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Was early modern writing paper expensive? (2018)
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An etiquette manual published in 1675 encourages the ostentatious display of blank paper as a show of respect, its writer suggesting that when composing a letter, to “make use of large Paper rather than small, and a whole sheet (though we write but six lines in the first Page) rather than half a one, is no inconsiderable piece of ceremony, one shewing reverence and esteem, the other familiarity or indifference” (Antoine de Courtin, The Rules of Civility). Nathaniel Bacon used a whole sheet, folded into a bifolium, to create this rough draft of a letter to Lord Ellesmere, even though he only needed a single leaf ( Folger MS L.d.122). As for Shakespeare’s papers, literary drafts were not valued in this period, and as Tiffany Stern and others have shown, the sorts of manuscripts that were produced for performance were ephemeral.
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