This chapter focuses on Izaak Walton and his discovery of a biographical technique that anticipates literary biography, through his uncommon educational background, his experience of the Civil War and his interest in the concept of a ‘private’ life. The chapter examines how in his different versions of the Life of Donne, written over the course of thirty-five years, Walton grew increasingly interested in Donne’s works (especially his poetic works) and attempted to use them in his Life to recover the poet’s own voice or ventriloquise it through paraphrases. Over the course of his revisions to the Life of Donne, Walton developed a new model for writing a Life, which, unlike the vita activa model, was suitable for writing the life of a poet and culminated in Walton’s Life of Herbert, the first life of an English poet as a poet. The chapter argues that Walton’s biographical technique was substantially shaped by his use of literary quotation, which differs from the aphoristic style of quotation more commonly used by his contemporaries. It also proposes that Walton’s innovative approach played an important role in the success of his Lives and proved highly influential for the development of literary biography.

Early modern discussions of British ethnographic history turn on a recurring set of references to Asia, migration, tribal unity, ancestral peoples, pagan practices, genealogies, violence, language, Christianity, mythology, and the Norman Conquest. Produced across the centuries I consider and circulated by writers who often had no direct influence on or even knowledge of one another, these tropes enable memories of a past that supports a specific socio-political present. They offer ways to think about the Nordic regions, Britain, and the historiographic connections among them that sustained national identity by means of historical division. At issue in such cultural memories is the establishment of some kind of continuity between past and present, which depends on distinctions between the two historical moments. Emerging from many early modern discussions of England’s political history was the belief that the Nordic and English peoples were of the same race and that as such they were categorically distinct from other races, especially from the French and sometimes even from the German ones. Evidence for this unity could be found in population movements and the attendant historical interactions, religious practices, and social characteristics.

The interlude on Edmund Spenser’s (lack of) afterlife in print forms a ‘bridge’ between Chapters 3 and 4. Surprisingly, considering the fact that his status as one of the most eminent poets of his time was undisputed, Spenser’s death in 1599 did not prompt many reactions in print, perhaps as a result of his long absence in Ireland. It begins by examining the few known commemorative poems for Spenser by John Weever, Nicholas Breton and Francis Thynne, and then proceeds to chart the emergence of a ‘Life’ of Spenser in the biographical compilations of the seventeenth century, culminating in a prefatory life published with the 1679 edition of his Works (the earlier Lownes editions, which contained the ‘Mutability Cantos’ had lacked a similar preface). Rather than merely checking them for factual errors, however (of which there are plenty), it focuses on the ways in which the different accounts use and adapt anecdotes about Spenser. The interlude argues that while they are very unlikely to be true, those anecdotes have a narrative and structural function within the lives and thus reveal the biographical compilers’ attempts retrospectively to make sense of the life of a poet who had died several decades before.

Chapter 2 examines the professionalisation of the publishing industry and the first generation of ‘professional’ poets. It focuses on a peculiar phenomenon of the 1590s, Robert Greene’s death in 1592 and his textual afterlife as a semi-fictionalised professional poet character and cause of the Harvey–Nashe quarrel. Due to his reputation as a ‘hack’ writer, much Greene criticism has focused on literary quality (as well as the apparent insult to Shakespeare in Greenes Groats-worth of Witte), although recently there have been more varied approaches to Greene. This chapter, however, is primarily interested in Greene’s afterlife as a biographical phenomenon. It argues that Greene’s notoriety as a prodigal scholar and a professional – if negatively perceived – poet figure is for the most part a posthumous construct through his appearances as a ghostly character figuring in other people’s works. This involved a gradual fashioning of Greene’s body of works into a suitable life narrative by other figures involved in the professionalisation of the English publishing industry during the 1590s. Vitally, however, this fashioned identity established the possibility of newly close relation between the nature of literary output and personal life.

The Petrarchan love sonnet and the figure of the sonneteer kept appearing in seventeenth-century plays (generally comedies) long after the fourteen-line poem is usually said to have waned. The plays discuss the sonnet both as a poetic form and as a tool for social advancement; the staging of sonneteering as a mercantile activity practised by incompetent sonneteers (most usually amateur poets from the country gentry) appears as a means to reflect on poetic language. Sonnets are deemed to be superior to ballads according to a hierarchy of poetic genres which reflects the social hierarchy. The evidence gathered in the wide array of seventeenth-century plays studied suggests that after the ‘sonnet craze’, when received poets in the canon had moved on to anti-Petrarchan poetics, or poetics which had little to do with the Petrarchan model, more ordinary rhymers kept on imitating the Canzoniere, and still claimed they composed sonnets. The continuous stream of attacks against the sonnet therefore also testifies to the deep mark it left upon early modern English poetry.

Chapter 1 is an overview of written lives of poets during the early modern period and the shapes they take (prefatory lives, compilations of lives etc.). It proposes that the dominance of the idea of vita activa (public service) in Renaissance humanism in existing models of lives posed problems for writing lives of poets as poets. The early modern written lives of Chaucer and Sir Thomas More are used to illustrate this problem. Both were recognised as important English poets during the sixteenth century, yet the biographies of both are almost exclusively concerned with their public lives. The chapter also contrasts two lives that illustrate the developments traced by this book: Thomas Speght’s ‘Life of Chaucer’ (1598) and Gerard Langbaine’s ‘Life of Cowley’ (1691). The former is a carefully structured text that unites typical features of the exemplary life and the prefatory life and demonstrates the dominance of the humanist idea of a vita activa within early modern life narratives. The latter considers Cowley primarily through his works, indirectly revealing the impact of Izaak Walton’s Lives (discussed in Chapter 4).

Focused on the historical relations between English and the Nordic languages and on the relevance of Nordic literature to British experience, memories produced by language and literature worked towards this same end of fashioning a medieval memory. Lacking the mythology of the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, as well as the sagas’ detailed descriptions of daily life in the Middle Ages, English readers could find in Norse literature reasons to believe there had been comparable material in English literary history and that what Norse literature described equally might have been said about the English experience. Similarities between Old English and Old Norse likewise could be understood to affirm the essential sameness of those who spoke the languages. With the theoretical underpinning of Herder’s and von Humboldt’s reflections on social identity, the putatively shared language and literature identified in this way became much more than a scholarly diversion. Like tropes of travel, ethnicity, and personal identity, replicated references to sagas, Eddas, speakers, poets, verse forms, translation, unintelligibility, dialects, and languages (medieval and modern) fashioned a historical identity worth remembering for what it revealed about the modern world and for how it illustrated contemporary divergences from its historical origins.

This introduction considers the issue of how much weight to give to autobiographical passages in the work of a sixteenth-century poet. Brink alludes to the expectation of his early patrons that Spenser would take holy orders and become a churchman and expresses scepticism about the idea that Spenser ever had an ambition to become a court poet.

The Introduction elucidates Chartism and its cultural world while suggesting how the presence of dramatic performance shifts our understanding of the movement. Arising at a moment when a sizeable minority of all men and women could not read or write, Chartism relied on a style of politics and politically inflected art which bridged the divide between literate and illiterate participants. The introduction also explores the question of political violence and the role of women in politics as reflected in Chartist drama. Finally, it contextualises Chartist performance in terms of the history of early Victorian theatre, which underwent significant changes in the 1840s. In 1843, the century-old Licensing Act was rescinded, allowing all theatres to perform the ‘legitimate’ genres of tragedy and comedy. Leading up to this event, theatrical categories provoked heated political disputes from the 1820s to the 1840s as non-patent theatres sought to protest and circumvent the prohibition on the performance of tragedy and comedy. In a cultural context that associated the theatre monopoly with franchise restrictions, John Watkins’s verse tragedy about the Newport rising refashioned ‘legitimate’ drama for subversive ends while Chartist performances of Shakespeare staked a claim for cultural as well as political democracy.

Chapter 3 is concerned with the problems involved in reconciling a poet’s life-narrative with the vita activa model and examines the potential causes for the ‘gap’ between Sir Philip Sidney’s public life and his works, which continues to pose a challenge for modern biographers. It considers the two ‘waves’ of responses to Sidney’s death: the elegies published in the immediate aftermath of his death and funeral, which seek to establish him as an exemplary soldier and courtier, and the first portrayals of Sidney as an exemplary poet figure (often referred to as ‘Astrophil’ or ‘Philisides’), following the printing of his works during the 1590s. For the most part, these two categories of life-narrative provided for Sidney remained distinct from each other, and there were few attempts to read his works biographically, beyond an ‘identification’ of Stella as Penelope Rich. Nevertheless, there is one remarkable exception: Edmund Spenser’s ‘Astrophel’, which should be read not as an unsuccessful belated elegy for Sidney but as a response to his rebirth in print and an innovative attempt to bridge the gap between the dead knight and the poet ‘borne in Arcady’.

Whilst scholars have often attended to the sonnet’s accretive nature, this chapter hopes to address the parallel – and largely unwritten – history of the sonnet as a stand-alone form in sixteenth-century English poetry, a form that flourishes in unsequenced contexts. Elizabethan commentators and practitioners alike routinely theorise the sonnet as, in the first instance, a circumscribed form, privileging the sonnet’s self-containment and recognising the skilful artifice required of the sonneteer in negotiating compact form – a conception very much in keeping with the way the sonnet was understood on the Continent. Used as dedicatory or commendatory poems, stand-alone sonnets do not just articulate frustrated desire, or pledge service, or seek patronage, or secure fame: they co-opt formal self-enclosure in the service of celebrating native eloquence and accommodating foreignness, implicitly or explicitly commenting on the literary authority, cultural status and vernacular identity of the works in which they are found, especially when they serve as a paratext or preface to a volume. In the confluence of horticultural and political registers that is often found in their rhetoric, with entwined motifs of enclosure, vernacular cultivation and national self-definition, those sonnets announce and enact a process of cultural transference and belonging.

This chapter is the first modern edition of a fragment from an early modern printed verse miscellany, complete with notes and an introduction discussing the text, presumed authors, printing details, the context of printed verse miscellanies and the miscellany’s reception. Published as an octavo in 1603, The Muses Garland is part of the English interest in printed poetic miscellanies ushered in by Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), and a successor to such late Elizabethan verse collections as The Phoenix Nest, Englands Helicon or A Poetical Rhapsody, miscellanies often addressed to and composed of pieces by courtiers and aristocrats that describe poetry as a medium that dignifies poets. Possibly compiled by Munday, Davison or Breton, or, perhaps even more tentatively, Markham, Pricket or Barnfield, the miscellany includes two poems by Spenser, and ascribes the authorship of two poems to ‘S.P.S.’ (possibly two previously unknown poems by Sir Philip Sidney). The political and poetic prestige of The Muses Garland also derives from its emphasis on the figure of the Earl of Essex, partaking in a trend of making him speak posthumously in the years after his death.

Three focuses of British travel writing from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were natural history, science, and recreation. Throughout this period and often independently of one another, widely separated writers on these topics utilised a set of consistent yet contradictory images to represent their experiences. In explicit detail they described beauty but also filth, and dangers to which they responded with expressions of awe, uncertainty, and disgust. From these contradictions emerge coherent ways to look at the modern world – especially the contrasts between Britain and Scandinavia – as well as to remember the world from which it developed. The collective impact of replicated tropes rendered visits to the modern-day Nordic regions as rides on a time machine to the British medieval past.