Blotted Lines

Desai challenges a long-standing legend that Shakespeare wrote without ever crossing out a line. Rather than accept that image of effortless genius, the book argues that the halting, untidy labor behind early modern poems can help today's teachers guide students who write about literature.

Through close study of manuscripts, the author follows George Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, John Davies of Hereford, Lady Anne Southwell, and Shakespeare as they work through their verses. Desai reads these drafts alongside the rhetorical theory of the period, the material culture surrounding manuscripts, and the social networks in which poems circulated, and finds recurring signs of frustration, hesitation, self-doubt, and insecurity.

These poets did not treat such discomfort as failure. Disrupting their own drafts could open the way to new versions, and that churn kept their thinking and learning moving. The book connects this scholarship with modern composition studies and asks early modern literary scholars to treat writing as both an action and a finished product. Poetry and criticism alike, the author contends, can show students how to build patience, collaborate with others, and take creative risks.