Abstract
abstract: It is well known that collections like Richard Tottel's Songes and Sonettes (1557) were retrospectively classified as miscellanies, as both the lexicon and the conceptual categories for multiauthor books were still being developed in sixteenth-century England. "Miscellany" and "anthology" are bibliographic back-formations, impositions of modern ideals of authorship and coherence on to collections that mix the labors of compilers and poets. This essay asks what histories of production and reception have been hidden by continuing to read Elizabethan poetry books as miscellanies. In particular, how has the mixed, disorderly book been taken as an essential origin point for English literary history? Heffernan's focus is Englands Helicon (1600), a book of 150 pastoral poems from the leading poets of the day. Because its mode was so consistent, this collection has most often been understood as an anthology compiled in response to the death of Philip Sidney. But by tracing its sources, Heffernan shows how dozens of poems in Englands Helicon were not at first pastorals and only gained a rural tone through the poem titles, speech tags, and attributions added in the process of printing the collection. The expansive fictions within the printed apparatus still contribute to how poems like Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd" are read and taught today. Englands Helicon holds a history of how a generically mixed body of work began to function as a cue for interpretation, covering the circumstances of its writing and circulation with a desire to read at scale.