Henry Chettle, Kind-Heart’s Dream and Piers Plainness: Two Pamphlets from the Elizabethan Book Trade

Henry Chettle, Kind-Heart’s Dream and Piers Plainness: Two Pamphlets from the Elizabethan Book TradeOverview In these two little known pamphlets, published here for the first time together, you will find rollicking storytelling: Kind Hearts Dream brings to life the dog eat dog world of the London marketplace, while Piers Plainness recounts the trials of an apprentice who tries to survive corrupt masters during the fallout of a political coup. Despite their different settings and plots, these tales not only cast light upon Elizabethan pamphlet

Praise

“Scholars doing serious work on the pamphlet and literary culture of early modern England will find this edition of Chettle’s work very valuable.” — Constance C. Relihan, Dean and Professor of English, University College, Virginia Commonwealth University

“This edition makes two of Henry Chettle’s pamphlets approachable for both experts and novices in book history. It presents Chettle as a checkered but sympathetic figure who will allow advanced undergrads, grad students, and faculty to put a human face on the book trade. Chettle emerges as a more interesting writer, and fiction as a more self-reflexive genre, than we have seen before. Finally, the volume also gently and wittily contributes to a less Shakespeare-centric view of early modern literature as a field of production.” — Lori Humphrey Newcomb, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“In sum, this book’s introductory survey of scholarship is rendered with a careful eye to the details of the current debates in the History of the Book Studies and the political history of London’s vagabond subculture and indentured servant class. The edited pamphlets are worth reading alone for the editors’ annotations that offer lively backstories on the suggested innuendo of Chettle’s phrasings and sometimes wry remarks. The book will be useful to scholars of English Renaissance literature and will teach well in undergraduate and graduate courses focusing on the politics of London’s book trade as well as the development of English prose. Libraries will want to purchase this edition to provide access for students and scholars alike to the turbulent world of early modern book making in which some of our language’s best literature sees print—and lives on to this day—because of the Chettles of this world.” — Craig Dionne, review in Renaissance and Reformation

“an accessible, affordable edition of two under-studied Elizabethan texts that succeeds in communicating their interest to the general reader as well as offering a lively introduction to the potentially murky topic of the Elizabethan book trade.” — Tom Rutter, review in The Review of English Studies