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Just as book design has only recently become established as a specialist craft in which a skilled workman may make a living and be credited for his work, so the historical study of book design is a relatively new field in inquiry, not yet thoroughly incorporated into the conventional wisdom of historical bibliography and of textual and literary criticism. Adrian Wilson is a pioneer in both fields, and his book The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1976) is a remarkable demonstration that book design was practised in a recognizable way in the earliest years of printing—and indeed before—and that evidence of its practice survives. Somewhat similar evidence survives in relation to Harington's Ariosto,[1] which Philip Gaskell has described as "an unusually well-documented example of the progress from writer to reader of a work of literature of the late Elizabethan period". Yet Gaskell in his study of Robert McNulty's critical edition pays hardly any attention to questions of book design, preferring to concentrate his discussion on the transmission of the text and on McNulty's treatment of it.[2] The "text" is understood narrowly as being constituted by the "words" and their "details" (spelling, punctuation, etc.) but such matters as the layout of the words on the page are regarded as "relatively minor" (p. 15) and the
In this article I shall be arguing, on the contrary, that the design of Harington's book (the 1591 edition) did indeed affect the text of his apparatus and does indeed affect—in ways that Harington intended—a reader's understanding and enjoyment of the work as a whole. Harington chose to publish his verse-translation in the form of a fine, elaborately-presented printed book, in which he addressed his readers not only in the verse of his translation and in the verse and prose of his apparatus but also in the ancillary languages of picture and typography. I believe that, if these ancillary languages are interpreted aright, one is led to a new respect for his work as a translator; or, in other words, that his work as a book-designer is an essential part of his achievement in "setting foorth" Ariosto's poem for the reading public of Elizabethan England. Like the poem itself and much of the apparatus, the book's design was largely "filcht from forren lands"[4] —that is to say, the pictures and typography are modelled on Italian originals, notably the Franceschi edition of 1584—but Harington imposed his own treatment on all three elements of the book (poem, apparatus, and design) and did his best to reconcile and integrate the diverse materials he energetically brought together, imitated, adapted, and improvised. The verse-translation was written first, and the length of each of the forty-six cantos seems to have been determined by purely literary constraints (Harington's time, patience, and skill); but there is ample evidence to suggest that the apparatus was shaped to fit the design that Harington had in mind, and that the design itself was shaped to express the form and indeed some of the significances of the work. No doubt it is going a little far to call Harington a "book-designer" in his own right—he was a "print-customer", really—but the term does serve to emphasize two well-known facts: that the printer, Richard Field, took his instructions from Harington in these matters, and that Harington "gaue direction" for the making of the book's engraved title-page and forty-six engraved illustrations. It seems clear that Harington intended the book's design to serve as an expressive means of communication with his readers, modifying as well as reinforcing the verbal meanings of the text. Just how well his intentions were carried out, and just what degree of fidelity to the 1591 design may properly be called for in a modern edition, are interesting questions, which deserve to be looked at quite closely.
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