Abstract
In Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England, Samuel Fallon identifies the emergence of a ‘strange literary being’ that he terms the ‘persona’ (p. 2). Personae, according to Fallon, are figures that settle somewhere along the spectrum between author and character: after their creation, they migrate between a range of texts, no longer belonging to one author but to a community of readers and (re)writers, taking on a life of their own.
Fallon’s sources are entirely printed – the prose romances, pastoral lyrics, sonnet sequences and baggy and undefinable pamphlets that were increasingly popular in the final decades of the sixteenth century. But Paper Monsters uses these sources to explore Elizabethan textual culture more broadly. At its centre is the compelling claim that personae were vehicles of literary self-reflexivity at a moment of radical change and expansion in the book trade. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘field theory’ (pp. 19–20), Fallon argues that personae were used to create imagined textual communities: through their ‘virtual’ (p. 10) presence, they negotiated the disembodiment of the textual encounter and suggested intimacy with some readers and the exclusion of others. When Fallon connects these imagined communities to the distinctions between print and manuscript culture, he is not claiming that Elizabethan personae and the readings that they prompted were a result of the distinction between print and manuscript. Instead, he suggests that personae were part of its very production, helping to establish a narrative of print and manuscript opposition that has dominated literary and book historical scholarship until very recently.
Paper Monsters, then, is an original and valuable contribution to the wealth of existing research on the history of the book, in the tradition of Roger Chartier, Harold Love, Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns. At the same time, Fallon departs from these cultural studies by focusing primarily on the literary questions of narrative modes and identities, fictionality and character, charting shifts in the formal qualities of texts alongside historical developments in the book trade.
Fallon’s introduction traces the pre-history of the persona, dividing it into two distinct traditions: the classical ‘figure of the poet’ (p. 5), including textual representations of Virgil, Ovid, Dante and Chaucer, and the stock figures of satire such as Piers Plowman. The first chapter presents the ‘persona’ of Robert Greene, beginning with an exploration of Greene’s narrative modes in his prose romances and coney-catching pamphlets before discussing the presence of Greene’s ghost in a range of texts such as Greenes Groatsworth of Wit and A Quip for an Upstart Courtier after his notorious demise. Because of his self-professed prodigality, Fallon argues, Greene became representative of the increasingly pressing literary concerns of authenticity and fictionality after his death. The fact that Greene haunts these texts in the form of a ghost is significant: his spectre is illustrative of the contemporary desire for an embodied encounter between author and reader but also, as Fallon suggests, a growing sense of the impersonal and the ethereal in print culture.
The second chapter also centres on the author’s ambivalent presence and absence in the printed text, moving now from the heterogenous world of pamphlets to the green spaces of pastoral poetry. There Fallon argues that Colin Clout – created by Spenser but present in the verses and paratexts of a range of other authors such as Thomas Lodge and Michael Drayton – became emblematic of a certain kind of literary community. Analysing his appearance in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar and The Faerie Queene, Fallon highlights how Colin’s poetry is typically recited in his absence, suggesting contemporary anxieties surrounding the immediacy – or rather distance – of the lyric voice. Colin, then, symbolises the inevitable mediation of poetry in its textual form. This barrier of reproduction between Colin and his audience prompts, in Spenser and elsewhere, a sense of nostalgia for the pastoral space of speaking and listening. Of course, this space never existed in the first place but the figure of Colin brings it into being, fashioning an imagined community of both pastoral poets and an audience who are forced to make do with reading, rather than hearing, the shepherds’ songs.
The third chapter presents the figures of Philisides and Astrophil, who appear in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella. Fallon begins by outlining the complexities of Philisides’s identity in the tangled textual history of the Arcadia before arguing that these two personae serve, for both Sidney and later authors, as markers of an exclusive coterie of intimate readers. This intimacy – grounded in the physical proximity of an elite group and the narrow circulation of a text in manuscript – becomes a ‘useful fiction’ (p. 114) for Sidney’s editors and admirers, who use the personae of Philisides and Astrophil to distinguish Sidney, and by extension themselves, from the broader mass of Elizabethan print. The fourth and final chapter continues this attention to the relationship between personae and literary distinction through the notorious Nashe-Harvey quarrel and the figure of Pierce Penilesse. Fallon’s reading of the quarrel as primarily a contest for literary authority is persuasive and he goes on to suggest that Pierce, in both Nashe’s works and those of Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, fashions a community of good readers who are skilled and witty enough to negotiate the narratorial complexities of good books. This, according to Nashe and his later admirers, is something Harvey fails to do.
The book’s conclusion returns to the place of the late Elizabethan persona in the longer history of the figure of the author. Through an analysis of England’s Helicon, Fallon argues that, at the end of the sixteenth century, personae began to shape what we understand as the ‘literary agency’, or ‘function’, of the author today (p. 154). But personae as they are represented in Paper Monsters were a short-lived literary phenomenon. Democritus Junior, Robert Burton’s persona, in the Anatomy of Melancholy, is used to illustrate a shift in the signification of these quasi-self-representational, quasi-fictional figures: from the turn of the seventeenth century onwards, Fallon claims, they are only deployed as self-reflexive, metafictional selves and no longer as detachable figures around which readers and later writers might build imagined communities and textual worlds.
Paper Monsters offers a series of highly nuanced readings of a range of Elizabethan texts and its overarching meditation on the distinction of literary communities, and of manuscript culture from print culture, provides much food for thought. The definition of the entity that ties these readings together is, though, rather unstable: although Fallon acknowledges the ambiguity of the ‘persona’, he doesn’t fully account for its close proximity to the author nor its distinction between initial use and ‘migratory’ (p. 4) appearance in other texts. Greene, in Chapter 1, is both an author negotiating narrative modes and a character in texts by other authors. Chapters 2 and 4 are predominantly about Colin Clout’s and Pierce Penilesse’s function in works by Spenser and Nashe, undermining Fallon’s initial claim to ‘displac[e] and estrang[e]’ the author amongst the ‘wide range of agents’ (p. 4) involved in literary production and reception. In Chapter 3, Astrophil and Philisides might be described as pseudonyms of Sidney’s, rather than personae, to similar effect – and their appearance in a multitude of texts after Sidney’s death is, as I see it, indicative of a cult of the author that, according to Fallon, had not yet fully developed. Paper Monsters, then, makes an important contribution to scholarship on Elizabethan literary culture but it is more about the author than Fallon would have us believe.