While the connections between commonplace books, miscellanies, and essays have long been recognised, and the significance of the commonplace methodology for early essayists noted, we still lack a comprehensive account of the genres’ enmeshing. Drawing on the work of prominent early essayists (Michel de Montaigne, John Florio, William Cornwallis), as well as the collections of Joshua Baildon and Francis Osborne, this chapter fills that gap. It shows how the commonplace method helped to generate the early essay by providing essayists with their raw materials, and also demonstrates how commonplace books and miscellanies modelled the practices of notation, citation, and imitation that made the form possible. Early essays were made from citations, but they also transformed those citations. Thus, early essays were grounded in both the humanist imitative tradition, from which the culture of commonplacing emerged, and a longer tradition of miscellaneous writing, reaching back to late antiquity.

This chapter examines Shakespeare’s dramaturgical “cuing the past” through spoken directives to recall things preceding the play’s chronology. His ingenious staging of “the tug of memory” – grounded in traditional mnemotechnic oratorical tactics – elicits and guides the audience’s affective response to some specific aspect of a character’s backstory. Special attention is given to “invention” and “memory” from classical rhetoric (where the relationship of affect to emotion is shown to function analogously to that of invention to invented text), by way of illustrating how the appositive yet complementary tropes of “augmentation” and “abbreviation” in Merchant of Venice and Comedy of Errors, for example, can be used to unpack the rampant play of proverbs in Henry V (3.7). Shakespeare’s affective cueing of the past sets memory to work, tugging at what is to be recalled and yanking it center stage for all to see and then factor into their judgment of the character.

Scholars have long debated the origins of John Skelton’s idiosyncratic form of verse, the so-called “Skeltonic.” In this chapter, I suggest that the action and effect of Skeltonics are best understood through the lens of one of Skelton’s long-standing preoccupations: the attempt to simulate, in writing, the presence of a living thing. During the early sixteenth century, Humanist intellectuals argued over the proper way to represent liveliness in verse, particularly in their discussions of imitatio and enargeia. Where Skelton differs from his contemporaries, however, is in his conviction that proper imitatio requires the use of copia, an abundant style that (in his hands) aims to depict a physical thing, not merely as it appears frozen in a single moment, but as it moves and breathes through time. After putting Skelton’s work into conversation with contemporary theories of imitatio and copia, I turn to two of his best-known poems, “Speke Parott” and “Phyllyp Sparowe,” which attempt to replicate living bodies in predcisely this way while also expressing some skepticism towards the politics of this procedure.

Chapter Two studies how Rome figures in shifting conceptions of the problem of the self. The chapter’semphasis is on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and texts, ranging from Edmund Spenser and John Donne to Sir Thomas Wilson and John Milton. English perspectives on Rome, however, were mediated to a significant extent by continental writers such as Petrarch, Joachim Du Bellay, and Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Writers trained within (and in Petrarch’s case, actively forging) the traditions of humanist inquiry celebrated their commitment to returning ad fontes. In practice, however, their engagements with a ‘text’ as complex and ramified as Rome risked leaving them endlessly navigating tributary brooks, creeks, streams, and rivers rather than reposing comfortably at the source. The chapter brings together scenes of schooling, staring, and travel in order to study tensions between understandings of the self as being an immured condition of metaphysical finitude, on the one hand, and as being formed via the absorption of capabilities that arrive from the outside, on the other.