institutional church and of a church liturgy, visited Galileo (who was under house arrest) before writing the Areopagitica, his defence of press freedom; moreover, Galileo’s work was printed in the Protestant Netherlands, where press restrictions were significantly looser than elsewhere in Europe. Protestantism’s replacement of the supreme authority of the institutional Church with the authority of the scriptures now meant that, in the babble of Protestant voices arguing their different points from those scriptures, there was a good deal more debate and disagreement in general, and this fostered far more space for independent thinking.
When England’s Royal Society (the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, to give it its full title) was founded in 1660, one of its opening speakers argued that, just as the Protestants had purified scripture (as well as returning to the original Greek and Hebrew texts, Luther had removed the books Judaism deemed apocryphal from the Catholic canon94), so Copernicus and Galileo had purified science. Frequent references were made to the two great books of learning: the book of scripture and the book of nature – in both cases, it was the empirical method that made study so fruitful. Isaac Newton’s personal library showcases this relationship especially well; among more than 2,000 titles, books on theology and science dominated.
The Copernican print runs could not compete with those for Lutheran tracts or other popular Renaissance writers, but nor were they supposed to. Where the Reformation drew wide audiences and interest, other areas galvanized by print had different aims. The emergence of a scholarly scientific community across Europe, able to read one another’s works with ease, was paper-printing’s greatest gift to scientific debate and discovery. Printing enabled a communications revolution, after all, and just as Europe’s religious unity under Rome was dissolving, so its thinkers and inventors were discovering a new European intellectual community to which they might belong. Scientists still look to a handful of publications on paper as the most important dates in European science up until the early twentieth century, since these publications were quickly being read by scholars and scientists across Europe. The historian Adrian Johns lists the first two of these as Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus (1543) and Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Principal Systems of the World (1632). He includes only a further four publications – by Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin and Einstein.95 The major scientific breakthroughs were all announced on paper.
—
This ability to capture more specialist disciplines, such as science, was part of the continued rise of paper culture in Europe during the Renaissance. But niche subjects could never have delivered the paper age on their own; instead, the crucial groundwork was done by the networks of printers that emerged across Europe during the fifteenth century; by 1500 there were printing presses operating in more than 200 cities across Europe in a dozen different countries, producing more than 20 million volumes. Most of these printing presses would be economic failures, leading the print trade to gradually coalesce around a few key urban centres, but the initial surge at least indicated the unparalleled ambition of booksellers in the age of print or, to put it another way, their conviction that the book market was expanding at breakneck speed.96
The appearance of these presses also reflected the Renaissance love for the book – and early Renaissance books were often objects of exceptional beauty. Thus Renaissance authors and publishers harnessed the visual potential of paper and books, even after the introduction of movable-type printing. Form was suggestive of content; elegance, harmony, learning, advancement and a love for the classics – even for classical form – could all be signalled through the look and feel of the book itself. Venice became the powerhouse of fifteenth-century publishing, producing a quarter more editions than Paris, its main competitor – and, unusually for the time, more than half of Venetian books were in the larger folio format. Venetian books used the best paper, employed the most impressive designs, blazed a trail in using illustrations and indexes, and yet were also less expensive than their non-Venetian rivals. It was a city comfortable with the economics of books, as print runs required significant initial outlays (and therefore risk). It was also well-placed to export its books across Europe.
Meanwhile, the northern Renaissance spurred paper production in France. One of the first centres of northern papermaking had been Avignon, where the Papacy had relocated from 1309 to 1377. (Following a deadlocked conclave divided between Italian and French cardinals, the French Clement V was finally elected Pope by a narrow margin in 1305 and chose – perhaps wisely, given how completely he owed that electoral victory to the French cardinals – to hold papal court in France, moving to Avignon in 1309.) The humanist popes of Avignon were impressive in their pursuit and sponsorship of scholarship, introducing to France both Petrarch and Boccaccio, each man a forerunner of the Renaissance. By the late fifteenth century, however, Paris and Lyons had become printing centres not just for France but for Europe, producing more printed materials than any other cities in Europe, except for Venice.
If the Renaissance spurred book production and made learning and ideas more available, the reformers were among the first to view printing as a way to reach every reader in Europe – even, perhaps, the illiterate, whether they encountered those texts directly, through images, or indirectly, by hearing them read and quoted aloud. Whereas the Renaissance focus on classical learning (often expensively bound) could deliver it to only a relatively elite audience, religion in Europe was universal. Allied with printing, religion had the potential to reach a mass audience. Moreover, once the Reformation had taken hold, reducing the price of printing, forging new distribution networks and encouraging reading much further down the social scale, it then became more feasible economically for other disciplines to profit from printing, too.
As we shall see, paper was able to capture disciplines that had formerly been closed to it, and to give them a new network of writer-readers across much of Europe. Scholars in such niches were not usually aiming at the broad readership that Luther had sometimes written for, but their more targeted audiences were important for very different reasons. New reading networks and markets would now emerge for composers and musicians, playwrights and artists, scientists and engineers, prose-writers and poets. The result was an emerging culture of cross-pollination, one that was able to deliver moments of radical breakthrough with far greater frequency.
—
In the arts, the links the early Renaissance enjoyed with paper often appear very indirect, at least at first sight. In early Renaissance art, for example, the dominant form was mobile pictures, and among these it was not paintings but altarpieces which dominated (books remained on parchment for serious illumination and painting). Even when destined for a private home, these products usually comprised wooden panels. Beyond altarpieces, moreover, it was not works on paper which dominated but frescoes and paintings on panels. For the first time, oil paints were used in Italy, the employment of ‘pagan’ subjects and a new understanding of light – compared to these developments, paper in Renaissance painting seems more footnote than feature. Its importance lay, instead, in the role of preparatory sketches and drawings, which were usually on paper or parchment.
Cennino Cennini, writing no later than the early fifteenth century (and possibly earlier), described drawing as the foundation for art and advised painters to make drawings on paper, parchment or wooden panels on a daily basis. His Book of Art or Craftsman’s Handbook was a distillation of artistic techniques and advice. Such preparatory sketches must have been especially important when it came to figurative compositions. Moreover, the idea of preparatory drawings was not entirely new; Petrarch had described them as the common source of sculpture and painting as early as the 1340s. It is difficult to gauge whether paper was used significantly more than parchment or panels for such sketches, since artists often did not consider them worth keeping, although the widespread availability of paper in Italy in the fourteenth century, coupled with its lower cost, suggest it was at least the natural choice for the financially prudent. Moreover, several Renaissance figures valued drawings on paper very highly – not simply the artists we most associate with them today (notably Leonardo da Vinci) but even the sixteenth-century father of art historians, Giorgio Vasari, who was one of the first collectors of such drawings.
Architects had perhaps even greater use for paper than painters, at least in the early Renaissance. They could increasingly afford to buy architectural manuals with recent drawings. Some drew their designs out on what we now call cardboard (cartone in Italian); the origin of the word ‘cartoon’ comes from this use of heavy paper as a surface to make preliminary drawings for frescoes, paintings, tapestries and stained glass windows. These technical drawings, the work not simply of artists but of artist-engineers, would be crucial for the development not only of architecture but of the Renaissance vision more broadly. This was nowhere more apparent than in the work of Filippo Brunelleschi, a Florentine sculptor who quickly switched his trade to architecture. Vasari, in his Lives of the Artists, writes that Brunelleschi never tired of making drawings of buildings he saw, sketching them out in their form as in their details; thus he studied and progressed and experimented through imitation on the page. It was as an architect that Brunelleschi pioneered the use of linear perspective in drawings and paintings, whereby the two-dimensional page can be convincingly used to present three-dimensional objects. (The concept behind the practice, aptly enough, seems to have been the brainchild of an eleventh-century mathematician in Baghdad.97) Others had been trying this for centuries, but Brunelleschi experimented with mirrors to develop a more precise understanding of how lines converge on the horizon as they disappear into the distance. The result was a more technical basis for representing depth on a two-dimensional surface. Brunelleschi’s breakthrough was rapidly welcomed across Florence – indeed, together with his ability to capture technical processes on paper it would be used across architecture and engineering in the centuries to come.
But if paper fuelled the experimentation of architects, it was printing which delivered to them both easier access to foreign designs and a wider European market for their own. The expanded, 1567 publication of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, which offered brief biographies of several major Renaissance architects, undoubtedly helped to raise their status. As that shift occurred, printing delivered the possibility of making their presence felt in distant countries, since architects and men of letters abroad might now afford to buy their works. Their target was not Luther’s mass market but a far narrower readership of potential patrons and men of influence. No Renaissance architect enjoyed a greater impact through the media of paper and print than Andrea Palladio.
Born ‘Andrea, son of Piero the miller’, he was later named ‘Palladio’ by the humanist poet Gian Giorgio Trissino (who patronised him in 1538–9) as a reflection of his classicism, since he looked back to the Roman architect Vitruvius and to classical form as his starting point. Almost 300 sheets of Palladio’s drawings survive, covering the span of his long working life. Palladio used various sizes of paper, but they were all sourced from sheets that measured around 22 inches by 16½ inches, which he might then divide into two or four sections. He would incise construction lines on the paper with a stylus and then go over them with an ink pen, typically made from a feather. Wooden rulers and brass compasses were features of his everyday stationery, ensuring straightness and correct orientation. According to Vincenzo Scamozzi, apprentice to Palladio, he sketched initial drawings with black chalk or a lead pencil. If he had drawn the design for an ancient building on the recto (front) side of a piece of paper, he might then sketch a derivative idea on the verso (back).
Yet paper did not merely aid the planning of his buildings. It propelled his reputation and influence across Europe and even across the Atlantic. Palladio’s signature work, I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), was published in Venice in 1570. For all its freshness, a treatise on architecture, complete with woodcuts of Palladio’s drawings, was not destined to appeal to a large readership, and nor did it need to. The Four Books was, typically for Renaissance artists who relied largely on wealthy patrons, aimed at a rarefied readership. There is some evidence that the Italian edition travelled around Europe – the English architect Inigo Jones owned a 1601 edition before his own trip to the Veneto in 1614. But drawings alone did not make Palladio famous abroad. Instead, it was translations which would, decades later, transform the architect’s influence.
In 1645 an abridged Paris edition of the Four Books appeared, followed by a full-text version in 1650, the first translated from the Italian. In 1663 an English edition of Book One was published, and a complete English edition finally appeared between 1715 and 1720. Various editions followed, none of them accurate and many of them with altered illustrations, until a definitive 1737 edition became authoritative for English-language readers. In 1734 Palladio Londinensisappeared on the English market and quickly became the standard builder’s manual. A few copies of the Four Books travelled to America too, especially to well-connected or wealthy readers like Thomas Jefferson, who in 1816 wrote in a letter to a friend: ‘Palladio is my Bible’.
Yet grandly bound portfolios of the Four Books aimed at wealthy readers did not create such a stir in America as did the pattern books of Palladio’s designs. Pattern books showed models and designs to the reader in a more affordable format. These books had developed thanks not to letter-type printing but to block printing; where movable type had transformed letter-type printing, block printing had profited from improved craftsmanship, specifically in carving patterns in wood.
Pattern books of Palladio’s designs and drawings, printed in London, popularized Palladio among gentlemen, builders and craftsmen in America. Meanwhile, the 1734 Palladio Londinensis became the most available book on architecture in Britain’s colonies. (In fact, its Palladian heritage was impure but by this point many publishers were more interested in the celebrated artist’s selling power than in achieving the most accurate portrayal of his ideas and drawings.) Inigo Jones and Richard Boyle, Lord Burlington (the wealthy English lord known as the ‘Apollo of the arts’), brought Palladio’s drawings to England, thus nurturing new disciples of the great architect, among them Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor.
It was in America, however, that Palladio’s influence was perhaps most enduring and monumental. Thomas Jefferson drew up his designs for Monticello, the classical villa at his Virginia plantation, based on his close reading of Palladio’s works. (The name ‘Monticello’, ‘small hill’ in Italian, may even have been a nod of recognition to the Italian.) Numerous plantation houses and several university buildings in the United States were built on Palladian designs in the eighteenth and nineteenth century; his influence even extended, through the conduit of James Hoban, the Irish Palladian architect whose submission won the contest to design a new building of state in Washington DC, to the design of the White House.
Palladio’s use of paper as a starting point for his art was typical of Renaissance architects. It allowed them to test their ideas freely, to engineer new ways of transferring weight or capturing light without ever lifting a stone. Thanks in great part to Brunelleschi’s development of perspective drawing, paper delivered architects a means of practising their art far more often than real building projects would have allowed, and with complete freedom. Moreover, the growing availability of architectural texts, coupled with the possibility of becoming well known in print hundreds of miles away from the buildings you designed, delivered entirely new possibilities to Renaissance architects. The buildings are of course the legacy, but paper had helped to make that legacy possible.
—
Renaissance architects were fortunate to have surviving classical buildings and architectural treatises from which to learn. As they sought to revive the best of classical antiquity, they discovered that much could, indeed, be recovered. Yet that precious access to classical precedents was not shared by composers and musicians. While many were eager to revive what they knew of the classical passion for music, it was not possible to revive the music itself, since the few traces remaining gave very little away of what the music actually sounded like or how it should be played.
In medieval Europe, musicians lacked detailed musical notation until the development of stave lines from the eleventh century – the familiar five-line stave then appeared in Italy in the thirteenth century. Aside from wandering minstrels, music in medieval Europe had been largely based in cathedrals and churches for centuries. But the spread of printed music, begun in the second half of the fifteenth century though only significant in quantity and impact from the start of the sixteenth, linked composers and choirmasters across Europe; thus they could increasingly read and play one another’s work without travelling or paying large sums for manuscripts. Yet printing out music posed practical challenges that printing out text did not.
The major problem was how to print notes onto a stave. At first, printers only printed the staves; all the notes were then added by hand. The Mainz Psalter, produced in 1457, is one example of this approach. This, of course, saved some time but left most of the hard work to the scribe. Yet superimposing notes onto the stave required exceptional accuracy and it was complicated by the fact that, in liturgical music, the standard form was black notes on a red stave. To overcome this challenge, printers would impress the staves first, and later the notes, a process begun in Rome in the 1470s. Ottaviano Petrucci, a Venetian printer, went further still, adding a third printing for the addition of text and other details (like page numbers) – song anthologies he published in 1501, 1502 and 1504 are good examples of this.
Although Petrucci was relatively skilled in his art, and was the first to print polyphonic music using movable type, the process remained expensive, and thus cocooned from some of the obvious advantages that Gutenberg had achieved for printing alphabetical scripts. The breakthrough was to cast the stave lines onto the notes, thereby allowing a single impression to do all the work. Although Italy and France were generally the centres for sixteenth-century European music publishing, the technique seems likely to have been first developed in London by the barrister John Rastell, but by 1528 Pierre Attaingnant, a French printer based in Paris, was using the same approach – Attaingnant would be the first to use this method for significant print runs. Venetian printers followed. Paris and Venice were more natural centres for music printing than London as sixteenth-century Europe developed a distinct musical geography. Thus musical publishing would be centred on the German states, the cities of northern Italy and, to the west, on Paris and Lyons. Yet over the course of the sixteenth century it was increasingly Venice that came to dominate musical publishing in Europe, building on its longstanding Renaissance bookishness.
As early as 1468, Cardinal Bessarion had described Venice as a ‘second Byzantium’ thanks to its written scholarship. It was that year that Bessarion, a Roman Catholic bishop and one of the great scholars of the early Renaissance, donated around 750 of his own Latin and Greek codices to the city’s library, the Biblioteca Marciana, as well as some 250 manuscripts and printed books. Bessarion’s bequest pointed to the growing need for texts among Venice’s scholars. The new combination of increased supply and demand in the world of books meant many readers now had leisure to pursue their own interests more exclusively. Venetian printers, inevitably, noticed this tendency towards specialization too, and began to follow suit.
The Scotto press in Venice enjoyed particular success in the second half of the sixteenth century. It printed on a range of topics, but its specialty was music, for which a market had now developed. The rise of printed music in Venice was especially good news for composers, since it enabled them to widen their circle of patrons; indeed, now patrons could simply pay for the printing of a book of music, which deepened the pool of possible patrons to include men who might not afford their own musicians at home. Composers could also do their own paper-based publicity and sell their music themselves. Venice’s global trading networks made this all the more feasible and Venetian musical texts were sold abroad – in at least one case, as far abroad as Colombia.
As printed music became more commonplace, and as the type set for musical notation was used more frequently, so music was increasingly standardized, and its notation improved.98 This tended to increase loyalty to the composer’s original and to give the performer far less power to interpret the music himself (although this trend was fed by other movements within music too). But paper printing’s greatest contribution to music came in its spread, as very different traditions became accessible to one another, enabling a close-knit community of European composers and musicians to emerge. As they fed off one another across the continent, composers profited both from more breadth in style and from greater competition among their peers.
The rise of Renaissance music also illustrates the impact that printed papers could enjoy in a specialist area, one with only a limited readership. Cost undoubtedly mattered less in music publishing than in, say, the publishing of religious tracts. Indeed, even single-impression musical scores were expensive enough (due to the complexity and variety of fount-types required) for printers to correct mistakes rather than simply use a new sheet; musical scores were the first printed texts on which, beginning in the fifteenth century, publishers used correcting fluid.99
The sudden flourishing of music in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was one of the most spectacular developments in which printing on paper would play a part. The Renaissance and Reformation were self-consciously derivative movements, looking back to various ancient sources (Hebrew, Greek and Roman). Composers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did look back to the classical period for musical principles and for a philosophy of music, but they lacked ancient musical scores to serve as practical models. Renaissance music did, however, receive strong religious impulses. Indeed, the religious divide in Europe was one of the factors that lay behind the great miracle of European music in the age of printing.
Music now became a means both of theological affirmation and of competitive display. Luther himself played the lute and the flute and wrote many hymns in German for congregational singing, providing songbooks for his congregations. This marked a departure from the Latin traditions of the Mass, most significantly in the use of language and in its corporate emphasis. Luther harnessed music to his theological vision: the spiritual equality of all believers. He was mesmerized by the music of the great Renaissance composer Josquin des Pres. Above all, he believed in the remarkable power of music to affect the hearer inwardly:
except for theology there is no art that could be put on the same level with music, since except for the [music] alone produces what otherwise only theology can do, namely, a calm and joyful disposition.100
When the Pope ordered a council to debate the Church’s response to Lutheranism, music was a particular focus. Indeed, for all Luther’s impact in his musical policy, the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation, its start usually dated to the Council of Trent (which ran from 1545 to 1563), would be foundational for the rise of music in Europe through the rest of the sixteenth century, and into the seventeenth century too. The best composers would come from both sides of the divide, but the Counter-Reformation provided much of the institutional groundwork for what would follow. While early drafts on musical policy had provided some detail and strictures, the guidelines actually published by the Council in 1562 were remarkably light. The council determined only that all church music has to be free of any secular elements and simple, while its liturgical texts have to be completely intelligble. Through providing direction in this way, the Council helped to encourage innovation, spectacle and beauty. Masses, the Council wrote in a preliminary canon, should be clear, comprehensible and ordered, but later reduced this to ‘not lascivious or impure’. The problems had been summarized by Bishop Cirillo Franco in a letter he wrote in 1549:
I should like, in short, when a Mass is to be sung in church, that its music be framed according to the fundamental subject of the words, in harmonies and rhythms apt to move our affections to religion and piety, and likewise in Psalms, Hymns, and other praises that are offered to God…
In our times they have put all their industry and effort into the composition of fugues, so that while one voice says, ‘Sanctus’ another says ‘Sabaoth’, still another ‘Gloria Tua’ with howling, bellowing and stammering, so that they more nearly resemble cats in January than flowers in May.101
The result of these rules was not a closing down of music but, instead, a continued flourishing. Moreover, the Council left the interpretation and enforcement of musical policy to be decided on locally; this looseness encouraged both variety and innovation. One of the Roman Catholic composers who shone most brightly under the Roman Church’s new approach to music was Palestrina.
Giovanni Pierluigi was born in 1525 not far from Rome and since his death has been known by the name of his home town of Palestrina. His great strength lay in combining clarity with complexity, which was arguably the great challenge laid down by the Council of Trent as it sought to clarify music for the common ear. Palestrina was a master of polyphonic Renaissance music, perhaps most famously in his Missa Papae Marcelli (Mass for Pope Marcellus). For much of his life, he struggled financially and his personal letters reflect the difficulty composers had in making ends meet when they lacked wealthy patrons. In 1588 he prefaced one of his works with a dedication to Pope Sixtus V, in which he complained that, although he had already published many works, he had many still waiting to be published but had been delayed by finances. He added that ‘it requires a great expense, especially if the larger notes and letters are used, as church music clearly requires.’ Publishing music, then, remained a major financial undertaking, and Palestrina would sometimes struggle in this area, despite his popularity with the Papacy. He did publish hundreds of compositions throughout his life, however, and achieve fame before his death.
Despite the costs associated with printing music, other composers flourished in print as well. The works of Antonio de Cabezón, who died in 1566, were published by his son in 1578, with a print run of 1,200 copies. Moreover, printers experimented with different forms. Jacques Moderne, an Italian who settled in France and died in the 1560s, was one of the first printers in France to use the single-impression method. Moderne founded a music house in Lyons and appears to be the first printer to publish chant books with multi-voice parts facing in opposite directions, so that people standing either side of a table or stand could sing together. Such innovation might seem surprising, given the relatively high cost of printing music. But, whereas many non-musical texts could be read and reread several times, musical scores were never intended to be read or used on a single occasion, but repeatedly. (Indeed, although initially aimed at specialists, published music would begin to enter the home in the sixteenth century too, and thousands of collections of both religious and secular songs would be published.102) The survival rate of Renaissance music books has been exceptionally low103but the reuse rate goes some way to explaining why.
Palestrina, however, was a particular publishing star of sixteenth-century music, favoured by popes and copied out by Johannes Parvus, scribe of the Papal Chapel, which relied entirely on manuscript sources. Indeed, evidence is lacking that printed texts were used by the Chapel even as late the Council of Trent. This unusual setup gave to Parvus extraordinary power and influence, reflecting a more hierarchical approach to book production, one driven not by market interest but by guidance from above. Parvus copied out a few of Palestrina’s works, and the composer certainly enjoyed the patronage not only of princes but even of the Pope. Indeed, Palestrina’s output was early proof that the Counter-Reformation had provided music with an opportunity, not a straitjacket.
Palestrina’s success in his own lifetime meant that his works would travel and survive. Thus his influence was able to persist after his death, and greater, more prolific composers would learn from him, both Catholic and Protestant. Among them was the great Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach, born in 1685 in Eisenach some ninety-one years after Palestrina’s death.
Bach, although a theological heir to Martin Luther, was especially influenced by Palestrina’s Missa Sine Nomine, which he studied and performed while writing his own Mass in B Minor. As cantor and music director at St Thomas’s in Leipzig, Bach had access to a good musical library; the St Thomas School library had especially rich collections of vocal polyphony from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.104 Thus, despite the struggles Palestrina had endured, his music was widely available to his musical heirs, even more than a century after his death.
Unlike Palestrina, however, Bach won fame in his lifetime only as an organist, and his compositions remained largely unremarked in the wider musical world even at his death in 1750 and for several decades thereafter. Very few of his works were published in his own lifetime. One exception was The Well-Tempered Clavier, an initial compilation made in 1722 with a second set of preludes and fugues compiled in 1742. These, however, were not ‘published’ according to modern definitions. Instead, they were merely circulated as manuscripts and not printed until 1801, fifty-one years after the composer’s death. It might be tempting to see this as somehow a failure of print culture, but it can as easily be seen as an example of printing’s success, since print offered the opportunity to revive a composer’s work long after his death, perhaps even to grant him the worldwide and enduring fame he had lacked in life. Palestrina was merely revived by the nineteenth-century Romantics, whereas Bach’s worldwide fame began with them.
Printed music had fed into Bach’s own musical beginnings and development as well as providing an avenue for him to be rediscovered half a century after his death. His musical vision and depth owed perhaps very little to the medium of print, whereas paper had at least been useful when he secretly copied out scores of seventeenth-century music as a child. But the success he achieved posthumously was very much a product of the print era. For it was only in the print era that composers could gain sudden and widespread fame decades or even centuries after their deaths, their works sitting on bookshelves, pianos and music stands in the homes of millions of admirers all around the world.
—
Printing on paper enabled composers and musicians to study, borrow, interact and compose music, and to publicize that music, far more easily. Public information campaigns were a crucial development in paper’s age of print, and paper-based campaigns quickly became part of the urban landscape. Indeed, sometimes paper was viewed as the only way to address a public crisis; thus, from the 1570s, the problem of plague in England was addressed by printing out and distributing around public spaces procedures for citizens to follow and, soon enough, Bills of Mortality too. Under James I, plague orders would be published in the first year of his reign (1603) to advise citizens how and when to meet, what to avoid and what treatments and medicines might help them. (Even tobacco was publicly recommended.)
Once the 1603 outbreak had died down, however, paper returned to a more festive role, advertising pleasures rather than providing support during disasters. In London the 1603 outbreak had begun in Southwark, home to the city’s great playhouses. As part of the emergency measures introduced by James that summer to stem the spread of the plague, playhouses had – as in some previous outbreaks – been closed. In 1604, however, life returned to normal in the capital and, instead of plague warnings, residents would see adverts for, among other amusements, performances at one or another of the London playhouses.
Playhouses were a particular feature of London’s life and landscape at the turn of the sixteenth century. The master playwright of the age, William Shakespeare, was himself part-owner of one of the London playhouses, long since referred to as ‘The Globe’. Shakespeare’s plays enabled characters from across the social spectrum to appear on the same stage – kings and bishops, gravediggers and clowns. The stage therefore offered a snapshot of the full range of society to its viewers, enabling very different members of the audience to identify with at least one of the players. Standing in the pit in front of the stage were the ‘groundlings’, who paid just a penny for entry.
Shakespeare himself inhabited a paper culture and profited by it. Paper makes many appearances (and disappearances) in his plays, often, as in Romeo and Juliet, with great dramatic impact. But paper’s most crucial role in Shakespeare’s drama was as deliverer of a breadth of sources it delivered to the playwright himself. Indeed, it was during Shakespeare’s own life that a new reading device appeared: the bookwheel. This remarkable contraption comprised a large drumwheel perhaps five feet tall, with shelves spaced across the inside of it. Designed in 1588 by an Italian military engineer, the device allowed a reader to have several books open at once and to switch between them as he turned the wheel, something like multiple browser windows.
It was a product very much of its time (although few were actually produced and used) since educated Renaissance readers liked cross-referencing and were therefore used to ranging between a selection of texts at the same time. Comparison was part-and-parcel of the Renaissance approach to learning. There is no particular reason to think that Shakespeare used a bookwheel himself, but the reading culture it served was his reading culture too, a culture that delighted in multiple sources, even for a single myth, event or metaphor. This celebration of multiplicity had of course been enabled by the rapid increase in affordable books. Many of those titles made accessible in the Renaissance were texts from classical Greece and Rome and these became crucial source-texts for later Renaissance writers.
The culture of reading multiple books at a time, and thus of profiting from a range of sources in a single sitting, fed into Shakespeare’s own work. He did not simply begin with a blank page; one of Shakespeare’s attributes was his ability to pillage older texts for stories – and then improve on them – or simply plunder them for ideas, beliefs and metaphors. The range of this literary acquisitiveness was enormous; Shakespeare imported the world – and that included the world of books and learning – onto the stage. The plot of his 1599–1600 comedy As You Like It, for example, was taken from the Thomas Lodge prose story Rosalynde, or Euphues’ Golden Legacie, which had appeared only in 1590. Even Shakespeare’s title is taken from one of the phrases of Lodge’s opening: if you like it, so. Yet in the play itself, the possible sources are so many as to make it impossible to trace line-by-line derivations with any certainty. And so it is in the speech, delivered by Jaques in Act II, scene 7, that hangs from one of Shakespeare’s best-loved metaphors. It opens:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
The metaphor itself, of course, was not Shakespeare’s own invention. The image echoes Policraticus, an 1159 work by John of Salisbury which argues that a man’s life on earth is a comedy in which everyone plays another man’s role, while the choice of the number seven picks up on the biblical and medieval use of that number for religious and symbolic purposes. Renaissance influences are also strong. Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly had described life as a play in which each actor waits for the director to motion him offstage, while Palingenius’s book Zodiacus Vitae, first published in the 1530s, comes closer still, depicting the world itself as a stage. The 1570 publication of a world atlas in Antwerp entitledTheatrum Orbis Terrarum, often described as the first modern atlas and certainly recognized as remarkable in its day, may well have fed into the speech too – its name means ‘Theatre of the World’ (literally ‘Theatre of the Sphere of the Earth’). It is a name that captures the excitement of the age of exploration, itself a rich seam in Shakespeare’s plays. Or, looking back to classical antiquity, Shakespeare may have also been picking up on Ovid’s Metamorphoses (a text he regularly echoed), in which the ancient Roman poet describes the four ages of man. Such was the range of sources made readily available by print culture at the end of the sixteenth century.
Moreover, while the accessibility of books helped Shakespeare to import the world onto the stage, they also helped him to export the stage into people’s homes. Although the complete set would not be published until the first folio in 1623, the first of William Shakespeare’s plays were published as early as the 1590s. The print runs were not large compared to the number of people seeing the plays themselves (usually no more than 1,500 were printed, while the Globe Theatre could hold 3,000 people for a single performance) but, by contemporary standards, a print run of 1,500 was not inconsiderable. Hamlet, in fact, saw a second quarto printing in 1604, just a year after the first. This time, however, the text ran to 4,056 lines instead of 2,221. That made it much longer – and therefore more expensive to stage – than the usual length of time allowed for plays, which was around two-and-a-half hours. But it did not matter, as this was a print run aimed not at players and their sponsors, nor even at playhouse audiences, but at readers.105 Shakespeare’s own name, unusually for playwrights of his time, could actually sell books, as publishers soon realized.
For the most part, however, Renaissance drama was not a publishing success, and many of its authors would only be published after their death. Meanwhile, Shakespeare’s sonnets, with their intensely personal expressions of romantic love, also illustrate the shift from the private to the public realm that printing encouraged. Shakespeare’s friend Francis Meres had praised the Bard’s ‘sugred sonnets’ in 1598, but in the same breath mentioned their availability only to ‘private friends’ (as opposed to a reading public). Yet just a decade later, in 1609, Shake-speares Sonnets was published for a public readership, probably without proper consent, by Thomas Thorpe.
This personalized focus would gain much greater publishing traction in prose, however. Whereas poetry had always favoured memorization, brevity and performance, prose-writing posed a problem in the market because a typical reader could not afford to buy a parchment book (of considerable length) that he or she only planned to read once. But paper books, increasingly finding a standardized form (and thus lower price) during the sixteenth century in Europe, made such single-read purchases increasingly realistic. They also encouraged the practice of private, silent reading, where poetry had generally favoured performance or at least reading out aloud. The rise of printed prose would follow.
—
The novel’s particular capacity for rapid and widespread sales was displayed in what is sometimes referred to as the first modern novel, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, or simply Don Quixote. Defining the novel is a dangerous pursuit, largely because it can take on so many shapes, echo so many different forms of literature and end up looking very unlike whatever definition you might apply to it. Henry James wrote of how some novels were ‘large loose, baggy monsters’. But this characteristic, according to Cervantes scholar Anthony J. Cascardi, may in fact be what best defines the novel, namely, its ‘ability to incorporate a seemingly limitless number of components and to assume an unpredictable variety of shapes’.106 It is for this reason, writes Cascardi, that we can call Don Quixote the first novel. Cervantes’s 1605 episodic account of the adventures of his picaresque, self-named hero Don Quixote and his loyal servant Sancho Panza was published in two separate volumes ten years apart (1605 and 1615). It quickly won an international readership. By 1620, Don Quixote had been translated and published in markets across Western Europe and parts of the Americas.
Don Quixote may be best described as a proto-novel, however, because it ‘shows how the novel comes about when romantic idealism…collides with the real world’.107 This makes sense of the timing of the novel’s rise, which coincides with both the rise of modern science and a growing suspicion of classical authority. It is also a secular genre and closely tied to a new socio-economic phenomenon of the age of print: the middle class.
A novel is much more expensive to produce than a pamphlet or newspaper and therefore involves significant financial risk for the investor. That risk is only rewarded if a sufficiently large readership exists to purchase it, which means that the novel first requires a high number of non-specialist readers with enough disposable income to afford it – in other words, a bourgeoisie. But it requires more than that. It requires a shared language. Obviously that includes literacy in the same language, but it also includes a set of shared cultural experiences and understandings that can make the novel accessible to thousands of people who will never meet one another. This need for shared language, literacy and cultural identity across thousands of people is why the novel is often described as the literary form that is most closely tied to the nation – a hugely diverse set of people but one, nevertheless, with some degree of shared ‘national’ experience. France and England would experience its earliest flowering.
The breadth of the novel’s readership marks an important moment in the history of paper’s audiences, not simply because of its links to the bourgeoisie or to any kind of national consciousness, but because it crossed the gender gap more decisively than any serious literary form that had preceded it. The novel delivered itself directly to women as well as to men. More radically still, it was a form increasingly written by women, too. The Renaissance had provided a rationale for women’s literacy. The Reformation had often gone further – Martin Luther had expressed his desire to see the vernacular Bible made accessible to women and, as a corollary, wrote that both boys’ and girls’ schools should be founded. But the novel would provide a serious avenue for female authors to write independently of men – and for a mixed audience.
In France, the emergence of female authors was aided by the development of printing (which took books into bourgeois homes), by the Reformation (since it encouraged personal Bible reading), especially in the south-west, and by the influence of Italy, with the spread of Renaissance humanist ideas (especially under King Francis I (1515–47)) to both men and women. Thus Francis I’s sister Marguerite de Navarre’s mix of learning, royal connections and Protestant sympathies led her to write on a wide range of subjects. She corresponded with an admiring Erasmus and wrote the Heptaméron, a collection of seventy-two stories, including one about doomed love, ‘Amadour et Floride’, which has been described as a mini-novel.108 Women writers received even greater encouragement in the seventeenth century, when Marie de Gournay published The Equality of Men and Women (1622), in which she argued for education for all, and The Ladies’ Grievance (1626).
The literary salon, an Italian invention, would blossom in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France as a centre for the discussion of books and ideas. This privileged institution especially favoured women, since it was believed women were better at conversation than men and more adept generally in social relations. Meanwhile, while the literary focus of seventeenth-century France was on the theatre, with its male playwrights and strict classical forms, women increasingly turned to narrative, which opened the way for more personal styles and subject matters. The novel was a natural form to choose, and one in particular stands out as symptomatic of the changed relationship women were seeking with the printed page.
La Princesse de Clèves was written anonymously and published in 1678, but its author is thought to be Madame de Lafayette, who had been born into a minor noble family in Paris in 1634. Often called the first modern French novel, the psychological tale was an incredibly bold story to tell in seventeenth-century France, not least because every character except the lead was based on someone at the royal court. It provoked widespread debate. Discussion centred around the principal character, Mademoiselle de Chartres, who marries the Prince de Clèves and then falls in love with another man. (As in some of the greatest English and French novels of the succeeding two centuries, what form the woman’s name takes in the title of the work is indicative of her relative social independence. Like Madame Bovary but unlike Emma, the heroine in Lafayette’s novel is named after her husband.) She avoids being unfaithful but informs her husband of her feelings. Before he dies (of a broken heart), he asks her not to pursue her true love. She then decides to reject the open advances of the man she loves, choosing instead to live in a convent, where ultimately she will die young: she is convinced that her true love would one day tire of her and forsake her for another woman. One of the elements that surprised readers was that the main character did not behave according to established social norms – this was, perhaps, all the more shocking coming from a woman. Lafayette had presented a very different kind of literary heroine to the ideal figure held up by French high society.
La Princesse de Clèves described a rarefied social world that most readers would never have seen, but the novel has since proved itself to be a far broader genre. Written in popular language, it was also the first European genre to treat the common people ‘with unwavering seriousness’.109 In England in particular, it began to evoke a range of characters from all walks of life. Moreover, it did not just borrow all kinds of characters; it borrowed all kinds of writing, too (although this reduced with the emergence of the realist novel in the mid-nineteenth century.) In this, it linked to a form of literature that appeared in a very different social context: the gospels. The New Testament gospels were themselves literary hybrids, plundering a wide variety of ancient and classical forms to tell their stories: history, apocalyptic literature, poetry, healing stories, parables and so on. Moreover, the gospels were similarly unusual in treating common people as serious human subjects, which was strange to the classical worldview. This, it has been argued, was where the idea that everyday life is precious found its origin.110
The novel’s more democratic elements were among the reasons it was often looked down on by educated men of status. Many eighteenth-century commentators were not impressed by what they viewed as a populist and low-brow literary form, one suited to those who lacked a proper classical education. In other words, they saw it as suited to women. This initial disdain played into the hands of women authors and readers alike, freeing them to experiment with the genre relatively unhindered. Moreover, the novel’s focus on the inner life only added to the sense that it was ‘women’s writing’, since questions of the heart were widely viewed as women’s business.
What followed was an unprecedented surge of women’s writing, especially in England. If a classical education was not necessary in order to start writing for others, then this freed the novel from some of the old limitations of dramatic action, which often located the story in classical, royal, ecclesiastical or battlefield settings. Instead, it was now possible not merely to enter the drawing-room, dining-room, kitchen or marketplace but to use those locations as backdrops – focuses, even – for serious literature. The novel’s particular emphasis on social relations, often through the vehicle of reported conversation, brought it into the everyday world, a world inhabited by those who had not received a formal education in history, the classics, theology or poetry (generally, women and the lower socio-economic classes) as well as those who had.
Inevitably, this meant not just female authors but female readers, too. As early as the seventeenth century, there were growing numbers of women readers in England’s urban middle class, since technical books were increasingly written for just such a readership.111 In physical form, the printed book was also portable, allowing it to be carried into the home. (Indeed, novels could be concealed, as they were by New England mill girls going into work in nineteenth-century America.112) The popularization of novels among women encouraged the domestication of reading; the fact that the novel was often dismissed as a more feminine literary form only helped to smooth its passage into female hands.
By England’s Victorian era, the novel had become wildly popular. Thanks in part to the works of Jane Austen, the early nineteenth century saw the genre develop a respectable reputation in England. A publishing boom ensued. Between 1830 and 1900 some 40,000 to 50,000 novels were published in England, by close to 3,500 different authors.113 This was a crucial period for publishing, too; no longer the work of printers and booksellers, by the nineteenth century publishing had become a distinct practice with distinct practitioners.
—
Of all printing’s deliveries to the modern readership, the novel ranks as perhaps the most personal and individual of the mainstream products, even though it is seeking to appeal to an exceptionally wide readership. A novel is not simply an item you buy for yourself, like a newspaper, but an item you tend to keep and often develop a sense of ownership over. It does not dictate when you should read it (unlike the newspaper or work papers or the post). It has strong historical tendencies but it does not primarily seek to inform you about processes, events or even people in the world around you (as in, say, history or science). Instead, it asks you to internalize a story and to imagine it yourself – characters, usually locations and often much more. Inventive in its own right, it also seeks to feed invention in the reader’s mind’s eye.
Portable, affordable, accessible (at least in principle), individual, modern and middle class, the novel is one of paper’s best-suited passengers. If the paper book were ever to approach its end, then I suspect the novel would be the last form to fall.