Caxton's Worthies Series: The Production of Literary Culture

The common wisdom on William Caxton holds him to be intellectually derivative of English and Burgundian literary culture. Indeed, most scholars argue that Caxton simply reproduces inherited literary traditions for an interested bourgeois audience. ¹ Yet Caxton remains central to our understanding of the fifteenth century precisely because its literary culture is notoriously difficult to define; even the extent to which the non-noble community imagined itself with the coherency implied by the term “bourgeois” remains unclear. ² Caxton is useful to us because he gives shape to an English literary culture otherwise vaguely understood and, I suggest, he provided a similar service to his original readers. In reproducing a selection of texts, Caxton articulates canon, authority, and audience as cogent and interrelated concerns, and thereby produces a comprehensive intellectual framework for the physical products rolling off his presses. Caxton is a major figure in late fifteenth-century culture: his interest in previous traditions is part of his production process, and should be viewed as a sign not of intellectual simplicity, but of ideological complexity. ³

To see this complexity at work, we need to understand Caxton’s discussion of print production in much larger terms than we have previously. That Caxton frequently discusses the mechanics of printing in his writing is widely recognized; that he also uses his prologues and epilogues to map a series of bibliographical, thematic, and political connections between his texts is less so. In his 1477 prologue to the History of Jason, Caxton refers his readers to his earlier Recuyell of the Histories of Troy on the grounds that both texts stem from the Burgundian court; in his Cordiale (1479) he emphasizes that this text concludes his printing of Anthony Woodville’s translations; he links his Golden Legend (1484) and Polychronicon (1482) as “noble historyes”; and he groups his Godeffroy of Boloyne (1481), Le Morte Darthur (1485) and Charles the Grete (1485) around the conceit of the Nine Worthies. Illustrating a critical program capable of presenting various texts as unified around common themes, these series are essential to our reading of Caxton’s production techniques, and I offer the last, the Worthies Series, as a test case demonstrating how he produces literary culture. ⁴ As a structural device, the Nine Worthies present the three texts as a unit to Caxton’s readers. In this context, the individual texts function less as reproductions of manuscript culture repackaged in print for a pre-existing reading public than as symbolic structures that work to consolidate the disparate literate groups within English polity. This process of consolidation is, in fact, thematized within the texts, and Caxton’s arrangement of the texts in sequence presents a coherent representation of the subject’s individual and collective body. Thus, I argue, Caxton’s method of transforming manuscript to print merges the material reproduction of his sources with the ideological production of fifteenth-century culture. That the three competing printing houses in England—the St. Alban’s Schoolmaster printer, William Machlinia, and Theodore Rood—went out of business in 1486, the year after the Worthies Series, suggests Caxton’s strategy was successful. ⁵

I. The Structure of Spontaneity

The Worthies Series begins with Caxton’s review of the Nine Worthies in his 1481 prologue to Godeffroy, and ends with his list of the three editions in his December 1485 prologue to Charles. Printed in July 1485, Caxton’s prologue to Le Morte Darthur both discusses the Nine Worthies and mentions Godeffroy. As much as this prologue elaborates the series overall, then, Caxton’s anecdote of “many noble and dyuers gentylmen” disrupts it by presenting his readers’ demand for an Arthurian text as a direct critique of his printing agenda:

The sayd noble ientylmen instantly requyred me t’emprynte th’ystorye of the sayd noble kyng and conquerour Kyng Arthur and of his knyghtes, wyth th’ystorye of the Sayntgreal, and of the deth and endyng of the sayd Arthur, affermyng that I ought rather t’enprynte his actes and noble feates than of Godefroye of Boloyne or ony of the other eyght. ⁶

The “noble ientylmen[’s]” critique is...