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

In these two little-known pamphlets, published here for the first time together, you will find rollicking storytelling: Kind Heart’s 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 production and print culture, but also give voice to the underrepresented precariat—indentured servants, itinerant labourers, and confidence men—to which Chettle belonged in his capacity as a printing-house factotum, author-for-hire, and notorious forger.

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

DONALD BEECHER is Chancellor’s Professor of English at Carleton University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His publishing ranges from translations of French, Italian, and Spanish plays to early literature and the cognitive sciences. Included are several editions of early English prose fiction, as well as work on lovesickness, sex changes, pharmacology, nostalgia, suspense, the inquisition, fairy- and folktales, and early music. Currently, he is writing on Milton’s Paradise Lost.

GRANT WILLIAMS is an Associate Professor of English at Carleton University. He researches rhetoric, psychology, and interiority in early modern English literature and culture. With William E. Engel and Rory Loughnane, he has coauthored The Memory Arts in Renaissance England: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and The Death Arts in Renaissance England: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).