Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting

Chris Stamatakis discusses Wyatt's literary importance, as a poetic innovator and as a pioneer of translation from continental and classical literature, and it examines the fascinating process by which Wyatt's texts are composed, handled, transmitted, and read by his early Tudor readers. Where other studies have interpreted Wyatt's poems through the lens of biography, this book suggests that readers should be alert to his playful, knowing transformation of texts-an activity of verbal turning which he encourages in his audiences too. By examining the original manuscripts, and by analysing the multiple (and often variant) copies of Wyatt's texts, in both manuscript and early print editions, this monograph relates the wealth of textual variants to the early modern concept of 'copia'-an abundance of words, which is the foundation for artistic display and the basis of written conversations in this literary culture.