This volume describes the many ways in which poetic texts were shaped by compilers, stationers, and printers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Heffernan opens with an analysis of Richard Tottel's influential Songes and Sonettes (1557), which remained in print through 1587. As is well known, this is a compendium of poetry, including poems by Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, that also preserves works by other Henrician poets; Tottel added descriptive headers or (sometimes misleading) titles to poetry that had originally been composed without them and freely emended scansion, most egregiously in Wyatt's case.

The main term under consideration in this first chapter is “plain parcel,” as Tottel's book is described as comprising “fluid and shifting parcels” (38) to allude to moveable sections of poetry or its recontextualization. Reader annotations are of interest here: a Bodleian copy of Tottel has been corrected by an assiduous reader, while in the copy in the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas), two annotators remark in the margins, one noting classical references, the other supplying vernacular music to which poems could be sung (47). Then there is a copy of Shakespeare's First Folio in the Free Library of Philadelphia in which a reader (thought to be John Milton), using his edition of Tottel, identifies lines from the gravedigger's song in Hamlet (incorrectly) as an allusion to Surrey.

Chapter 2 describes different ways in which poetry collections were conceptualized in print. They might be conceived of as poesies (with a pun on posies, flowers—for example, A Smale handful of fragrant Flowers, 1575), forests (The Forrest of Fancy, 1579), galleries (A gorgious Gallery, of gallant Inventions, 1578), even paradise (The Paradyse of dainty devises, 1576). Books were given personas, becoming “animated and speaking” objects (60). This chapter concludes with discussion of Englands Helicon, a popular compilation of Elizabethan pastoral verse put together by stationers, which features the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and others.

Chapter 3 focuses mainly on the poetry of George Gascoigne, first published anonymously as A Hundreth sundrie Flowres bounde up in one small Poesie (1573), then claimed by the author when republished as The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire (1575). Heffernan points to changes between these two editions and discusses the elaborate narrative fictions and authorial performance that are differently promoted in each text.

Chapter 4 discusses English sonnet books, the fashion for which reached its peak in the 1590s with Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (1591, 1597). In printed sonnet books, which often include dozens, even hundreds, of poems, numbers replace verbal titles; Heffernan's attempt to provide a “microhistory of poetic numbering” (150) is valiant if occasionally repetitive. It is amusing, however, to note the occasional mixing of Arabic with Roman numerals and other peculiarities. In the case of Henry Constable's Diana, the titles, headings, and framing devices found in the manuscripts are entirely omitted in print, and numbers are given for each (English) poem in Italian. Numbered sonnets read together in a sequence could also create “conditions for fictions of poetic emotion to exceed the limit of a single sonnet” (127). Astrophel later appears appended to The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia (1598), corrected from a manuscript in possession of Sidney's sister, Mary Sidney Herbert; in this case, the sonnets are accompanied by Sidney's songs, which changes the reader's experience of the text. Nineteen sonnet books follow Astrophel and Stella (cited on a table, 144–45) until the vogue dies out.

Chapter 5 begins with discussion of the return of the manuscript as the preferred form for poetry in the 1620s and 1630s and what this meant for the transmission and publication of the poetry of John Donne. Heffernan makes an interesting case for the influence of John Marriot's Poems, By J. D. (1633), a collection of Donne, on Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare, Gent. (1640), an octavo put together by the stationer John Benson.

Heffernan's book is a useful addition to the larger history of print and demonstrates her extensive reading and careful consideration of works both famous and obscure.