The first facsimile reprint of Whitney's emblem-book was edited in
1866 by Henry Green, who as one of the founders of the Holbein Society
pioneered the modern study of emblem literature.[1] Continuing his interest in reviving the
study of Renaissance iconography, Green edited, between 1868 and 1872,
many reprints ranging from Hans Holbein the Younger's Icones
Historiarum Veteris Testamenti and Les Simulacres de la
Mort (1869), to Henry Godyere's The Mirrour of
Majestie (1870), and to the principal early editions of Alciati's
Emblemata. Except in his last work, Andrea Alciati
and His Books of Emblems (1872), nowhere did Green lavish as
much effort as in the reprint of Whitney. In addition to the "Introductory
Dissertation," "Index to the Mottoes," and "Postscript to the Introductory
Dissertation," which traces the ancestry of Whitney, Green appended four
"Literary and Bibliographical" essays, close to one hundred
pages of "Notes" and "Addenda" as well as sixty-three plates, most of them
title-pages and selected emblems from early emblem-books. Yet more
recent scholars of emblem literature have paid only passing attention to
Green's edition as a whole. Rosemary Freeman notes briefly that "H. Green
in his edition of Whitney's A
Choice of Emblemes. 1866. p. 252. has shown that 202 out
of 248 woodcuts were printed from identical blocks."
[2] In
Studies in Seventeenth-Century
Imagery, Mario Praz also notes tersely: "Edited in facsimile by
Green for the Holbein Society, 1866, with a survey of the first
emblem-writers, and various observations on sources, etc.; all with little
method and less accuracy."
[3] It is
with Green's study of Whitney's sources that the other recent treatises on
Choice have concerned themselves. John Franklin Leisher,
in his 1952 Harvard dissertation, "Geoffrey Whitney's
Choice of
Emblemes and Its Relation to the Emblematic Vogue in Tudor
England," corrects several of Green's oversights, discovers a new source
in Georgette de Montenay's
Les Emblèmes ou devises
chrestiennes (1571), and eliminates all of Green's "similar" sources
as irrelevant. In her 1964 Saint Louis University dissertation,
Sister M. Simon Nolde reaches conclusions similar to those of Leisher,
even though working apparently without knowledge of the latter's
study.
[4] Perhaps the first person ever
to study the manuscript original of
Choice (the presentation
copy to the Earl of Leicester now in the Harvard College Library,
designated, and hereinafter referred to, as MS. Typ 14), Leisher
unfortunately made only perfunctory use of it. MS. Typ 14 is more fully
described by Frank Fieler in his introduction to the 1967 reissue of Green's
edition published by Benjamin Blom.
[5] The general nature of this introduction,
however, precludes any detailed treatment of the similarities and differences
between the MS and the printed edition and the drawing of meaningful
conclusions as to the process of converting from one to the other. The story
of how
Whitney produced the printed edition of
Choice from the MS
remains to be told.
[6] Moreover, in
view of the fact that the two recent revisions of Green's attribution of
sources both appear in unpublished theses, a few readers still regard
Green's edition as the sole authority and do not hesitate to rely on his
findings, inaccurate though some of them have been proved to be.
[7] There is a need, therefore, for a fresh
study of Whitney's
A Choice of Emblemes, in light especially
of its manuscript, and of those aspects that have been neglected both by
Green and by recent studies of
Choice. This need is all the
more urgent now that Whitney's emblem-book is rapidly becoming more
available because both
Choice itself and Green's edition of
it have been reproduced by many enterprising reprint presses. For example,
in 1969, just two years after the reissue of Green's edition by Blom,
Choice was
reprinted by the Scolar Press of Menston, England, as No. 3 of its English
Emblem Books series with a note by John Horden, as well as by
Amsterdam's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (distributed in New York by Da
Capo Press) as No. 161 of its English Experience series; and in 1971,
Green's edition was again reprinted by Olms of Hildesheim, Germany
(distributed in New York by Adler's Foreign Books). Although most of the
biographical and bibliographical details in Green's edition remain useful,
his neglect of Whitney's woodcuts, verses, annotations, and "newly
devised" emblems must be remedied, and his treatment of Whitney's
sources and mottoes reviewed and revised.
The purpose of this essay, then, is to provide a more accurate and
comprehensive study of Whitney's A Choice of Emblemes.
It will concern itself with these areas: 1. source, 2. motto, 3. woodcut, 4.
verse, 5. annotation, and 6. "newly devised" emblems. In each area the
manuscript version will be compared with the printed version in order to
disclose the process by which one is converted into the other, assuming of
course that MS. Typ 14 was, if not the copy, at least the basis for the copy,
of the printed edition. Comparison of the two versions will also reveal the
number of emblem-books that were available to Whitney during the
composition of the manuscript in England and the number of new sources
he used in producing the printed version at Leyden. Of especial interest are
those twenty emblems in the MS that have no known emblematic sources;
ten of them were copied and made into woodcuts at Leyden by an
artist/engraver who, under Whitney's instruction, added five more such
emblems. A study of these fifteen "newly devised" emblems along with an
examination of the other five areas will go far toward rescuing Whitney
from the common modern estimate of him as merely an
emblem-collector/translator of little originality and discovering him to be
an
emblem-writer of considerable ingenuity and skill. Above all, such a study
will provide a more enlightening background for relating Whitney's
emblem-making to poetic imagery of such English authors as Spenser,
Shakespeare, Daniel, Chapman, and Donne. Before proceeding with the six
areas of concern, it would be helpful to give some general ideas concerning
the composition of both MS. Typ 14 and
Choice, together
with a brief account of the circumstances under which the latter was
printed.
Bound in sixteenth-century vellum, MS. Typ 14 contains 98 folios,
written on both sides of each leaf. Presented to the Earl of Leicester on 28
November 1585 (according to the date in the printed version of the "Epistle
Dedicatorie" since the MS epistle is undated), it is decorated with 197
emblematic drawings in pen-and-ink, sepia, and blue water-color. Offered
for sale in December 1899 in Quaritch Catalog 194, No. 1395, and bought
by William Augustus White on 2 January 1900, it was presented to the
Harvard College Library in 1941 by Harold T. White and Mrs. Hugh D.
Marshall.[8] It has two parts. The first
part, written in ink now turned brown, begins on fol. 1v with the arms
of the Earl of Leicester and continues with the epistle dedicatory (fols. 2-5),
the dedication to Jove (fol. 6v), and 91 drawings (fols. 7-50). The
second part, written in violet ink, follows a blank page (fol. 50v) and
has a half-title which has in the middle the
Leicester crest of a muzzled bear chained to a ragged post surrounded by
a knotted belt with the famous motto, "Honi soit qui mal y pense," and
a six-line Latin quotation from Nicolas Reusner. Following this half-title are
verses in praise of Leicester and his brother Warwick (fols. 51
v-52)
and 106 drawings (fols. 52
v-98
v). There is a missing leaf in the
MS between fols. 43
v and 44. On fol. 43
v is a drawing with the
motto "Quicquid delirant reges, plectunt
r Achiui" and a stanza of ten
iambic pentameter lines which correspond to the emblem "Non dolo, sed
vi" on p. 58 of
Choice. On the first half of fol. 44, instead
of the beginning of the next emblem with its motto and woodcut, are the
last two sextets of the missing emblem "Silentium" which in the printed
edition appears on p. 60. The woodcut of "Silentium" pictures Harpocrates
holding an index finger over his mouth while reading a book at his desk;
it is supported by a seven-sextet verse, the first half of which appears on
the same page with the woodcut. The remaining three and one half sextets
continue on the next page, p. 61; separated from these
verses by a horizontal bar of a decorative border, the alternate emblem,
without woodcut, entitled "Video, & taceo" in eight lines of poulter's
measure fills out the rest of this page. Correspondingly, the identical
alternate emblem also fills out the second half of fol. 44. The missing leaf
should then contain on its recto the emblem "Nimium rebus ne fide
secundis" identical to that on p. 59 of
Choice and on its verso
the motto "Silentium," a drawing corresponding to the woodcut on p. 60 of
Choice, and a verse of five sextets that is continued by the
two sextets on fol. 44.
[9] The MS
measures 270 x 190 mm. (10 ¾ x 7 ½”). The drawings in
the first twenty folios are enclosed in heavily lined (the rest in thin-lined)
rectangular frames. The dimensions of the drawings vary, depending on
whether they appear alone on a leaf, fill out half a leaf, or share a leaf with
another drawing. The single drawing on a leaf measures 64 x 86
mm. (2 ½ x 3 ⅜”); the double drawings on a single leaf 44
x 80 mm. (1 ¾ x 3 ⅛”); drawings used to fill out the lower
half of a leaf sometimes measure 58 x 83 mm. (2 ¼ x 3
¼”). The changes in size between a model and an MS drawing,
and between the latter and the woodcut in
Choice, tax the
ability of the copying artists and sometimes produce interesting results (see
Section 3 below). These changes also reflect the progressive differences
among designs of the model, the MS, and the printed version.
Just ten days after he received the manuscript of Choice
from Whitney, Leicester went to the Low Countries on 8 December 1585
as the Queen's Lord Lieutenant and Captain General of the English forces
to help the Dutch States General against Spain. Whitney followed him there
shortly as a supernumerary in the party of Janus Dousa, one of the
ambassadors sent to England after the fall of Antwerp in August by the
States General to seek Elizabeth's intervention. At the beginning of the new
year (1586), the Dousas, father and son (to each of whom Whitney
dedicated an emblem, and the younger Dousa also wrote the first
commendatory verse, in Choice), along with Whitney were
at the University of Leyden, where the senior Dousa was the rector and
where on 11 January the Earl of Leicester was entertained as the honored
guest. Leicester stayed in Leyden until the twentieth. It is not inconceivable
that it was on this occasion that Whitney was persuaded to publish his
collection of
emblems from the MS, as he said that he was ". . . earnestlie required by
somme that perused the same, to haue it imprinted. . ." ("To the Reader,"
sig. **3v). "By somme" might very well refer to the Dousas, who had
taken a great personal interest in Whitney and his talents.[10]
Perhaps to facilitate his task Whitney was
matriculated at the university on 1 March 1586 and lived close to both the
university and the Plantin printing shop, whose printer Francis Raphelengius
later became professor of Hebrew at Leyden. Whether or not the printing
of Choice by Raphelengius was also motivated politically to
popularize Leicester's name so as to enable him to assume sovereign power
in the Low Countries, as has been suggested by Fieler (p. xiii), may not be
as relevant to our purposes here as the fact that Whitney had less than three
months in which to publish the book—in which to select from the Plantin
stock over 200 woodblocks, instruct an
artist/engraver to copy 35 additional emblems and to devise five new ones,
compose or translate verses for at least 62 emblems that were not in the
MS, and to add a large amount of marginalia. The text of the verses in the
printed edition shows signs of haste in the many punctuation and spelling
errors by an illiterate compositor. Although Whitney caught nine of the
"Faultes escaped in the Printing" (sig. ***2v), and although he
mentioned that he had
already corrected most of the faults, there are legions of
others—particularly the overuse of commas and the atrocious use of the
question marks. Yet, on the whole, the printed
Choice,
completed on 4 May 1586, is comparable in execution and attractiveness to
the best of the continental emblem-books of the period.
A Choice of Emblemes follows the two-part division
of the MS, but with the addition of the epistle "To the Reader" (sigs.
**3v-**4v), seven commendatory verses (sigs. ***1-***2), the
errata already mentioned and on the same page the same verse dedicated in
the MS to Jove now addressed to D.O.M. (Deo, Optimo, Maximo). Part
one has 113 emblems, one of them, on p. 61, as has been mentioned above,
is a "naked" emblem, an emblem without woodcut, and one of them, on p.
95, is a "newly devised" emblem. Of the emblems in this part, 17 contain
no marginalia; 31 are dedicated to Whitney's acquaintances. Part two has
135 emblems; 14 are "newly devised," 31 without annotation, and 60 are
dedicated. All emblems in Choice are surrounded by
decorative borders; those dual emblems that occupy the same page
sometimes have borders only on two sides. The size of woodcuts is more
uniform than that of the MS drawings; a vast majority of them measure in
a square of 57 mm. (2
¼”), although those from Sambucus and Junius vary in height
from 47 to 51 mm. (1 ⅞ to 2”). The most noticeable exceptions
in size are those woodcuts borrowed from Paradin which are unframed and
measure as high as 83 mm. (3 ¼”). In changing these vertical
rectangular models into his horizontal rectangular drawings, the MS artist
produced a number of inferior copies. With this general description of both
MS. Typ 14 and Choice, the full story of their conversion is
now ready to be unfolded.
