The Peaceable and Prosperous Regiment of blessed Queene Elisabeth: A Facsimile from Holinshed's Chronicles (1587) (review)

Holinshed's Chronicles are principally famous for having provided the source material for a good deal of Shakespeare, or, in Annabel Patterson's 1994 treatment of them, as a site of protoliberal English historiography before the hostile takeover by courtly humanist historians in the early seventeenth century. Sorting out its publishing history has been a problem of long standing.

The usefulness of this expensive facsimile lies both in the additional information it provides about the second edition of Chronicles and in what it tells us about textual preparation and the printing process generally. Some longstanding assumptions about the stability of Renaissance texts (especially large and expensive texts that required a substantial commitment of capital and labor) may need to be seriously rethought — along with the order that, for the better part of the last century, the Short-Title Catalogue has bestowed upon Renaissance editions, variants, and reprints. That chunks of the second edition of Holinshed were censored by Elizabethan authority and the "castrated sheets" replaced is well-known. Cyndia Susan Clegg, a leading authority on Elizabethan and early Stuart censorship, here convincingly reconstructs the process based on readings of the cancels and their likely relationship with other signatures of text. In her historical introduction to the work, Clegg outlines the context of its publication and revision, and identifies a particularly useful specimen, the "Melton Holinshed" (a copy now held in the Huntington Library) that consists largely of proof sheets. Clegg then articulates the successive stages of censorship that occurred as several different sets of eyes were satisfied. Various sections, including those dealing with the Earl of Leicester and with the history of the archbishops of Canterbury, were corrected, as well as chunks pertaining to hot topics such as the trial of Mary Queen of Scots.

The final result of all the revision is apparent in the Melton copy, and the process illustrates that, far from representing a conflict between the might of a surveillance state and a submerged oppositional authorship, or (at the opposite extreme) a Tilyardian piece of Tudor propaganda, the Chronicles were in many ways a collaboration between authors and authorities to produce a work that was acceptable to readers and which captured an image of "Englishness" that could be read abroad as well as at home. "With its evidence of the procedures and motives of censorship and revision," Clegg notes, this section of the Chronicles "suggests that in the 1580s the often divergent views held by many English citizens, the queen, and her Privy Councilors converged in a vision of England as a great Protestant nation" (15).

Randall McLeod's elaborate commentary on the production of the text repays close reading. Through a painstaking analysis of the text on a line-by-line and frequently letter-by-letter basis McLeod illustrates the complex procedures employed to print a mammoth work such as this. The difficulties in identifying a stable text for Holinshed are familiar and captured in the STC, though McLeod believes the STC identification of cancels (and its conflation of these with censored text) to be seriously flawed. Two points emerge: first, that there were plenty of reasons for cancels to be generated that had little to do with censorship and much to do with the economics and conventional practices of publishing; secondly, that there is in fact no "final" text of the Chronicles (in the sense of a printed version that most accurately captures what the authors meant to say), simply because there are probably no two copies extant of this — or any large sixteenth-century book — that contain absolutely identical texts. A basic error lies in assuming that the eventual printed sheets mainly emerged after the proofreaders had done their work. But quite aside from the fact that several presses might be involved simultaneously with the production of a big book such as...