Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England by Stephen B. Dobranski (review)

REVIEWS 246 reader. Hans Robert Jaus claims that there is no such thing as an innocent reader. Dobranski, in his work, takes this a step further and suggests that, in early modern authority, there is no such thing as innocence in either reading or writing— that the two, in fact, are each complicit in advancing the authority of the other. In this thoughtfully and sometimes elegantly written book, Dobranski shows compellingly how authors and publishers both manipulated and encouraged readers, through blank moments in the text, to lose their innocence and thereby enlarge the author’s authority. PETER CARLSON, School of Religion, Claremont Graduate University Stephen B. Dobranski, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005) xiii + 226 pp., ill. In the opening pages of Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England, Stephen Dobranski clearly and explicitly lays out his project of analyzing omitted material from printed books in the seventeenth century. Dobranski argues that such omissions played an integral role in determining meaning and authorial authority in these printed materials; as he tells us, “The overarching premise is that authors, like all speakers, can convey ideas by saying almost nothing; the best writers can create moments of audible silence” (2). The opening pages of Dobranski’s book are indicative of the entire book, as he frequently and appropriately leaves road signs throughout his prose that alert readers to where he is, has been, and plans to go. Before Dobranski begins his series of case studies in omissions found in seventeenth-century printed works, he seeks to establish the nature of reading practices in the early modern period as the relate to reading practices developed during the Middle Ages. Dobranski begins his argument with an analysis of reading practices as they relate to prefaces added to printed books in sixteenthand seventeenth-century England. He traces “the reader’s changing function prior to the early modern period” and then examines “contemporary conventions and circumstances that encouraged active reading” (22). The analyses that follow delve into the nature of reading in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period, focusing on texts by Augustine and Luther. Dobranski’s first seventeenth-century case study involves a poem included in the 1655 edition of Philip Sidney’s Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia, a poem previously mistakenly attributed to Sidney entitled “A Remedie for Love.” Dobranski argues that the lines omitted from this poem allow him to “examine the evidence of readerly activity preserved in … Arcadian response poems” (63). Sidney’s Arcadia appeared as an incomplete epic romance, and unfortunately Dobranski sees an analysis of attempts to finish the romance as outside the scope of his current argument; readers may have liked to see Dobranski’s treatment of this topic in his monograph. Dobranski does survey some of the various responses that Sidney’s Arcadia inspired, and links the incompletely printed “Remedie for Love” to the tradition of responding to the romance that continued throughout the seventeenth century. Dobranski argues, “Through the character of Mopsa, the poet of “Remedie” uses the lie of an omission specifically to adapt Sidney’s romance to the political culture of seventeenth-century England” (66). “Remedie for Love,” according to Dobran- REVIEWS 247 ski, ultimately constitutes a Royalist poem. Dobranski next examines what he calls an authorial omission in the 1616 printed Folio Workes of Ben Jonson. Dobranski examines the omission found in the poem “Epistle to Elizabeth Countesse or Rutland,” an omission of the poem’s final eight lines. Especially illuminating is Dobranski’s reading of the poem’s use of words associated with birth and child bearing and his assertion that these words and the implied impotence of omitting the final eight lines speaks to Jonson’s anxiety over having not produced a male heir. Dobranski writes, “By introducing the themes of error, omission, and impotence, Jonson suggests his limitations as a poet but also, paradoxically, asserts his authority, defending an author’s primacy within the burgeoning business of printed reproduction” (101). Unlike Jonson’s 1616 Workes, the printed edition of John Donne’s works does not demonstrate the close relationship with the poetry’s author. Dobranski convincingly argues that the printer and...