The Idea of the Book and the Creation of Literature

by Stephen Orgel

The Idea of the Book and the Creation of Literature explores the intersection of literary history and the history of the book. For several millennia, books have been the material embodiment of knowledge and culture, and an essential embodiment for any kind of knowledge involving texts. Texts, however, do not need to be books-they are not even necessarily written. The oldest poems were composed to be recited, and only written down centuries later. Much of the most famous poetry of the English Renaissance was composed in manuscript form to circulate among a small social circle. Plays began as scripts for performance. What happens to a play when it becomes a book, or to a collection of poems circulated among friends when it becomes a volume of sonnets? How do essays, plays, poems, stories, become Works? How is an author imagined? In this new addition to the Oxford Textual Perspectives series, Stephen Orgel addresses such questions and considers the idea of the book not simply as a
container for written work, but as an essential element in its creation.

Genres: Nonfiction

224 pages, Hardcover

Published February 25, 2023

Reviews

[Aaron Thomas · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really don't get this. Chapter 1 and Chapter 6 are indeed about what a book is and how books as objects shape what we read and how we read it. Chapter 2, though, is about how plays are actually performed activities and how their appearance on paper—in books—is not an accurate report of what happened onstage. This is hardly a novel thing for a scholar to say, indeed it is a commonplace, not only in Shakespeare studies but in theatre studies as a whole.

Chapter 3—and here is where Orgel began to lose me—is about the Jonson and Shakespeare folios. We begin with Jonson referring to his plays as "works", and that's interesting, but then the chapter progresses and Orgel is discussing the invention (taxonomization) of Shakespeare's "romance plays" and the establishment of the Shakespearean canon. The chapter is simply not about what this book purports to be about, to wit: books. Chapter 4 continues this perplexing behavior as Orgel discusses whether or not drama was considered "poetry", the lives of Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, why so much drama is in verse, and how we might look at Shakespeare's plays differently if his poems had been included in the folio of his "works" (this is, I think, a very interesting point, but I fail to see what this has to do with the idea of the book). Chapter 5 is a critical reading of Shakespeare's sonnets, and I think Orgel has completely lost the plot. Why is he talking about this at all?

For Chapter 6 we, indeed, return to the plot of this book, and Orgel has a few insights and fun tiny histories about books, manuscripts, woodcuts, illustrations, moveable type, scrolls, etc. He's said much of this already in the book's introduction, but I was so happy to be speaking again about this book's subject matter that I didn't much mind.

The book ends very abruptly, however, with a little "just so" story that by decorating collections of plays with portraits of the author instead of images from the play's action, plays, in this way, became literature. This was odd. It feels like Orgel had a tendency to want to write smaller, informational tidbits, stories, and bons mots about books, literature, and publishing. But instead this got made (rather like the argument he makes about Shakespeare, I suppose) into something we might call a book almost against the author's will.

Another thing: In a 2021 essay of mine titled "Infelicities" I mention the first use of the word "performative" I know of in English studies where it has nothing to do with J.L. Austin. John Hollander uses performative to mean “related to performance” in a 1956 essay about the performance of poetry. Performative in Hollander's use means something like "poetry as it is performed" rather than read quietly. Weirdly—it's weird to me because I've rarely seen it used like this elsewhere—Orgel uses performative twice in this book in exactly this same way (I'll quote one of them below). It's strange indeed.

Last things I want to nitpick about: At the beginning of chapter 4 Orgel says: "Moreover, one of the essential elements of Greek drama was melody, so from the beginning drama was both performative (rather than literary) and related to ritual. Greek tragedy dramatized the nation’s mythology, and thus was both historical and religious; but the comedies of Aristophanes too are in complex poetic meters: drama was a form of poetry; and Aristotle’s treatise is therefore The Poetics (Περὶ ποιητικῆς), not something like The Theatrics or The Histrionics."
But "ritual" appears here virtually from out of thin air. Greek drama was melodic, yes, but that hardly means it had anything to do with ritual. Why does he even say this? How are the two ideas related?
And, indeed, it is true that Aristotle has written a treatise that we have called the Poetics, but one look at the Greek title will show anyone that it's not "the" Poetics or "the" anything at all: On Poetics would be a much better translation. (Picking nits, I know. But it's just not accurate, and I got frustrated.)

[Roy Kenagy]

RK KINDLE