Drawing in a Theatre: Peacham, de Witt, and the Table-Book

In 1994, Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, J. Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe published an essay in Shakespeare Quarterly on “Hamlet’s Tables”, illuminating a practice and a technology that appear to have been ubiquitous in early modern England but that had previously eluded scholars. The essay speaks of the many references in early modern literature to “tables”, “writing-tables”, and “table-books”, small notebooks with waxed pages that enabled one to take notes or sketch pictures with a metal-point stylus. Such drawings were erasable: once the notetaker copied his notes onto ordinary paper – perhaps organizing them for insertion in a commonplace book – he could remove the original notes with a wet fingertip or sponge and reuse the tables. The invention spoke to the ingenuity of the period, which clearly needed a convenient, portable writing technology. When one traveled, for instance, the conventional tools of writing – paper, pen, ink, and an inkhorn – could not easily be managed, nor did one always have at his disposal a table and stool. Table-books, sized to fit in one’s pocket and contained within stiff boards, enabled the owner to write without paper, pen, and ink, with the surface of its covers for support.

The Stallybrass et al. essay is remarkable in its thoroughness. It covers the materiality of table-books and their accompanying styluses; information on the kinds of paper and writing implements in use at the time; instructions on cleaning waxed pages; a history of marketing, purchasing, and using writing-tables; a discussion of archival holdings of table-books, including one at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC; comments on the relationship of such temporary records to memory and the “tabula rasa” of the human brain; and an analysis of the role memory plays in Hamlet. I do not presume to propose amendments to the authors’ excellent work. But now that the academic community understands Hamlet’s call for his tables – ”My Tables, my Tables; meet it is I set it downe” (1.5.108) – I would like to add a few thoughts to our still-developing knowledge of two iconic drawings that are central to our understanding of early modern theatre: the Peacham and the Swan.

A search of the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership database (EEBO-TCP) for “table-books” and “writing-tables” yields nearly 500 hits,¹ among the earliest from 1530.² In Here begynneth a newe tracte or treatyse moost profytable for all husbande men, John Fitzherbert advises a young gentleman to inspect his pastures and fields to see what is amiss or would be amended: “And as soone as he hath seeth any such defautes / than let hym take oute his tables, and wryte the defautes. . . . And whan it is amended, than let hym put it out of his tables. For this used I to doo. x. or. xii. yeres and more” (58v).³ Sir Philip Sidney, according to John Aubrey, “was often wont, as he was hunting on our pleasant plains, to take his table-book out of his pocket, and write down his notions . . . as he was writing his Arcadia” (xv; quoted in Stallybrass et al. 405). In the next century, in 1604, John Downame, in The Christian Warfare, observes: “men purposing to write a sermon, doe make cleane their writing tables, by blotting out that which was written in them before, for otherwise there would be such a mixture & confusion, that nothing would be legible” (365). And in 1607, Edward Topsell, in The Historie of Foure-Footed Beasts, speaks of “writing tables, whereon they write with a pensil of iron or Brasse, and afterward deface and race it out againe with a spunge or linnen cloath” (628). In the latter half of the seventeenth century, in 1653, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, in Philosophicall Fancies, compares the motions of the spirits to a table-book: “Like as a Point, that writes upon a Table-book, which when the Lettter that was writ thereon, is rub’d out, the Table is as plain, as if there was never any Letter thereon; But though...