Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Modes and means of literary production, circulation and reception
- 1 Literacy, society and education
- 2 Manuscript transmission and circulation
- 3 Print, literary culture and the book trade
- 4 Literary patronage
- 5 Languages of early modern literature in Britain
- 6 Habits of reading and early modern literary culture
- 2 The Tudor era from the Reformation to Elizabeth I
- 3 The era of Elizabeth and James VI
- 4 The earlier Stuart era
- 5 The Civil War and Commonwealth era
- Chronological outline of historical events and texts in Britain, 1528–1674, with list of selected manuscripts
- Select bibliography (primary and secondary sources)
- Index
- References
3 - Print, literary culture and the book trade
from 1 - Modes and means of literary production, circulation and reception
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
By
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Modes and means of literary production, circulation and reception
- 1 Literacy, society and education
- 2 Manuscript transmission and circulation
- 3 Print, literary culture and the book trade
- 4 Literary patronage
- 5 Languages of early modern literature in Britain
- 6 Habits of reading and early modern literary culture
- 2 The Tudor era from the Reformation to Elizabeth I
- 3 The era of Elizabeth and James VI
- 4 The earlier Stuart era
- 5 The Civil War and Commonwealth era
- Chronological outline of historical events and texts in Britain, 1528–1674, with list of selected manuscripts
- Select bibliography (primary and secondary sources)
- Index
- References
Summary
The advent of printing in England
In Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, the rebel Jack Cade orders Lord Saye to be beheaded on the anachronistic grounds that he had ‘caused printing to be used’ and had ‘built a paper mill’ (4.7.30–3). William Caxton would not in fact set up the first printing press in England until 1476, some twenty-six years after the encounter the play represents, and still another twenty years would pass before John Tate would establish the first paper mill on English soil. Yet if Cade is an unreliable historian as he seeks a justification for his reflexive opposition to authority and order, he correctly intuits that print would have a profound effect upon the social life of England.
Certainly it could be claimed that print was one of those inventions that, in Bacon’s famous phrase, ‘changed the fate and the state of things in all the world’, although it did not work quite as bluntly as Jack Cade feared to secure aristocratic power and privilege. Its effects were unpredictable and slow to be felt at first, and few in the first decades of printing could have sensed its eventual impact. Initially it was little more than an improved means of textual reproduction, a technique of ‘artificial writing’ that served as a faster, cheaper way of producing multiple copies of the texts that had previously circulated in manuscript. Indeed early printed books tried very hard to reproduce the form and feel of manuscripts (typefaces, for example, mimicking the popular forms of script), though, of course, their ability to do so did not bring the age of manuscript production to an end.
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- The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature , pp. 81 - 116Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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