Reading Pseudonyms in Seventeenth-Century English Coterie Literature

Abstract

The study of pseudonyms is one of the oldest activities of literary historians. In its first stages, pseudepigrapha was an important arena of scholarly endeavor because of its goal of establishing the canon of the New Testament through the correct identification and authentication of authors and texts. During the Renaissance, the primary interest in this field, whether theological or classical, was attribution and the unmasking of fraud, involving, as Taylor and Mosher characterize it, critical methodologies standing between higher criticism and investigations in plagiarism and forgery (vii). Such techniques of investigation lie behind such seventeenth-century texts as Vincent Placcius's Theatrum Anonynorum et Pseudonymoron (1674) and Adrien Baillet's Auteurs deguisez (1690), whose contents consist of long lists revealing the true identities of a wide variety of authors. In these early studies, as well as such later ones as Halkett and Laing (the standard reference work) and Alice Kahler Marshall, the goal is to establish literary ownership of a particular work or to validate the credentials of the author by discovering the identity masked by the pseudonym. The historical questions raised by the use of pseudonyms in the period to be discussed in this essay, English literature in the seventeenth century, would thus appear to be quite simple: who was Urania? Was there really a Poliarchus? Traditionally, pseudonyms are read as fiddles to be solved; the theoretical issue to be resolved in this mode of reading is who, not why. The politics of using pseudonyms, however, are more complex than this one methodology of literary detection suggests, and they are largely unexplored. This type of analysis of pseudonyms implies that all pseudonyms are meant to be read in the same way, regardless of historical context. A closer consideration of the practices of coterie literary production during the seventeenth century, however, both reveals and discredits the unstated assumption found in these accounts that the nature of authorship and of writers' relationships with their readers have remained unchanged throughout history, regardless of the mode of literary production. The issues raised about the relationship between author, audience, and subsequent generations of critical readers are, in fact, so large and so varied that this essay will focus only on late seventeenth-century English coterie circles and pastoral pseudonyms in particular. By examining this specific phenomenon and the ways in which we have conventionally analyzed its presence in the literary environment of the seventeenth century, I hope to provide suggestions for reconsidering the ways in which we discuss authorship in early periods in general. References to pseudonyms in general literary histories of the seventeenth century are grounded on two key assumptions which concern the nature of authorship and the author's relationship with his or her readers. These assumptions are that pseudonyms are a form of deliberate, intentional disguise and that they function either to perpetrate fraud or to protect the writer. In either use, the relationship between author and reader is thus presumed to be antagonistic. The early studies of pseudonyms illustrate these premises not only in their methodologies but also in the very format of their presentations. Baillet's title Auteurs deguisez itself declares the relationship between Baillet and the writers he studies. Implicit in the approach suggested in Baillet's title and found in the volume is the belief that pseudonyms signal an author's desire to distance him- or herself from the audience, with the suggestion that the writer does so deliberately to deceive the reader, either to disguise the identity of the author or the nature of the work. Deguiser also contains the notion of putting on a costume or fancy dress, a way of reading of pseudonyms which the frontispiece of Vincent Placcius's Theatrum Anonymorum represents. …