The Immaterial Book: Reading and Romance in Early Modern England by Sarah Wall-Randell (review)

Sarah Wall-Randell’s Immaterial Book should be of interest for Shakespeare scholars for a variety of reasons. It provides a refreshing intervention in book history and offers new readings of perplexing scenes involving books in Cymbeline and The Tempest. Including episodes from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Mary Wroth’s Urania, The Immaterial Book models a cross-genre approach that reflects the intellectual context through which early modern readers would have experienced Shakespeare’s plays more closely than the more traditional Shakespeare-only approach. It is an important book, not only for those interested in romance (Shakespearean and otherwise) but also for those who wish to pursue more deeply the meanings possible to the early modern book and its potential relationships to the evolving early modern self.

The concept of the immaterial book requires some defining. It is not precisely true that the books considered in this monograph are “imaginary” (viii) or lack any material presence. Spenser depicts his Arthur as reading “Briton moniments,” which looks like a book; the imprisoned Cymbeline wakes to find a tablet deposited by Jupiter; Wroth’s Urania and Veralinda together open a magical book describing their lives up to that point. On the other hand, Britomart’s book is really a mirror; Don Quixote overhears his book narrated in a tavern; Prospero’s book is absent from stage directions, although some productions give it presence onstage. These highly disparate episodes are linked by a form of reading that eschews rational understanding to enter a state of “transforming wonder” (134) in the encounter of readers with themselves. Perhaps counterintuitively, these immaterial books, monumental and even supernatural, do not yield clear insights or increased understanding. Instead, they dematerialize “the wholeness and heft” of the material book through their “abrupt breaks, deferrals of understanding, and unexpected deflations of meaning” (2). These books all present puzzles that the concept of the immaterial book helps us to recognize and appreciate as significant events reflecting an experience of reading accessible to early moderns.

There is something pleasantly perverse as well as timely in Wall-Randell’s study of the immaterial book, given the significant advances in our knowledge of the book as material object. Drawing from marginal notations, paratexts, and commonplacing, scholars such as William Sherman, Anthony Grafton, Lisa Jardine, Heidi Brayman Hackel, and others have convincingly conveyed a model of early modern readers as pragmatic and utilitarian. Early moderns read books—or rather, they used books—for practical purposes. They mined phrases to advance their own rhetoric; they read devotional works (which ranked high in the numbers of early modern bestsellers) to improve their souls; they read how-to books all the better to cook, hunt, and manage horses. With the advent of the printing press, books became ordinary objects rather than the rare treasures they once were. Even for nonreaders, books were physically present: in the church, in homes, in bookstores passed on the street. And it has been claimed that this everyday familiarity demystified the book. The Immaterial Book supplements this account with the claim that the earlier wonder attached to books coexisted with these more down-to-earth modes of reading. Of course, one might argue that the ostensibly splendid uselessness of romance does not invite utilitarian reading. But Wall-Randell’s close readings convince me that the readings portrayed in The Immaterial Book tap into something deeper and more widespread than simply a response to romance.

In Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Wall-Randell’s reading makes some sense of Prince Arthur’s odd reaction when his history of Briton moniments suddenly breaks off mid-sentence just as the narrative is getting to Arthur’s own role (although he does not yet recognize that he has a role to play). Arthur’s first irritation is succeeded by “‘secret pleasure’” and “‘wonder’” (24) strikingly at odds with the brutal carnage and...