In recent years what has come to be known as “the history of the book” has contributed some of the most exciting new perspectives on the history of early modern texts, culture, and politics. Stephen Dobranski's monograph, though somewhat inappropriately titled, adds to the field an important dimension: the absences and omissions in Renaissance literature.
As Dobranski reminds us, many seventeenth century books were, or contained, unfinished texts, and in some cases they drew attention to their unfinished state. It is Dobranski's argument that these omissions, whether intended by authors or included by printers, constituted a means by which authors and publishers communicated with readers and even negotiated the relationship between authors and readers by inviting the latter into the processes of authorship and publication. Where, that is, some recent work posits a contest for authority between authors and readers, Dobranski suggests a reciprocal relationship that empowered both.
The argument is advanced by five case studies: of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, Jonson's 1616 folio Workes, John Donne's 1633 Poems, Robert Herrick's Hesperides (1648), and John Milton's Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes (1671). Arcadia was not only famously unfinished, it became the basis in the seventeenth century for a variety of “completions,” sequels, supplements, and revisions that appropriated Sydney's name and reputation for a variety of purposes and causes. As Dobranski shows, where in some readings and renditions Arcadia became a republican text, in Royalist hands, with the addition of a poem, “A Remedie for Love,” it became a paean to kingship. In the case of Jonson's Works, identifying lines missing from the epistle to the countess of Rutland, Dobranski argues both that sensitivity to a patron's failure to produce an heir required omission and that, in removing lines, Jonson underscored his authorial control and the authority of his hand, even in a printed text. Unlike Jonson, Donne, dead by 1633, had no control over the publication of his Poems. But, the argument runs, in including poems with missing lines and imperfections, the publisher emphasizes Donne's importance as an author, as well as erasing what may have been offensive passages. In the case of Herrick, though there is no evidence that the poet exercised control over the publication of his work, his own identification of omissions seems to suggest an address not only to authorial but political authority. In closing verses with the phrase “caetera desunt,” Herrick, Dobranski suggests, lamented not only text but values and institutions lost and a world from which good things had been gone missing. Omission here was related to a Royalist politics of nostalgia. On the other side of the political line, Milton's omissions from Paradise Regain’d and Samson, especially when advertised by a ten-line Omissa containing a violent scene of Samson's destruction, points to, and calls for, a more activist politics than Milton is credited with in 1671. Textual absences and omissions, that is, open insights into authorship and authority, into ideology and politics.
Dobranski's book makes a valuable addition to recent studies. Though the opening survey chapters on reading and writing appear a little dated—or at least overtaken by recent studies—his book comes into its own once he turns to case studies. Here his eclectic methodology, his good close reading, his emphasis on the materiality of texts, and his fine comparative study of variant editions (especially of Herrick) open rich seams of inquiry that nicely complicate the debates about the stability or instability of print and the authority of authors, publishers, and readers.
While the case for reciprocity is often well argued, at times Dobranski too much plays down the anxiety authors expressed about the reader's mounting independence. And, though he takes that independence as a fact, he appears unclear about what circumstances had led to it. The argument, too, lacks a clear discussion of the impact of print on authorship, readership, and omission; there is too little distinction made between authorial intention and the designs (in both senses) of printers and publishers, not to mention simple accident or publishers’ lack of attention to what was missing. In his longer story of the role of omissions in the emergence of the author, more attention to change, both in the marketplace of print and readerly habits, would have helped. Many readers will also sense a lost opportunity to develop the argument about politics. As several studies have shown, politics in this period, and especially the English Civil War, is inseparable from texts: their design, production, distribution, market, and readers. In this study Herrick's and Milton's deployment of omission as political invocation needs fuller situating in the contexts of the pamphlet wars and the materiality of English revolutionary publication. Curiously, the author has little to say, except in passing, about censorship and the shifts in constraints on writing (and reading) over the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Finally, the discussion of Milton's revenge fantasy in the omissa to Samson turns us to the psychology of the author (and indeed reader), which might, certainly in this case—perhaps across the larger terrain of the absent, omitted, and uncompleted—have been helpfully explored.
This then, for all it offers, is itself an incomplete study and one that is too short for its rich subject. But Dobranski identifies what has too long been passed over: absences and omissions, and in doing so, he offers a fresh perspective on the conditions of writing and reading in early modern England.
