Solitude and Speechlessness: Renaissance Writing and Reading in Isolation by Andrew Mattison (review)

Andrew Mattison's work of literary criticism takes as its leitmotif the concept of isolation—of author, of reader, and of text. It is a response to the concentration on collaboration and community that has dominated literary studies in recent decades. Applying this focus to a range of poetic sources in English dating from the sixteenth and (predominantly) the seventeenth centuries, Mattison interrogates the social and literary forces that act upon authors, readers, and indeed on texts themselves as material and immaterial forms. One of the most interesting aspects of this fruitful approach is its consideration of readers across time, as Mattison discusses the reception of early modern texts during the lifetimes of their authors and after them, both in the near future of the subsequent century and in our own distant present. His interest in interrogating his own role as a reader of past texts was, he writes, the starting point for the study: a specific interest in a 1902 letter by Hugo van Hofmannsthal addressed to Francis Bacon drew attention to the parallel 'between the condition of Renaissance writers addressing unknown and unpredictable readers, and that of modern readers confronting their necessarily partial knowledge of old texts' (p. 171). Mattison's inclusion of the role played in the life of a text by his own work as a scholar is indicative of the sensitive and reflective tone of the book.

Key themes in the book's six chapters are ambition, obscurity, melancholy, speechlessness, and solitude, which are placed into dialogue with each other through the poems analysed. New resonances within these experiences—and their literary deployment—are brought to light. Concepts that may have a negative association are problematized to draw out more complex uses by English authors in these centuries. For example, Mattison returns to the etymology of 'ambition'—to go from door to door, to wander—to argue that his poets consciously used this sense of the word to combat an inherited discomfort with the naked pursuit of personal fame (p. 21). In this way, ambition could be a positive virtue for the text itself, leaving the author to respectable poetic solitude: sent out by its author into the world as an orphan, the ambitious poem seeks connection with readers.

Similarly, Mattison evokes the concept of obscurity as both a liberating force for an author, allowing the privacy required for creative invention, and a unifying experience for the readers who overcome it. Obscurity builds connection and community by creating an 'in crowd' who understand the message. Authorial anonymity or pseudonymity allows an orphan text to fulfil its ambitious purpose and even to identity the author through clues embedded for the intended reader(s) alone. Solitude provides the conditions for writing and for reading, so that withdrawal from society engenders its own form of conversation. This paradoxical approach makes for dense but very satisfying reading, exploring the interplay between Mattison's subject and his own authorial practice.

As a historian of book culture, I was particularly interested in the moments when Mattison addresses the question of materiality. Analysing Samuel Daniel's concern with his posthumous reception, Mattison notes another paradox, this time between manuscript and print: print is more widely disseminated but for this reason allows for a kind of privacy—a detachment from original context—that manuscript cannot (p. 44). The public nature of printing can allow a form of authorial withdrawal and silence even while it promotes the text's ambitious engagement with readers. This consideration of the materiality of textual reception is short-lived, however, as in a later section Mattison opines that text tells a fundamentally different 'history of the world' to that told by material culture, seemingly eliding the material nature of text (p. 172). While this book is clearly intended primarily for literary scholars and not book historians, it has much to offer both, and further consideration of the material...