Algorithm and Analogy: Distant Reading in 1598
Catherine Nicholson · PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America · 2017
The chapter titled the “Reading of Bookes” in Francis Meres'S 1598Palladis Tamiaoffers two competing prescriptions for the allocation of readerly attention. The first suggests that too-close reading spoils some books: “As the s[c]ent of spices and flowers is more acceptable somewhat off then close to the nose: so there are some things that please, if they be lightly passed over; which being exactly looked into do loose their grace” (266v). The second reverses that logic by way of a fresh analogy: “Those things that live long, doe not soon spring up: so that worke which thou wouldst have alwaies to be read, ought to be throughly laboured in, and seriouslie scanned” (267r). On the face of it, Meres's book—a six-hundred-and-sixty-five-page-long compendium of moral and practical precepts, each cast in the repetitive syntax of the similitude—is evidently the first sort of text. At once dizzingly various and mind-numbingly repetitive,Palladis Tamiais a book to “be lightly passed over”—“scanned” in the modern, not the sixteenth-century, sense of the word. That is certainly the case today, whenPalladis Tamiais known primarily for a single chapter, “A Comparative Discourse of Our English Poets, with the Greeke, Latine, and Italiane Poets,” Meres's pioneering survey of English Renaissance writing, and above all for a handful of sentences in that chapter, which offer a rare glimpse into the early career of William Shakespeare. “As the soule ofEuphorbuswas thought to live inPythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule ofOvidlives in mellifluous and honytonguedShakespeare,”Meres declares. “AsEpius Stolosaid, that the Muses would speake withPlautustongue, if they would speak Latin: so I say that the Muses would speak withShakespearesfine filed phrase, if they would speake English” (281v, 282r).