Patronage, Poetry, and Print

Literary patronage in Medieval England, 1350‐1550

“…[…] recent scholarship in the Renaissance period has emphasized the importance of patronage to literary production and reception in early print. Given the socioeconomic dependency of most writers, especially those who deliberately arranged to have their work printed, patronage was a social and financial necessity (Marotti, 1991, p. 1).…”

“…It was a patronage that came from the use of a prestigious or powerful name, not from the financial support of a wealthy personage. In Patronage, Poetry and Print Marotti writes, “bookmakers now sought patronage as a way of legitimating and endorsing printed texts, rewarding them for producing such work, and lending prestige to the whole enterprise” (Marotti, 1991, p. 2). There were instances where a patron may contribute to costs, but the practice of the Middle Ages had changed.…”

“…Willingly or not, members of royalty and the aristocracy found themselves portrayed in print as the authorizers, protectors, even owners of a wide variety of religious, historical, scientific, polemical and literary texts, though, it should be noted at the outset, in many cases their connexion with the authors or publishers was slight or non‐existent and their names mainly functioned as signs of celebrity‐endorsement. Through the praise and idealization that supposedly enhanced the patron's (Marotti, 1991, p. 2).…”

“…Within the literature of print culture, however, another set of social relations was emerging in the sixteenth century which the patron was ultimately eclipsed by the increasing sociocultural authority of authors as well as by the economic and interpretative importance of the reader, the ‘patron’ of the work as buyer and consumer in the modern sense of the term ‘patronage’ (Marotti, 1991, p. 2).…”

“And every day new Authors doe appeare…”: Labelling the Author in the Front Matter of Thomas Beedome’s Poems Divine, and Humane (1641)

“…According to Michael Saenger, there was a "move from an understanding of collaborative textual authority to a concept of a more singular author" (18) in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and printed collections of poetry which provided the name of the author on the title page contributed to this development. The first collections of English poetry appeared in the second half of the sixteenth century (see Marotti 1991), the first of which was Songes and Sonettes, written by the ryght honourable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other, published in 1557 and better known to posterity as Tottel's Miscellany; and "in the last third of the sixteenth 1 An online version of Beedome's book is available here: <http://xtf.lib.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId=chadwyck_ep/uvaGenText/tei/chep_1.1344.xml;chunk.id=d4;toc.dept h=1;toc.id=d3;brand=default;query=Have%20Heart#1> This transcript, however, is incomplete: the Latin poem "In obitum Lachrymabilem, Thomas Beedome, nuper defunct, et in praeclara ingenii sui Monumenta, iam primum edita" by Henry Glapthorne is left out, as is Glapthorne's prose address "To the Reader". 2 The same motif is employed in Samuel Sheppard's address "To the Reader" prefixed to his Epigrams (1651), though there it is "the Effeminate Gallant" who "boasts, that he hath [poesy] at his beck, and can quaffe up all Helicon at one draught" (A4v).…”