Epistolary Community in Print, 1580-1664

Abstract

When Edmund Spenser asks his friend Gabriel Harvey "why a God's name, may not we, as else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language"?, it is significant that the question appears in a printed letter. The familiar letter, the genre of friendship, was ideally suited to dialogue about what binds individuals in a community and print opened this discussion to the reading public. In this exchange, published under the title Three Proper, and Wittie, Familiar Letters: Lately passed betwene two University Men (1580), the friends use the "Wittie, Familiar" language and ethos "Proper" to letters to represent English community in print. Certainly the ideal advanced, that the nation should be defined by the linguistically adept, is also expressed in "texts belong[ing] to different fields" written by a generation of English "men all born [ ... ] from 1551 to 1564" as Richard Helgerson demonstrates. It finds particularly sharp articulation, however, in the familiar letter, a prosaic genre not purely the purview of learned men. In print the familiar letter had extraordinary significance in early-modern England precisely for the reason it has received little attention as a literary genre. In the example cited above the words of the canonical poet cannot be clearly distilled from those of his friend. The printed familiar letter is a sociable form that speaks for the group rather than the individual. The voices in conversation are distinguished in relation to one another. This epistolary dialogue between familiars bound by strong affective ties provides the discourse and rhetoric to conceptualise a more inclusive vision of community. As this study demonstrates, a variety of sixteenth and seventeenth-century English writers used it for this purpose.