Renaissance Authors Addressing Their Books

Abstract

My paper reexamines a poetic conceit that recurs in Renaissance poetry: the author addressing his book as an agent, a kind of person capable of representing him, and therefore, subject to instruction on comportment. This conceit, which comprises several fi gures, including prosopopoeia and apostrophe, is integral to understanding poetry as a causal force during the period. Specifi cally, it refl ects anxiety about readers’ interpretative latitude, their supplanting authorial intention with willful invention. The command “Go, little book” indexes all that can go wrong when sending one’s work out into the world, from misprision to punishment. In dialogue with the few critics who have written about the device, and with attention to its particular operation in the works of Hawes, Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Milton, I argue that the attempt to control, or moderate, readers’ responses shows a revolt against appreciable skepticism about the capacity of texts to change readers at all.