Wynkyn de Worde, Stephen Hawes, and the improvisation of genre in early sixteenth-century English poetry

Abstract

The printing of the poems of the early Tudor poet Stephen Hawes (c.1474–before 1529) by the London printer Wynkyn de Worde (d. 1534/5) is the earliest example of the sustained publication of a contemporary English poet by a single printer. This article considers de Worde’s printing of Hawes, in a flurry around 1509 and then at intervals of more or less ten years until 1530, as part of a larger effort to establish a noncourt audience for contemporary English poetry with nevertheless courtly credentials. The paratexts with which de Worde frames Hawes’s verse – from woodcut illustrations, to the printing of the author’s name, to the citation of Hawes by other writers associated with de Worde – are examined as evidence for a growing tendency amongst London printers to provide opportunities for their readers to make imaginative crossreference between their varied literary output. They represent an alternative to the marketing of English literary texts primarily on the basis of authorship – what I describe as an ‘improvisation of literary genre’ by early Tudor England’s poets, printers, and readers.