‘Bound up in one small poesie’: Material Intertextuality and the Early Modern Poetic Collection (1557-1601)

This thesis explores the essentially composite nature of early modern printed books, and how the material configurations of individual volumes were used for a variety of literary ends. It contends that modern scholarship on early modern printed poetry has focused on individual texts, and has largely overlooked the tendency of books in this period to gather more than one major text in a single volume. This thesis aims to recover the creative design exercised by the poets, editors, and publishers who selected and arranged multiple works in one book. It argues that texts presented in a shared material context present readers with the opportunity to read between the poems (thematically, formally, narratively, etc.), and describes this phenomenon as ‘material intertextuality’. By reading early modern collections of poetry in this way, it proposes specific new readings of a number of canonical authors – George Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Samuel Daniel – as well as providing a methodology for reading other writers in this period. Reading the text within the context of the book has a number of ramifications for the study of early modern literature more generally, including recovering an early modern structural and organisational imagination, challenging canonical boundaries (by attending to the multiple authorship of many texts), revitalising the study of ‘minor’ works by major literary figures, and informing editorial practice in modern editions of these texts.