Gascoigne's Accidents: Contingency, Skill, and the Logic of Writing

This article argues that the work of George Gascoigne represents a sophisticated attempt to come to terms with an issue at the heart of Elizabethan poetic authorship: poems, plays and even prose narratives were often occasional texts, subject to a range of worldly contingencies, but when published in print they assumed new identities and new meanings as part of a constructed corpus of work. Gascoigne confronts, both in his poetic theory and in practice, the fact that the processes of writing and publication are themselves contingent; and his fictions offer us multiple explorations of the human challenges of making sense of chaotic and unpredictable circumstances. The essay shows that he does so in part by adopting a rich language of chance, suddenness and accident, engaging with ancient and early modern philosophical and practical discourses about art, intention, judgement and equity. The essay deals with the full range of Gascoigne's eclectic output, but focuses especially on his pioneering miscellany, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), arguing for a fortuitous resonance between that book's own complex and rather accident‐ridden printing history and the conceptual preoccupations of its contents. Gascoigne is shown as a serious thinker about the nature and experience of poetic skill.