ABSTRACT
James’s engagement with the cultures of manuscript and print spans a period of around forty years, and Scotland as well as England. He had comparatively unlimited access to both media, so we can be more certain in his case, than in the case of many of his contemporaries, that if he chose to circulate a work in manuscript it was not because he could not find a printer willing to print it and, equally, that if he chose to print a work in cheap quarto it was not because he could not afford to have it reproduced in prestigious hand-written presentation copies. His choices, in other words, were actual choices, dictated primarily by his perception of the relative merits of the two media. He seems to have realised both that ‘reverence’ – the response Donne associates with manuscript in the poem quoted – may also be inspired by print, and that ‘reverence’ is not necessarily the only desirable reader response. He therefore prioritised print to a degree unprecedented in a monarch, but he also circulated his writing in manuscript where this seemed best to suit a particular text, context, or readership.
