Turning Princes into Pages: Sixteenth-Century Literary Representations of Thomas Cardinal
Chapter IV ‘Handling This Story Effectualie’: Editorializing Wolsey in Holinshed’s Chronicles
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Chapter IV‘Handling This Story Effectualie’: Editorializing Wolsey in Holinshed’s ChroniclesIn reflecting on the life of Thomas Wolsey, posterity has largely settled in favor of an image of a stereotypically grand prelate of Rome: overly-worldly, over-reaching, pompous, and manipulative. As we have seen, these images came to be stereotypical largely because of the characterizations of Wolsey created by authors like Foxe. However, Foxe’s polemical manipulation of Wolsey’s image was not the only manner in which Elizabethan historiographers characterized Wolsey. Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which was published initially in 1577 and extensively revised by Abraham Fleming in 1587, presents a significantly more complex construction of the Cardinal, adapted from previous historiographies. Widely disparate motivations amongst the various editorial and authorial teams meant that the two editions of the Chronicles have often seemed like a patchwork, without a “conception of history writing as selective” and therefore disorganized and self-contradictive.337 This pejorative interpretation of the Chronicles has forced the relegation of Holinshed to the footnotes of Shakespeare’s works and has, by and large, been the dominant view for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Works like W. G. Boswell-Stone’s Shakspeare’s Holinshed, though extremely valuable for studying Shakespeare, only served to reinforce the view that “we care about Holinshed’s Chronicles because Shakespeare read them.”338 Only recently has the Chronicles been considered as a seminal work, essential not only to understanding Shakespeare but also to considering much broader themes across diverse disciplines. Annabel Patterson, in her defense of the Chronicles has decried the tendency of these earlier scholars, chiefly historians, who have largely seen the Chronicles as “useful only for literary purposes” (that is, for studying Shakespeare).339 Though the conflicting nature of Wolsey in the Chronicles is essential to understanding how Shakespeare and Fletcher created their own Wolsey in Henry VIII, this characterization is more significant than just as a source for that play. It is therefore crucial not to castigate those historians broadly and ignore the features they correctly identified, if in a limited sense, as the literary applications of the Chronicles. The characterizations of Wolsey in the Chronicles provide a unique opportunity to see how two editors, drawing on diverse sources, utilized different editorial methods to provide negative characterizations of Thomas Wolsey. All other concerns aside, there is a glaring issue that every Holinshed scholar must confront: who was responsible for the content of the Chronicles? Merely using the name ‘Holinshed’ is contentious: both editions were the products of various editors, authors, assistants, and outside contributors. The question of authorship has rightly been a lively arena for discussion. However, the sheer size of the text makes it very difficult to track down the authors and editors of individual passages, particularly as there are rarely any editorial or stylistic markers which distinguish one contributor from another. To attempt to deconstruct and identify the authors of particular passages is not unimportant and is often, as with Edmund Campion’s contributions, extremely illuminating: however, to do a thorough job would be far outside the scope of this project. In addition, questions about specific authorship are largely mooted because each edition was organized, edited, and produced almost exclusively by either Raphael Holinshed (for the 1577 edition) or Abraham Fleming (for the 1587 edition). Therefore, in the interest of maintaining a wider focus on the composite image of Wolsey created by these editors and contributors, rather than focusing on specific authorial attributions this consideration uses ‘Holinshed’ to acknowledge the man’s editorial role and not necessarily only the writings of the man himself, unless otherwise noted. When considering the 1587 edition, the significant additions and revisions produced by Abraham Fleming demand that we recognize the 1587 edition as a product not of Raphael Holinshed but instead as the result of the efforts of an entirely new editorial team, which was overseen by Abraham Fleming. For this reason, we will consider the 1587 edition to be a product of Fleming. This will not apply to passages explicitly cited as deriving from named authors or sources. This concern about editorial authority raises a further complication. Speaking about ‘the Chronicles’ as though they were a single text is misleading and, as this chapter will demonstrate, is fundamentally flawed. These two editions are distinct from one another, though certainly they are closely related, and to gloss over the differences between these two texts hobbles more specific textual analysis. Annabel Patterson argues that the problems associated with conglomerating these two separate editions are, in fact, a strength: she has listed this multivocality as one of her four posited ‘guiding principles’ in the Chronicles: Given the nature of post-Reformation experience, which set Protestants and Catholics against each other in changing patterns of domination and repression, a national history should not and could not be univocal, but must shoulder the responsibility of representing diversity of opinion. Wherever possible, moreover, diversity should be expressed as multivocality, which the Chronicles recording verbatim what they found in earlier historians or contemporary witnesses. A corollary of this principle was that although the individual chroniclers might hold and express strong opinions of their own, especially on religion, the effect of the work as a whole would be of incoherence, here used as a positive term.340 (Italics Patterson’s) This characterization of the Chronicles as ‘incoheren[t]’ provides an excellent opportunity to summarize how the Wolsey episodes demonstrate the difficulties with discussing the Chronicles as a whole. In one respect, Patterson’s characterization of the Chronicles is accurate. If we consider both editions together as a larger work, they are ‘incoheren[t]’: the 1577 and 1587 edition are distinct texts, with different authors, editors, and approaches to historiography, and Patterson’s argument (which focuses primarily on broader socio-political themes) acknowledges and celebrates this. For analysis of a specific figure, this approach is limited to a collective demonstration that the Wolsey episodes in both texts adapted and reinforced previously-available negative imagery of the Cardinal (though editorial interpretation and commentary makes Patterson’s use of ‘verbatim’ contentious). For our purposes, it is therefore most useful not to think of the Chronicles collectively, but rather to consider both editions separately and demonstrate the differences between their editorial practices: the 1577 edition systematically undercuts positive anecdotes with negative ones, and the 1587 edition steers the reader through editorial interjections. These distinct mechanisms typify the significant differences in editorial approaches taken by Holinshed and Fleming, and further complicate any reference to the Chronicles as a single text. When approaching texts as massive as the Chronicles, particularly when the issues surrounding authorship and editorial responsibility are taken into consideration, it is essential to isolate key elements of the text for examination. However, even restricting one’s attention to the anecdotes featuring Wolsey to the exclusion of all others leaves just under a hundred unique episodes in each edition. This discussion therefore focuses on episodes which most clearly demonstrate one or more of several key features. Episodes featuring guiding paratextual elements and, in particular, those which contain editorial marginalia have been selected as broadly representative of a particular author’s attempt to steer the reader’s understanding of a passage. Equally, episodes that contain clear editorialization of an event (as compared with the same event in Foxe, Cavendish, or Hall) have also been considered. In addition, episodes that differ significantly from the source text or account from which they were taken have been analyzed based on the assumption that if Holinshed (or one of his colleagues), having read a passage by an earlier writer, had decided to alter that anecdote, that must indicate a conscious attempt to manipulate the effect of that section. Finally, for the purposes of comparison, episodes that present a clear image of Wolsey which is thematically linked to editorialized portions of the text, but do not themselves contain overtly editorialized elements, have been examined to reveal more subtle means of image-crafting. Episodes from the 1577 edition are analyzed first, followed by episodes from the 1587 edition, to facilitate comparison and draw out editorial techniques. In order to reveal these four key elements (paratext, editorialization, adaptation, imagery), this study includes an annotated tabulation of every anecdote or marginal comment referencing Cardinal Wolsey in both editions of the Chronicles (see Appendix Two). By assigning numerical tags to each reference and measuring the physical properties of the same, the reader can more easily see what each passage contains, how large it was, how heavily annotated it was, and how it changed (if indeed it did change) from the 1577 to the 1587 edition. In addition, this table will work in conjunction with the other tables provided in Appendix Two so that readers may more easily compare the differences in recording the same events within the corpus of chronicles in this dissertation. Directory: 3735 3735 -> Oregon State Lottery Behavior and Attitude Tracking Study – May 2014 Oregon State Lottery® 3735 -> Path: /Applications/Autodesk/*/Maya app/Contents/MacOS/Maya Download 1.22 Mb. 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