Signed, Sealed and Delivered ëLetterwriting in Renaissance Englandí Chronicles Bygone Art by Gary Tischler You have to wonder if there will ever be a book on the collected e-mails of famous or not so famous Americans of the 21st century. Given that so many e-mails are sent every second of the day, and so many deleted, itís rather doubtful. Sheer volume would make the task daunting for historians. Looking at, and reading, "Letterwriting in Renaissance England," the provocative and elegiac exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library, gets one thinking about how we communicate today and all the high-tech bric-a-brac that goes with it. Poetry isnít a word that comes to mind, but it is when you think about the Elizabethans of the 16th and 17th century, for whom letters were a major part of their livesówriting them, sharing them, reading them, putting them together, and getting them from here to there. As this exhibition shows, letters might have gotten lost in the delicate process of sending them, but they were rarely discarded. Great care, feeling and knowledge went into preparing and writing letters. With letters, you proposed marriage, made assignations, dabbled in politica l treachery, gossiped, certified business dealings, caught up with the news of the past month or even year, conducted diplomacy, declared your love and expressed your sympathy. The printing press was the new technology of the Elizabethan world and paper and pen was the royalty of communication. Letters were so important that books on how to write letters properly became a cottage industry. This was an age when secretaries took on an importance they have never had in modern times. After all, these were the men who wrote the documents, proclamations, pronouncements, and private and official letters of royalty. Secretaries owned the word in a way that Shakespeare, for instance, did not. This is an exhibition of words and letters culled from the Folgerís extensive collection. The results are to be read and looked at closely. It may seem dauntingóthere is no spell check, for instance, and the handwriting is difficult to make out, although both wall text and a catalogue have contemporary versions of the contents. But the effort is worthwhile because the exhibition, as all good history exhibitions ought to do, transports you to the past and makes you almost viscerally feel and begin to understand it, while also making you think about the present and how far weíve come and what weíve lost in the process. For the history buff, there are any number of curiosities here: the great English poet John Donneís eloquent but humble letters to his father-in-law for eloping with his daughter, for instance. (Donne was briefly set to be thrown into prison for his marriage to Anne More.) There are examples of the letters by two of Queen Elizabethís favorites, the earl of Leicester and the earl of Essex, the former adding eyebrows and coded messages for the queen. There is some mystery about who actually wrote Essexís letters, since Essex not only had an abundance of ego but also of secretaries. The exhibition concerns itself not only with the contents of letters but with the processóthe manuals for writing letters and the materials such as wax, parchment, paper and quill. Writing a letter was no easy matter. It was a kind of mechanical art form, and getting the letters sent was something else entirely. Initially, a kind of pony express was used with bearers on horseback or on foot. These were hired men and it wasnít until the ill-fated Charles I officially created a national postal system complete with routes and maps that things got a little better. Finally, what comes through in this exhibition is the shared experience created by letter writing. So much of the formal, the informal, and the nitty-gritty daily life of Renaissance England comes alive in these letters and their ability to communicate death, birth, love, longing, pronouncements, official acts and emotions, both bad and good. You get a feel for the times in those lettersóthe physical texture is here, as well as the memories. You get flashes of letter bearers in thunderstorms on country roads, of a young woman by candlelight, reading a letter or writing one, or a group of people huddled together sharing the news of a letter. This is an intimate world, where letters are like keepsakes, worn close to the heart, echoing in carefully crafted words down the centuries. What would we do today? Empty the hard drive, save up the Internet blogs, and cherish the coded, faceless names and messages from chat rooms? Somehow, itís not the same. There are no Shakespeares in our chat rooms. "Letterwriting in Renaissance England" runs through April 2 at the Folger Shakespeare Library, 201 East Capitol St., SE. For more information, please call (202) 544-7077 or visit www.folger.edu. Gary Tischler is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.