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At the heart of Stephen Dobranski's book lie two interrelated
questions: "'How much authority did authors have during the Renaissance?'
and 'How much interpretive activity were readers willing or expected to
undertake?'"(6) To answer these questions, Dobranski examines one particular
segment of the literary marketplace: "Renaissance omissions", printed
texts that look incomplete but in fact contain deliberate gaps which aim
to solicit an interpretive intervention on the part of the reader. The
case studies are taken from the works of Sidney, Jonson, Donne, Herrick
and Milton, and in each of the five main chapters Dobranski seeks to demonstrate
the interdependence of authorial and readerly forms of empowerment. Filling
in a text's omissions obviously foregrounds the reader's authority, but
it also enhances the author's own status in less overt ways: by "focusing
readers' attention on what writers left unsaid", Dobranski argues, "these
unfinished works paradoxically helped to make writers more visible"; in
encountering an incomplete text, "readers seemed to witness firsthand
an author's poetic development."(8)
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Dobranski's theory of Renaissance omissions presupposes
a high level of readerly commitment: without the audience's participation,
the incomplete text seems merely accidental--the result of a printer's
oversight, perhaps, or the victim of natural disaster (the fire in Ben
Jonson's library springs to mind). Accordingly, the opening section of
the book examines how the notion of "active reading" was developed across
a wide range of classical, medieval and Renaissance sources. "Briefly
tracing the reader's evolution from antiquity to the early modern period"
is a laudable endeavour, but in practice it causes a number of methodological
problems that the subsequent chapters of the study never quite manage
to resolve. Dobranski's reader is a strikingly ahistorical and monolithic
entity, who remains essentially unaffected by political and socio-cultural
change. One result of this assumption is that the nature and scope of
"active" reading can seem rather vague and at times misleading: readers
who had grown up in an atmosphere of doctrinal and exegetical controversy,
for instance, would surely have struggled with the notion that correcting
typographical errors and being "responsible for determining what Scripture
meant"(30) occupy places on the same hermeneutic spectrum. (To take one
obvious example, it is difficult to see how a Laudian sympathiser in the
1630s might be persuaded that with "the spread of the Reformation to England,
the sacred text's authority was now vested in all authors and readers
who accepted divine guidance."(31)) Another problem is that the two key
terms of Dobranski's account, "active" and "collaborative" reading (17),
contain the seeds of interpretive conflict as much as happy cooperation:
a reader who feels entitled to sit in judgement over God's word, for instance,
might be reluctant to put himself at the service of a secular poet, and
be content merely to "think" and "infer … what an author withheld."(54).
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The central issue at stake in Dobranski's model, then,
appears to be one of readerly conditioning: the audience must first be
made to recognise an omission as significant and then be encouraged to
respond in ways that are at once benign and contextually appropriate.
In the first of the book's case studies, a feigned omission from Sidney's
Arcadia (the anonymous poem "A Remedie for Love", which was first
printed at the end of the Arcadia 's tenth edition in 1655), the
first of these conditions is easily fulfilled. Seventeenth-century readers
were aware not only of the existence of an original text and its incomplete
revision, but of a whole series of works that claimed descent from Sidney's
authority. In light of these circumstances, it is plausible to assume
that a new document would have fuelled readers' curiosity and provoked
fruitful interpretive engagement. In some of the other chapters, however,
the heuristic status of the omissions in question seems rather less certain.
Dobranski's discussion of Herrick's Hesperides, for instance, is full of interesting
and rewarding readings, but the bibliographical analysis does not fully
succeed in establishing the text's incompletions as a deliberate authorial
strategy. More importantly, perhaps, it is far from clear how the audience
would have been expected to appreciate the significance of these omissions;
as Dobranski himself concedes, "we cannot know how many seventeenth-century
readers would have overlooked or found distinctive two fragments among
the volume's more than 1,000 poems."(172) There is, in fact, no material
evidence supplied of readers' responses to any of the fragments that Dobranski
locates in Jonson's, Donne's, Herrick's and Milton's work.
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These problems of agency and intent emerge even more
sharply in the chapter on Donne's 1633 Poems. In the absence of
a presiding authorial figure (Donne died in 1631), it is the publishers
who take on the task of soliciting the reader's collaboration. Discussing
the censored passages in Satires II and IIII, Dobranski
argues that "the book's creators assist readers in repairing Donne's satires":
instead of removing all the poems' objectionable passages, the stationers
have left behind a series of horizontal dashes "almost as a sign of respect,
a textual I.O.U."(144) True understanders of Donne's work, Dobranski suggests,
might have been inspired by this to search for the missing lines in one
of the many manuscript copies then in circulation, thereby further augmenting
the poet's presence in the volume. This section is engaging and suggestive--not
least in the salutary reminder that authors, books and readers were created
in the printing house as much as in studies and libraries--but like some
other parts of the book it struggles under the burden of proof. Did Marriot
and Fletcher adopt this kind of interventionist policy with other authors?
Did they habitually draw readers' attention to textual gaps? Is there
any evidence that these readers felt obliged to react to such editorial
promptings? Given the absence of a holograph copy, do all manuscript versions
alike bolster the writer's authority? And even if it were possible to
find the manuscript reading that Donne intended, how does this hyper-intentional
approach impact on the notion of an "active" reader?
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Dobranski's study is original in conception and ambitious
in scope: it brings together textual studies, book history and literary
criticism, covers five of the biggest names in the early modern literary
canon, and intervenes in a number of current scholarly debates-most notably,
the history of authorship and reading. There are moments when the book
becomes a victim of its own ambitions, mainly because it does not devote
enough attention to the local contexts and circumstances of the interpretive
transactions it represents. This is not to suggest that a study of early
modern reading must remain incomplete unless it engages with the material
traces of interpretive engagement, but to demand a more detailed attention
to the historical specificities of readerly conditioning than Dobranski's
panoramic perspective at times permits.
