Elizabethan and Jacobean Pamphlets

Elizabethan & Jacobean Pamphlets

I can conceive some readers, not necessarily frivolous, anticipating little pleasure from a volume devoted to examples of Elizabethan and Jacobean pamphlets. It must be the business of the volume I have planned to convince them that they are wrong. But even before that volume is read, I think it not impossible to show cause for its right to exist. The originals of these pamphlets, except a few which have become familiar in consequence of their bearing on Shakespearian questions, were till recently almost unknown, except to a few scholars and antiquaries, and are still for the most part inaccessible except in the original editions, which are bought at large prices by collectors, or in limited and often privately issued modern reprints. Yet their interest is very great. The pamphlet of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth[Pg viii] century corresponded much more nearly to the modern periodical than to anything else, unless, indeed, it be the modern newspaper. It included fiction, sketches of society, accounts of travel, literary criticism, personal controversy, theology,the whole farrago, in short, of the non-political columns of our journals. It was in many cases written by men of much greater talent than the average journalist of the present day. In one remarkable casethat of the so-called Martin Marprelate controversyit holds a position almost unique, or only shared by the not wholly dissimilar groups of literature which included and grew up round Pascal's Provinciales and the Tracts for the Times. Above all, it has the advantage of a singular variety of subject, and of presenting the opportunity of making a great number of lively extracts, certainly faithful to the manners of the time, and showing those manners in a fashion not easy to surpass in freshness, contrast of colour, and incisive outline. The pamphlet was one of the most immediate and necessary creations of the printing press. Before that invention it was hardly possible, and a very considerable time had to elapse afterwards before the combination of education in the reader, command of mechanical means in the diffuser, and changed[Pg ix] political conditions, enabled the newspaper to supplant it. The pamphlet, so far as production is concerned, when once private presses are accessible, gives few hostages to fortune or to the strong hand of authority. It may make but a single appearance, and then the type is broken up, the machinery removed, and the printed copies left to find their way and do their work. A newspaper must have more or less of a headquarters, definite managers, at the very least a regular place and time of appearance at which it can be waited for and snapped up. Of the advantages offered by the pamphlet there is a good example in the fact that under the active, intelligent, and almost despotic government of Elizabeth, though the Martin Marprelate tracts excited the intensest hatred not merely of the lay authorities but of a powerful and omnipresent ecclesiastical corporation, the presses were only once (at Newton Lane in Lancashire) discovered and seized. In less perilous matter the pamphlet, if it did not give so much protection, 'obliged' even less. Its cost was small; the author was in no way bound to follow it up with anything else. It took him but a little time to produce; its profit, if there was any, came in quickly; it could be sold out before pirates could get hold of it; it did not frighten the unlearned by bulk and[Pg x] pretensions. On the other hand, of course, it had its drawbacks. It was of its nature, and in more points than one of that nature, ephemeral. The chances were rather against than in favour of its being preserved; for even in these days when most people have a library or book-room of some kind, the very student himself acknowledges with gnashings of teeth the way things published in pamphlet form have of 'going under,' of simply disappearing, he cannot tell how or whither. Hence the real and intrinsic interest of the pamphlet has had added to it the accidental and factitious interest of rarity. It is hardly a paradox to say that one of the best chances which such a thing had of surviving was the fact of its being proscribed and burnt by the hangman. There was then some reason for treasuring it instead of letting it go to clean boots, light fires, and wrap pounds of butter. The pamphlets of the Elizabethan age were almost as often in verse as in prose, the superior attraction of verse for early and uncultivated audiences not having died out. Indeed, far later than the period covered by this volume, things continued to be written in verse which were merely pamphlets, and gave us both matter of eternity, such as Absalom and Achitophel[Pg xi] or Religio Laici, and hard-bound doggerel like Defoe's True-Born Englishman and Jure Divino. The Elizabethan verse pamphlet, which was largely written by Thomas Churchyard, Nicholas Breton, John Davies, Samuel Rowlands, and others, is a curiosity, but as a rule very little more; and I do not propose to give any examples of it here. Nor, the space at my command being all too limited, have I thought it necessary to draw in this present volume on the miscellaneous pamphlets of the times. The examples will be taken from what may be called the great single pamphleteers or pamphlet collectionsthat is to say, Lodge, Greene, Nash, Harvey, 'Martin Marprelate' and the anti-Martinists, Breton, and Dekker. Some particulars of each of the selected authors or groups may appropriately be given in this introduction. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 44855
Author: Saintsbury, George
Release Date: Feb 9, 2014
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Editor: Saintsbury, George, 1845-1933