Doodling in a Copy of Guarini's "Il Pastor Fido"

frontispiece and title page

Battista Guarini, Il Pastor Fido=The Faithful Shepherd: a pastorall / written in Italian by Baptista Gvarini, a knight of Italie ; and now newly translated out of the originall. 

London : Printed by R. Raworth, M DC XLVII [1647].

[12], 223 p. : ill., port. ; 20 cm.

Translated by Richard Fanshawe.

Renaissance Center copy is in later (18th-century?; a signature dated 1660 is partially trimmed) calf (rebacked; inner hinges cracked; all before B2 and 2F2-4 detached; some worm damage to outer margins, which occurred before the current binding); extensive scribblings on several leaves at front and at back, including drawings and names, presumably of owners: John Penrose (title page; dated both 1647 and 1660); Bernard Penrose (2F4v; dated 1704; and on V3v and X4v, undated); Thomas Penrose (front free endpaper; and V1v, dated 1701; and 2F4v, dated 1708); Francis Penrose ((a)2v, undated; and as "Frank Penrose" on M2r, undated); Edward Penrose (F3r and 2F4v; undated); Margarett Penrose, James Lake, and Robert Olivier (all 2F4v, undated); John James Sampson (2E4v; undated). 

 

Although a number of my posts on early modern manuscript annotation characterize the practice as a serious affair, practiced by diligent scholars or readers deeply invested in their reading material, one can't ignore the frivolous act of doodling as one of the most common forms of book annotation. Children and bored students (both in the early modern and modern periods) frequently doodled in the blank leaves of their books, both as a form of writing practice ("pen trials") and no doubt to alleviate the boredom of tedious classroom lessons.

The subject of this post is the most copiously doodled book in our collection, a 1647 English translation of Guarini's Il Pastor Fido. The play is well known as one of the first tragicomedies ever written and its author's writings on the genre influenced a number of early seventeenth-century English playwrights. Beaumont and Fletcher's plays Philaster and The Faithful Shepherdess are both indebted to Guarini's experimentation with tragicomedy.

But this post isn't about tragicomedy, it's about doodling, copious doodling. This particular copy's title page and frontispiece (in addition to the blank recto of the frontispiece leaf) bear a complex layering of pen trials, drawings, tracings, signatures, and sums, stemming from the ownership of nine different people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (many of them from the Penrose family).

 Let's begin with the frontispiece leaf:

recto of frontispiece leaf

Perhaps the most obvious items of note on this page are the amateurish drawings, one of which is clearly a tracing of the frontispiece on the other side of the leaf. Probably in imitation of the fairly decent tracing job, a second would-be artist (undoubtedly a child) has added a second rendition of Guarini's face, upon which a third illustrated figure leans. A number of pen trials and other forms of handwriting practice litter the page, including the strange, owl-like forms in the bottom left-hand corner, clearly intended to train writing students in the formation of specific pen strokes. The page also contains (in no particular order) sums, transcriptions of the book's title, an armorial drawing, the initials of Baptista Guarini, and a line from an unidentified text.

frontispiece

Of course the frontispiece itself supplied the image for the tracing, and in its margin another annotator has drawn a couple fairly accurate human heads.

detail of margin on frontispiece leaf: drawings of heads

The title page contains a number of different sorts of doodles, including many items seen on the reverse page (a transcription of the book's title and another armorial drawing, for instance). The amateur drawing also continues with several images of birds and wings, apparently drawn by the same person responsible for the human figure on the reverse side of the leaf. One of the title page annotators has copied "London" from the book's imprint, writing it in both English and Latin. Another has written a number of early capital "block" letters (several "B"s, and "E," and an "H").

title page

There are also plenty of signatures on the title page and elsewhere in the book, identifying a total of nine different owners or readers from various time periods. One of the most interesting ownership marks elects not to use the typical signature for self-identification, but instead the rebus, that strange admixture of words, letters, and images we usually associate with children's literature.

detail of ownership rebus

As part of the witty, playful, and sometimes secretive literary culture of the day, writers could adopt the rebus as a way not only to mask their identities, but also to playfully incorporate text and image into the presentation of their names. If you haven't already figured it out, this rebus reads "T [Pen] [Rose]," or Thomas Penrose, one of the many owners identified elsewhere in the book. The rebus incorporates the Tudor Rose into an interesting amalgam of local (the Penrose family) and national identity, and I suspect its form was passed down through the family for some time. The illustration of the pen drawing the rose, albeit clearly appropriate for someone named "Penrose," is also interesting in light of the many drawings and pen marks displayed in this book, since it depicts the very material processes responsible for the doodling. Along with my earlier post on children's annotation, this example clearly demonstrates a relationship between the book and reader based less on serious intellectual engagement than on casual and playful interaction with a material object.

Schoolboys comment on a 17th-century Sea-Prayer

As books have moved and migrated throughout the world across time, passing through different periods of personal and institutional ownership, they frequently accrue the material signs of those owners in the form of inscriptions, stamps, bookplates, and manuscript notes. I find it fascinating when a book displays multiple layers of such material signs, each one being received at a different historical moment and reflecting the unique idiosyncratic tastes or interests of a particular owner. While we are all familiar with the book owner's habit of erasing or obliterating the marks left by the previous readers in order to assert authority over a book as physical property, it is maybe more interesting to find marks in books that interact with or build upon one another, like the layers of commentary on display in many medieval manuscripts, or the multi-generational family record-keeping in bibles. The book I am writing about today contains a similarly multi-layered fabric of inscribed ownership marks.

Limp vellum binding with MS title

title page

Sternhold, Thomas, d. 1549

The vvhole booke of psalmes : / collected into English meeter by Thomas Sternhold, John Hopkins, and others ; conferred with the Hebrew, with apt notes to sing them withall ; set forth and allowed to be sung in all churches, of all the people together before and after morning and euening praier ; as also before and after sermons, and moreouer in priuate houses, for their godly solace and comfort, laying apart all vngodly songs, and balads, which tend only to the nourishment of vice, and corrupting of youth.

London : Imprinted for the Company of Stationers, 1605

[10], 91, [14] p. ; 21 cm. (4to)

Renaissance Center copy is in contemporary (?) limp vellum; in phase box; long ms. note on blank final page, signed Saml. West 1637


The Book of Psalms, often bound with the Bible and Book of Common Prayer, was one of the most popular books in Renaissance England. The sale of this type of book was so lucrative, in fact, that the Stationers Company held a monopoly on its publication for much of the early modern period. The last few leaves of this book (one of the Center's eleven psalters printed before 1700) contains “certaine godly prayers to be vsed for sundry purposes,” including “a prayer to be said at night before going to bed” and “a prayer to be said at the hour of death.” 

more of these prayers, including one "necessary for all persons

Perhaps taking a cue from the text, a man named Samuel West added a specialized prayer of his own to the book's endpapers in 1637. The prayer focuses on merchants and other seafaring people, asking God to protect them from the manifold dangers of the open ocean. 

MS Sea-Prayer

The prayer reads as follows (according to my transcript, in which I have supplied many of the words missing due to material losses on the left-hand margin):

                                                                               on the Seas:/

[Alm]ightie god thy power is wonderfull both vpon the Sea and Land &

[how]soeuer thou pleasest that workest thou in them both, sometimes thou

[mak]est the earth fruitfull, sometimes barren, also sometimes the Seas calme

[&] pleasant, sometimes rough and boisterous, for that whether they bring

[valu]able or prosperous thinges vnto vs all come from thee o Lord god, that

[thy?] power maie be serived [served] in thy creatures to the praise and glorie of thy

[blesse]d name seeing thou art ruler both of earth and sea wee most humblie

[des]ire thee to blesse all those that travell both by sea and land in the waie

[of] truth especiallie for the marriners and shipping of this our towne,

[w]hoe are for the getting and maintenance of their liuing compelled

[to] trauell on the seas and to committ themselues to vnto the dangers

[th]ereof o Lord though the surges of the Seas are maruelous yet art

[....] which sittest on high more maruelous though the windes are strong

[and] vehement, yet doest thou excell them in power for thou hast

[giv]en a commaundment to thy creatures and none can goe beyond

[...] fire, haile, Ice, Snowe and vapours, stormie windes and tempestes

[acc]omplish thy will thou alsoe when the shipp whereon thou and thy

[disc]iples weare grieuouslie tossed with the waues and at the point

[of] drowning causedest at the desire of thy disciples the Sea to be

[....]et the stormes to cease and a great calme to follow in soe much

[a]s they which weare in the shipp marueiled and saide what

[ma]nner of man is this that both the windes and Seas obeye him;

[Gra]nt o most gentle Sauiour, that whensoeuer any troublesome tempest,

arise vpon the Seas soe that such as are in danger by calling

[on] thy holie name with true faith maie find fauour at thy

[me]rcifull handes to be deliuered out of all perills and dangers and

[bein]g preserued by thy heauenlie power maie make happie and

[pros]perous voiages, soe shall it come to passe that they being saflie

[l]ed out of all perills and dangers maie praise and glorifie

[thy] holie name all the daies of their life graunt this o most mercifull

[Sa]uior and Redeemer./

                                                                                    Sam. West  1637

The title "on the seas" is only a partial one, since it is clear that additional writing once existed at the top margin of the page. I suspect this part of the leaf was brittle or otherwise damaged, forcing an owner to cut down the margins when fitting the book to its current limp vellum binding. Based on context clues within the prayer, it is probable the title is something along the lines of “A Prayer for those who travel on the seas.” The prayer's allusion to "the marriners and shipping of this our towne"suggests Samuel West lived in a port settlement, probably in the South of England. So far I have been unable to identify Samuel West and in any case it is likely the common nature of his name will preclude a confident identification. Nonetheless, the prayer affords an interesting devotional perspective on the dangerous and risky oceanic voyages conducted by merchants and mariners in early modern England. 

Yet a second set of annotations effectively undermines the gravity of the prayer. At some point well after the early seventeenth century, two boys had access to the psalter, perhaps in an educational context of some kind. Their crudely written and ink-smeared annotations suggest the boys’ comparative ability to read the prayer provided a source of some good-natured ribbing: “Jim cannot read this...you cannot say that George for I can read it better than you can.” On a basic level, these comments are funny and evocative, conjuring the image of a stuffy schoolroom and two bored pupils trying to amuse themselves (is that a drawing of a boat too?). Since it is likely these sentiments would have been exchanged orally rather than in writing (the comments definitely have a conversational or bantering tone to them), I think it likely the two boys wrote them at a time of imposed silence, maybe during a school lesson. Why these boys were entrusted with a rare seventeenth-century Psalter--exposing it to use as a scribbling-pad--is another story altogether. All in all, this amusing and unlikely set of manuscript annotations demonstrates the potentially surprising combination of written marks a book accumulates as it passes through generations or owners and readers.