Meanings in Motion

This is a book about what books mean, and how these meanings change. It looks anew at Celestina by Fernando de Rojas, a canonical work of Spanish literature and one of the earliest ‘best-sellers’, with the aim of shedding light on its early modern reception. Thanks to the investigations of many eminent scholars we have a wealth of data on Celestina's print history that demonstrates its significant popularity and influence. Important as such facts are, however, they are not the whole story of Celestina's success. While we have clear evidence of its popularity, we have not adequately answered the question of precisely why it continued to hold such appeal for early modern audiences. Bibliographic approaches are of course fundamentally important. When taken as the sole index, however, empirical data provides a relatively limited perspective on the social dynamics of literary reception. Above and beyond the challenges faced by researchers of pre-modern literature (for example, a relative paucity of data and lack of systematic recording or preservation of manuscripts and printed editions, inventories of sales and ownership, and readers’ responses etc.), a comprehensive understanding of reception and the reasons for a particular work's success necessitates a contextualised and conceptualised approach.

Translation, printing, and reading are not abstract or ahistorical acts; rather they are determined by the socio-historical and ideological contexts in which texts are appropriated and engaged with. Such is the argument made by scholars of the history of the book, including Robert Darnton (1982), Roger Chartier (1989, 1994), and D. F. McKenzie (1999). In Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, McKenzie suggests that:

For this reason, the present study goes beyond data-driven interpretations of Celestina's textual transmission and the filiations between editions and translations. It is not concerned with the sources used by Rojas, or indeed authorial intention; nor does it trace the work's influence on later literature or analyse differences between Celestina and the continuations and adaptations it inspired.

IT must have been quite extraordinary to live in England during that heady and dangerous decade of the 1530s. The English Reformation – a retrospective and over-neat label – was set in motion by a strange chain of events involving great men like Erasmus and Luther, and, closer to home, Henry VIII with his interleaving dynastic, personal and religious worries. The sense of unpredictability must have been particularly strong in London where close proximity to court, Church and parliament would have sent rumours and opinions flying around the city. The priors of the five London friaries must have seen the end coming in the 1530s, but exactly when they realised it was inevitable is harder to say.

The 1530s: a decade of uncertainty

Four of the London priors were closely allied with Thomas Cromwell and the rapidly evolving Crown policy (the exception seems to have been the Carmelite prior, John Gybbes). George Brown of Austin Friars had been taking precautions and making changes for a few years, even before 1534 when the king's commissioners (led by the prior of the London Dominicans, John Hilsey) were sent to investigate England's mendicant houses. In March 1531 Brown had leased a mansion and garden within the friary precinct to Thomas Paulet, brother of the courtier William Paulet. In May the following year, Brown enhanced the friary's ties to its influential tenant Thomas Cromwell (by then Henry's principal secretary) by granting him a ninety-nine-year lease on a block of houses on the edge of the precinct so that he could redevelop it as a grand urban mansion. Brown later welcomed two wellconnected protégés of Cromwell as tenants, Richard Rich and Richard Morrison (in 1536 and 1538 respectively). Of course, as an ally of Cromwell, Brown may have been seeking to secure his own position rather than that of his priory. The Dominican prior, John Hilsey, began renting out what he saw as under-used parts of his cloisters to courtiers in the early 1530s. Like the prior of Austin Friars, Hilsey was almost certainly acting to safeguard his own future. The Grey Friars guardian, Thomas Chapman, was another supporter of Cromwell, although he does not seem to have taken the same steps to bring in influential tenants.

CONSIDERABLE amounts of building material have been recovered from archaeological excavations on sites within Black Friars, White Friars and Austin Friars. A fair quantity was also recovered from Crossed Friars, although much was roofing tile. There is relatively little building material from Grey Friars, a reflection of the fact that so much of the archaeological evidence of the western part of the friary was destroyed in the early twentieth century (during the construction of the new General Post Office building). This chapter concentrates on the floor tiles from the friaries; other building materials such as roof tiles are dealt with in more summary form. As is the case for most London archaeological sites, these floor tiles were found as building rubble, not as in situ floors. However, Londoners have usually avoided moving their unwanted earth and rubble too far and so the area where a particular tile or group of tiles was found may give a good indication of their likely original setting.

The types of floor tile are therefore tabulated by friary, archaeological site and area of friary in Table 15. The majority of these decorated floor tiles (except for unrecognisable fragments) are illustrated in a series of friary-by-friary figures (Figure 80 to Figure 84). Medieval floor tiles are usually categorised by their place of manufacture (for example, Chertsey), although the name sometimes refers to the location of their first discovery (for example, Westminster). The types of tile found in the London friaries are listed in Table 16. The tile designs are referred to by typological codes (for example, ‘Westminster’ tile W3 on Figure 80). These codes relate to classification systems developed for each tile type. The bibliographic references for these codes are given in Table 16. Some tile designs found at the friaries have never before been published; these are labelled T1, T2 (etc) on Figure 80 to Figure 84. The numerical fabric codes for the ceramic building material discussed in this chapter (for example, Low Countries tile fabric 2320; below, ‘Black Friars’) refer to a fabric reference collection held by Museum of London Archaeology, which can be consulted on request. Building stone types are discussed in this chapter; architectural fragments are discussed in Chapter 12: Architecture and Architectural Fragments of the London Friaries.

1970: ‘Erb Mandrake Sing a Rude Song Lie Down, I Think I Love You Isabel's a Jezebel

The new year marked a real shift in British musical flops, slightly more encouraging to anyone who wanted to see them progress than to those who had money invested in them. Along the way there was a lot of rather dreadful rudeness that would have seemed unthinkable to creators of musical theatre even five years before.

The 1960s had seen a few shows vaguely connected to Trade Unionism: The Match Girls and its successor Bryant and May Strike a Light!, and the 1967 Moral Re-Armament Annie, a surprise long-runner at the Westminster Theatre. ‘Erb (Strand Theatre, 7 April 1970; 38) was another attempt to interest audiences in social issues. Ronald Harwood, who would turn J. B. Priestley's The Good Companions into a rather dull musical four years later, acquired the rights to William Pett Ridge's 1903 novel. Harwood suggested that Trevor Peacock should write its music, book and lyrics. He seemed the perfect choice. Although Peacock had written the lyrics for Passion Flower Hotel, he couldn't read or write music; it was up to arranger Gareth Davies to turn Peacock's tunes into a score for the show's debut at Manchester University Theatre in 1969.

Ridge's ‘Erb, properly Herbert Barnes, is a richly Dickensian character, Bermondsey-born. Cockney socialist hero, Labour Party enthusiast, park orator and humanist, he is a parcel carman on the railway, earning 23 shillings and 6d a week, and reading John Stuart Mill for light relief. Ridge, a prolific novelist in the line of Dickens, was himself a humanitarian, having established the Hoxton Babies Home in 1907. Like ‘Erb, Ridge's ideal was to see the world ‘better and brighter’, in line with the Bryant and May girls, Pickwick and Annie Jaeger. So it was that ‘Erb created the first trade union for van drivers.

The day on which we were supposed to record our conversation about Violeta, Nicanor welcomed me dressed in a long poncho. We went up to the second floor of his library. He asked me if I had any Araucanian music. He said he was very interested in it. Then he started to imitate the hollow sound of the trutruca and to dance the final part of an Araucanian song, turning and tapping the rhythm with his feet. He stretched his arms, lifting his poncho up, which gave the dancer the look of a ritual bird. Then he talked to me about the idea of a musical that should be like a ‘collage, a dissemination’, made only from the ends of songs, beginning with the national anthem. ‘Take the national anthem, for example, and make it end like a rumba, or a conga, or a waltz, or an opera. And they're all farewells, farewells, farewells. Never-ending.’ Immediately he took the idea of mixing the ends of songs in another direction. He remembered a song from Chiloé, a sirilla and he sang part of it, in a very good voice. ‘Look what happens now,’ he said. He hummed the fragment of the sirilla, but entwining it at the end with the fragment of the Araucarian song, always tapping the rhythm with his feet. The result was surprising: the two fragments seemed to have forgotten their differences, blending together and giving birth to an entirely new musical product. ‘Look how they move from one to the other, how naturally that happened! How they become deeper as they pass from the slightly picturesque Spanish feel to the earthy Araucanian feel.’ He ended saying: ‘Spain and America: integration’.

This introduction, obviously, was not far from the theme of our conversation. Nicanor was without doubt creating the atmosphere of an incantation. The name of Violeta had not yet been mentioned, but neither was it necessary: her memory had already been invoked.

THROUGHOUT THE BOOK, I have sought to demonstrate the strengths of a narrow definition of montage built solely on perceptual, stylistic, and narratological criteria. I have posited only one subset of a broadly conceived hyperstimulation—the perceptual experience of disruption—as the essential intermedial trait of montage, and then proceeded to tease out its specificities in different media. I have found that the stylistic distinctiveness defines ready-mades and, by extension, montage in pictorial art and literature alike. In the case of film, I have articulated both visual and sound montage in terms of spatiotemporal dislocation diverging from editing norms. In other words, by bracketing off the question of the meaning of the work I have steered clear from interpretative commitments and yet have succeeded in identifying and explaining the device's variations across different art forms.

Using Berlin Alexanderplatz and its adaptations as case studies, I have also endeavored to shine new light on these works as well as to illuminate their interrelationships. I argued, for instance, that film montages in both Jutzi's and Fassbinder's film version owed little to the corresponding passages in the novel. I also found that montage played a key role in simulating narratological conditions of one medium in another. Whereas in Döblin literary montage eliminated the controlling fictional narrator and by doing so emulated the narratological properties typical of fiction film, Fassbinder achieved the presence of narratorial control that is standard in literary fiction through voice-over montage. As such, Berlin Alexanderplatz and its adaptations have not served simply as a testing ground for the narrow definition of montage, but rather became a privileged site that allowed me to relate montage to even larger intermedial stakes, including the relationship of adaptations to its source and the status of narrative voice in different media. In fact these works have not only dictated what the book is about but have even defined its mode of inquiry.

Most important, it was the novel and its pivotal place in the nascent discourse on montage of the late 1920s that gave rise both to the narrow definition of montage and the method behind this book—formal analysis guided by the analysis of contemporary reviews. Through their engagement with the novel, contemporary reviewers drew parallels between literature, film, and pictorial art to articulate a precise definition of montage that had all of the advantages of intermediality without any of its drawbacks.

WHAT EXACTLY ARE we doing when we set out on a translation? Well, it depends; the first thing to establish is for what purpose and readership we are doing it. Since the early nineteenth century when there was a reinforced emphasis on the theory of translation in works such as Friedrich Schleiermacher's ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’ it has been essential for translators to recognise precisely what kind of version they were aiming at – most immediately whether the objective was correspondence to the original in a new language (what degree of ‘equivalence’ we are aiming at, in Lawrence Venuti's terms), or to produce a new work which was prompted by the original. Not that such considerations were new in the nineteenth century: in the Alfredian Preface to the Anglo-Saxon translation of Gregory's Cura Pastoralis the translator will proceed ‘hwilum word be worde, hwilum andgit of andgiete’ (‘sometimes word for word; sometimes sense for sense’). And of course there are other contexts too: in her very enlightening essay on Borges here, M. J. Toswell refers to Umberto Eco's summary idea of ‘translation as a negotiation involving original text, publisher, economic matters, the target text, various kinds of approaches to the translation and reader responses’.

Not all of these factors are the primary concern for the context here. In her essay on translations of Old English poetry into Modern English and Russian, Inna Matyushina reminds us of a crucial distinction: ‘Translation has traditionally been divided into two types: that on a spatial axis, from one language to another, and that on a chronological axis, within one language of different periods.’ The chronological axis of course is fundamental for translations of Old English to modern – the sole concern of four of the twelve essays here – as it is also for the two essays concerned with translations of early Irish texts into modern languages: Irish in the case of Tadhg Ó Siocháin and English by Lahney Preston Matto. A substantial part of what verse translators do is the recasting of earlier texts in their own language.

The eald languages in the twelve essays here are Old English, Old Norse, and Middle Irish. The ‘new’ languages are Modern English, Modern Irish, Spanish, Scots and Russian, so this is not only a matter of chronological translation.

PERFORMING OR LISTENING to a Beethoven cello sonata today is of course markedly different from what Beethoven or his contemporaries experienced. Beyond questions of tuning (Beethoven's ‘A’ was lower than modern A-440 concert pitch), of how to articulate a phrase, or of how loud to render a forte, for example, other factors, such as concert venues and their acoustics, and of course the cellos themselves affected Beethoven's conception of his sonatas. And surely among the most striking differences were in the pianos Beethoven used to play and compose, instruments that bore little resemblance to their modern counterparts.

Despite a history dating to the start of the eighteenth century, the fortepiano continued to develop throughout Beethoven's lifetime. Like cello and bow makers, keyboard makers worked in tandem with the players, searching for ways to improve the sound, response and power of their instruments, and not surprisingly Beethoven's personal preferences were of great interest to some of the most influential builders of the day. On more than one occasion, they happily placed their instruments at Beethoven's disposal, hoping to provide the discriminating virtuoso with an ‘ideal’ instrument. Though we have been now long familiar with the power and coloristic gradations of the modern concert grand, Beethoven's instruments possessed an intimacy and immediacy largely lost to us today (save perhaps on modern reproductions of fortepianos), and offered distinct advantages within the ensemble setting, qualities that the composer fully exploited.

Beethoven's keyboard preferences were evident early on. When he traveled with the Bonn court orchestra to Mergentheim in 1791, he refused to perform in public for lack of an instrument from the workshop of Johann Andreas Stein, whose keyboards he had already become accustomed to playing in Bonn. Once in Vienna, Beethoven wasted little time in searching out a suitable fortepiano, though there is no record of what he played until 1797, several months after his return to Vienna following the Berlin sojourn that produced his first two cello sonatas. In the latter half of that year Beethoven wrote two letters to Johann Andreas Streicher, whose family had moved its piano business from Stuttgart to Vienna in 1795.

The success and pan-European circulation of sixteenth-century Castilian romances of chivalry, the libros de caballerías, were greatly fostered by the printing press and the imprint format. However, these material factors do not explain the intrinsic traits of the genre, as they neglect its literary aspects. Let us not forget that, whilst the format and new means of reproduction made chivalric romances more readily available, ultimately the genre's popularity derives from its stories which captivated audiences and readerships. Rewriting, the making of sequels, and the development of cycles are essential qualities of a genre that fulfilled the audience's and printers’ demands for new romances. These traits also had an important function in the structure, narrative, and poetics of the genre. This book has shown that in order to study these features it is necessary to understand the history of the genre and its literary aspects, whilst providing a more nuanced perspective of the transition between manuscript culture and the era of the print.

The generic configuration, narrative traits, and intertextual practices of the libros de caballerías owe much to its original model: medieval chivalric romance. The genre originated in the translations of Latin historiographical works into French in the twelfth century. Therefore, from its inception the genre resulted from an intertextual practice, translation. The first romances were crafted following the rhetorical concept of imitatio, another intertextual activity that was used as a model for medieval translation. Imitatio, as a procedure to handle a hypotext, encouraged changes to a hypotext in order to adapt it to a new reception context. This is the origin of the constant practice of rewriting which produced and modified countless chivalric romances from the twelfth century onward. The existence of a hypotext legitimised the hypertext in the first romances, those of Antiquity, since imitatio was based on the existing Latin accounts and their auctoritates. Later romances obtained their validity by mimicking the system of auctoritas of the Latin hypotext in order to create a fiction of authority and authorship. Therefore, romance embraced its textual origins and, thus, obtained historical validity for itself, regardless of the degree of transformation of the original.