23229 in the British Museum
contains
a single
folio which must have been torn from a manuscript identical with _W_.
folio which must have been torn from a manuscript identical with _W_.
John Donne
The younger Donne intervened
before the edition was issued, and either by authority or agreement
took it over. Marriot remained the publisher. The title-page which in
_1649_ was identical with that of _1635-39_, except for the change of
date and the 'W' in 'WITH', now appeared as follows:
POEMS,
_By_ J. D.
WITH
ELEGIES
ON THE
AUTHORS DEATH.
TO WHICH
_Is added divers Copies under his own hand
never before in print. _
_LONDON_,
Printed for _John Marriot_, and are
to be sold by _Richard Marriot_ at his shop
by _Chancery_ lane end over against the Inner
Temple gate. 1650.
The initials of the printer, M. F. , disappear, and the name of John
Marriot's son, partner, and successor, Richard, appears along with his
own. There is no great distance between St. Dunstan's Churchyard and
the end of Chancery Lane. With M. F. went the introductory _Printer
to the Understanders_, its place being taken by a dedicatory letter
in young Donne's most courtly style to William, Lord Craven, Baron of
Hamsted-Marsham.
In the body of the volume as prepared in 1649 no alteration was made.
The 'divers Copies . . . never before in print', of which the new editor
boasts, were inserted in a couple of sheets (or a sheet and a half,
aa, bb incomplete) at the end. These are variously bound up in
different copies, being sometimes before, sometimes at the end of
the _Elegies upon the Author_, sometimes before and among them. They
contain a quite miscellaneous assortment of writings, verse and
prose, Latin and English, by, or presumably by, Donne, with a few
complimentary verses on Donne taken from Jonson's _Epigrams_.
The text of Donne's own writings is carelessly printed. In short,
Donne's son did nothing to fix either the text or the canon of his
father's poems. The former, as it stands in the body of the volume
in the editions of 1650-54, he took over from Marriot and M. F. As
regards the latter, he speaks of the 'kindnesse of the Printer, . . .
adding something too much, lest any spark of this sacred fire might
perish undiscerned'; but he does not condescend to tell us, if he
knew, what these unauthentic poems are. He withdrew nothing.
In 1654 the poems were published once more, but printed from the same
types as in 1650. The text of the poems (pp. 1-368) is identical in
_1649_, _1650_, _1654_; of the additional matter (pp. 369-392) in
_1650_, _1654_. The only change made in the last is on the title-page,
where a new publisher's name appears,[11] as in the following
facsimile:
POEMS,
_By_ J. D.
WITH
ELEGIES
ON THE
AUTHORS DEATH.
TO WHICH
_Is added divers Copies under his own hand
never before in Print. _
_LONDON_,
Printed by _J. Flesher_, and are to be sold
by _John Sweeting_ at the Angel in
Popeshead-Alley. 1654.
James Flesher was the son of Miles Flesher, or Fletcher, who is
probably the M. F. of the earlier editions. John Sweeting was an
active bookseller and publisher, first at the Crown in Cornhill, and
subsequently at the Angel as above (1639-1661). He was the publisher
of many plays and poems, and in 1657 the publication of Donne's
_Letters to Severall Persons of Honour_ was transferred to him from
Richard Marriot, who issued them in 1651.
POEMS, &c.
BY
JOHN DONNE,
_late Dean of St. _ Pauls.
WITH
ELEGIES
ON THE
AUTHORS DEATH.
To which is added
_Divers Copies under his own hand_,
+Never before Printed. +
_In the SAVOY_,
Printed by _T. N. _ for _Henry Herringman_, at the sign of
the _Anchor_, in the lower-walk of the
_New-Exchange. _ 1669.
The last edition of Donne's poems which bears evidence of recourse
to manuscript sources, and which enlarged the canon of the poems, was
that of 1669. The younger Donne died in 1662, and this edition was
purely a printer's venture. Its title-page runs as opposite.
This edition added two elegies which a sense of propriety had hitherto
excluded from Donne's printed works, though they are in almost all
the manuscript collections, and a satire which most of the manuscripts
assign not to Donne but to Sir John Roe. The introductory material
remains as in _1650-54_ and unpaged; but the _Elegies to the Author_
are now paged, and the poems with the prose letters inserted in _1633_
and added to in _1635_ (see above, p. lxiii, note 8), the _Elegies to
the Author_, and the additional sheets inserted in _1650_, occupy pp.
1-414. The love _Elegies_ were numbered as in earlier editions, but
the titles which some had borne were all dropped. _Elegie XIIII_ (XII
in this edition) was enlarged. Two new Elegies were added, one (_Loves
Progress_) as _Elegie XVIII_, the second (_Going to Bed_) unnumbered
and simply headed _To his Mistress going to bed_. The text of the
poems underwent considerable alteration, some of the changes showing
a reversion to the text of _1633_, others a reference to manuscript
sources, many editorial conjecture.
The edition of 1669 is the last edition of Donne's poems which can
be regarded as in any degree an authority for the text of the poems,
because it is the last which affords evidence of access to independent
manuscript sources. All subsequent editions, till we come to those of
Grosart and Chambers, were based on these. If the editor preferred one
reading to another it was on purely internal evidence, a result of
his own decision as to which was the more correct or the preferable
reading. In 1719, for example, a new edition was brought out by the
well-known publisher Jacob Tonson. The title-page runs as over.
POEMS
ON SEVERAL
OCCASIONS.
Written by the Reverend
_JOHN DONNE_, D. D.
Late Dean of St. PAUL'S.
WITH
ELEGIES on the Author's Death.
To this Edition is added,
Some ACCOUNT of the LIFE
of the AUTHOR.
_LONDON_:
Printed for J. TONSON, and Sold by
W. TAYLOR at the _Ship_ in
_Pater-noster-Row_. 1719.
This edition opens with the Epistle Dedicatory as in _1650-69_,
which is followed by an abridgement of Walton's _Life_ of Donne. An
examination of the text of the poems shows clearly that this
edition was printed from that of 1669, but is by no means a slavish
reproduction. The editor has consulted earlier editions and corrected
mistakes, but I have found no evidence either that he knew the
editions of 1633 and 1635, or had access to manuscript collections. He
very wisely dropped the Satire 'Sleep next Society', inserted for the
first time by the editor of _1669_, and certainly not by Donne. It was
reinserted by Chalmers in 1810. [12]
These, then, are the early editions of Donne's poems. But the printed
editions are not the only form in which the poems, or the great
majority of the poems, have come down to us. None of these editions,
we have seen, was issued before the poet's death. None, so far as
we can discover (I shall discuss this point more fully later), was
printed from sources carefully prepared for the press by the author,
as were for example the _LXXX Sermons_ issued in 1640. But Donne's
poems were well known to many readers before 1633. One of the earliest
published references to them occurs in 1614, in a collection of
Epigrams by Thomas Freeman, called _Runne_ | _And a great Cast_ |
_The_ | _Second Book_.
Epigram 84.
To Iohn Dunne.
The _Storme_ describ'd hath set thy name afloate,
Thy _Calme_ a gale of famous winde hath got:
Thy _Satyres_ short, too soone we them o'relooke,
I prethee Persius write a bigger booke.
In 1616 Ben Jonson's _Epigrammes_ were published in the first (folio)
edition of his works, and they contain the Epigram, printed in this
edition, _To Lucy, Countesse of Bedford, with Mr. Donnes Satyres_. In
these and similar cases the 'bookes' referred to are not printed but
manuscript works. Mr. Chambers has pointed out (_Poems of John Donne_,
i, pp. xxxviii-ix) an interesting reference in Drayton's _Epistle to
Reynolds_ to poems circulating thus 'by transcription'; and Anthony
Wood speaks of Hoskins having left a 'book of poems neatly written'.
In Donne's own letters we find references to his poems, his paradoxes
and problems, and even a long treatise like the [Greek: BIATHANATOS],
being sent to his friends with injunctions of secrecy, and in the case
of the last with an express statement that it had not been, and was
not to be, printed. Sometimes the manuscript collection seems to have
been made by Donne himself, or on his instruction, for a special
friend and patron like Lord Ancrum; but after he had become a
distinguished Churchman who, as Jonson told Drummond, 'repenteth
highlie and seeketh to destroy all his poems,' it was his friends and
admirers who collected and copied them. An instructive reference to
the interest awakened in Donne's early poems by his fame as a preacher
comes to us from Holland. Constantine Huyghens, the Dutch poet, and
father of the more famous scientist, Christian, was a member of the
Dutch embassy in 1618, 1621-23, and again in 1624. He moved in the
best circles, and made the acquaintance of Donne ('great preacher and
great conversationalist', he calls him) at the house probably of Sir
Robert Killigrew. Writing to his friend and fellow-poet Hooft, in
1630, he says:[13]
'I think I have often entertained you with reminiscences of
Dr. Donne, now Dean of St. Pauls in London, and on account
of this remunerative post (such is the custom of the English)
held in high esteem, in still higher for the wealth of his
unequalled wit, and yet more incomparable eloquence in the
pulpit. Educated early at Court in the service of the great;
experienced in the ways of the world; sharpened by study; in
poetry, he is more famous than anyone. Many rich fruits from
the green branches of his wit[14] have lain mellowing among
the lovers of art, which now, when _nearly rotten with age_,
they _are distributing_. Into my hands have fallen, by the
help of my special friends among the gentlemen of that nation,
some five and twenty of the best sort of medlars. Among
our people, I cannot select anyone to whom they ought to be
communicated sooner than to you,[15] as this poets manner of
conceit and expression are exactly yours, Sir. '
This is a very interesting piece of evidence as to the manner in which
Donne's poems had been preserved by his friends, and the form in which
they were being distributed. There is no reference to publication. It
is doubtless due to this activity in collecting and transcribing the
poems of the now famous preacher that we owe the number of manuscript
collections dating from the years before and immediately after 1630.
Had Donne undertaken the publication of his own poems, such of these
manuscript collections as have been preserved--none of which
are autograph, and few or none of which have a now traceable
history--would have little importance for a modern editor. The most
that they could do would be to show us occasionally what changes a
poem had undergone between its earliest and its latest appearance.
But Donne's poems were not published in this way, and the manuscripts
cannot be ignored. They must have for his editor at least the
same interest and importance as the Quartos have for the editor
of Shakespeare. Whatever opinion he may hold, on _a priori_ or _a
posteriori_ grounds, regarding the superior authority of the First
Folio of Shakespeare's plays, no editor, not 'thirled to' a theory,
will deny that a right reading has been preserved for us often by the
Quartos and the Quartos only. No wise man will neglect the assistance
even of the more imperfect of them. Before therefore discussing the
relative value of the different editions, and the use that may be made
of the manuscripts, it will be well to give a short description of the
manuscripts which the present editor has consulted and used, of their
relation to one another, their comparative value, and the relation of
_some_ of them to the editions. It is, of course, possible that there
are manuscripts of Donne's poems which have not yet come to light; and
among them may be some more correctly transcribed than any which
has come into the present editor's hands. He has, however, examined
between twenty and thirty, and with the feeling recently of moving
in a circle--that new manuscripts were in part or whole duplicates of
those which had been already examined, and confirmed readings already
noted but did not suggest anything fresh.
I will divide the manuscripts into four classes, of which the first
two, it will be seen at a glance, are likely to be the most important
for the textual critic.
(1) Manuscript collections of portions of Donne's poems, e. g. the
_Satyres_. The 'booke' to which Freeman refers in the epigram quoted
above was probably a small collection of this kind, and we have seen
that Jonson sent the _Satyres_ to Lady Bedford, and Francis Davison
lent them to his brother. Of such collections I have examined the
following:
_Q. _ This is a small quarto manuscript, bound up with a number of
other manuscripts, in a volume (MS. 216) in the library of Queen's
College, Oxford. It is headed _Mr. John Dunnes Satires_, and contains
the five Satires (which alone I have accepted as Donne's own) followed
by _A Storme_, _A Calme_, and one song, _The Curse_ (see p. 41), here
headed _Dirae_. As Mr. Chambers says (_Poems of John Donne_, i, p.
xxxvi), this is probably just the kind of 'booke' which Freeman read.
The poems it contains are probably those of Donne's poems which were
first known outside the circle of his intimate friends.
What seems to be a duplicate of _Q_ is preserved among the Dyce MSS.
in the South Kensington Museum. This contains the five _Satyres_, and
the _Storme_ and _Calme_. The MSS. are evidently transcribed from the
same source, but one is not a copy of the other. They agree in such
exceptional readings as e. g. _Satyres_, I. 58 'Infanta of London'; 94
'goes in the way' &c. ; II. 86 'In wringing each acre'; 88 'Assurances
as bigge as glossie civill lawes'. The last suggests that the one is
a copy of the other, but again they diverge in such cases as III. 49
'Crants' _Dyce MS. _; 'Crates' _Q_; and IV. 215-16 'a Topclief would
have ravisht him quite away' _Q_, where the _Dyce MS. _ preserves the
normal 'a Pursevant would have ravisht him quite away'.
If manuscripts like _Q_ and the _Dyce MS. _ carry us back, as they seem
to do, to the form in which the _Satyres_ circulated before any of the
later collections of Donne's poems were made (between 1620 and 1630),
they are clearly of great importance for the editor. The text of the
_Satyres_ in _1633_ and the later editions, which closely resembles
that of one of the later MS. collections, presents many variants from
the older tradition. It is a difficult matter to decide how far these
may be the corrections of the author himself, or of the collector and
editor.
_W. _ This, the Westmoreland MS. , belonging to Mr. Edmund Gosse, is
one of the most interesting and valuable manuscripts of Donne's poems
which have come down to us. It is bound in its original vellum, and
was written, Mr. Warner, late Egerton Librarian, British Museum,
conjectured from the handwriting, 'a little later than 1625'. This
date agrees with what one would gather from the contents, for the
manuscript contains sonnets which must have been written after 1617,
but does not contain any of the hymns written just at the close of
Donne's life.
_W_ is a much larger 'book' than _Q_. It begins with the five
_Satyres_, as that does. Leaving one page blank, it then continues
with a collection of the _Elegies_ numbered, thirteen in all, of which
twelve are Love Elegies, and one, the last, a Funeral Elegy, 'Sorrow
who to this house. '[16] These are followed by an _Epithalamion_ (that
generally called 'made at Lincolns Inn') and a number of verse letters
to different friends, some of which are not contained in any of the
old editions. So many of them are addressed to Rowland Woodward, or
members of his family, that Mr. Gosse conjectures that the manuscript
was prepared for him, but this cannot be proved. [17] The letters are
followed by the _Holy Sonnets_, these by _La Corona_, and the book
closes (as many collections of the poems do) with a bundle of prose
_Paradoxes_, followed in this case by the _Epigrams_. Both the _Holy
Sonnets_ and the _Epigrams_ contain poems not printed in any of the
old editions.
It should be noted that though _W_ as a whole may have been
transcribed as late as 1625, it clearly goes back in portions to an
earlier date. The letters are headed e. g. To Mr. H. W. , To Mr. C.
B. , &c. Now the custom in manuscripts and editions is to bring these
headings up to date, changing 'To Mr. H. W. ' into 'To S^r Henry
Wotton'. That they bear headings which were correct at the date when
the poems were written points to their fairly direct descent from the
original copies.
If _Q_ probably represents the kind of manuscript which circulated
pretty widely, _W_ is a good representative of the kind which
circulated only among Donne's friends. Some of the poems escaped being
transcribed into larger collections and were not published till our
own day. The value of _W_ for the text of Donne's poems must stand
high. For some of the letters and religious poems it is our sole
authority. Though a unique manuscript now, it was probably not so
always, for Addl. MS.
23229 in the British Museum contains a single
folio which must have been torn from a manuscript identical with _W_.
The handwriting is slightly different, but the order of the poems and
their text prove the identity.
_A23. _ This same manuscript (Addl. MS. 23229), which is a very
miscellaneous collection of fragments, presented to the Museum by John
Wilson Croker, contains two other portions of what seem to have been
similar small 'books' of Donne's poems. The one is a fragment of what
seems to have been a carefully written copy of the _Epithalamion_,
with introductory _Eclogue_, written for the marriage of the Earl of
Somerset. Probably it was one of those prepared and circulated at
the time. The other consists of some leaves from a collection of the
_Satyres_ finely written on large quarto sheets.
_G. _ This is a manuscript containing only the _Metempsychosis_, or
_Progresse of the Soule_, now in the possession of Mr. Gosse, who
(_Life &c. of John Donne_, i. 141) states that it 'belonged to a
certain Bradon, and passed into the Phillipps Collection'. It is not
without errors, but its text is, on the whole, more correct than that
of the manuscript source from which the version of 1633 was set up in
the first instance.
(2) In the second class I place manuscripts which are, or aim at
being, complete collections of Donne's poems. Most of these belong to
the years between 1620 and 1633. They vary considerably in accuracy of
text, and in the care which has been taken to include only poems that
are authentic. They were made probably by professional copyists,
and some of those whose calligraphy is most attractive show that the
scribe must have paid the smallest attention to the meaning of what he
was writing.
Of those which I have examined, two groups of manuscripts seem to me
especially noteworthy, because both show that their collectors had a
clear idea of what were, and what were not, Donne's poems, and because
of the general accuracy with which the poems in one of them are
transcribed. Taken with the edition of 1633 they form an invaluable
starting-point for the determination of the canon of Donne's poems.
The first of these is represented by three manuscripts which I
have examined, _D_ (Dowden), _H49_ (Harleian MS. 4955), and _Lec_
(Leconfield).
_D_ is a small quarto manuscript, neatly written in a thin, clear hand
and in ordinary script. It was formerly in the Haslewood collection,
and is now in the possession of Professor Edward Dowden, Trinity
College, Dublin, by whose kindness I have had it by me almost all the
time that I have been at work on my edition.
_H49_ is a collection of Donne's poems, in the British Museum, bound
up with some by Ben Jonson and others. It is a large folio written
throughout apparently in the same hand. It opens with some poems and
masques by Jonson. A certain Doctor Andrewes' poems occupy folios
57-87. They are signed _Franc: Andrilla. London August 14. 1629_.
Donne's poems follow, filling folios 88 to 144_b_. Thereafter follow
more poems by Andrewes, Jonson, and others, with some prose letters by
Jonson.
_Lec. _ This is a large quarto manuscript, beautifully transcribed,
belonging to Lord Leconfield and preserved at Petworth House. Many of
the manuscripts in this collection were the property of Henry, ninth
Earl of Northumberland (1564-1632), the friend who communicated the
news of Donne's marriage to his father-in-law.
These three manuscripts are obviously derived from one common source.
They contain the same poems, except that _D_ has one more than _H49_,
and both of these have some which are not in _Lec_. The order of the
poems is the same, except that _D_ and _Lec_ show more signs of
an attempt to group the poems than _H49_. The text, with some
divergences, especially on the part of _Lec_, is identical. One
instance seems to point to one of them being the source of the others.
In the long _Obsequies to the Ld. Harrington, Brother to the Countess
of Bedford_, the original copyist, after beginning l. 159 'Vertue
whose flood', had inadvertently finished with the second half of l.
161, 'were [_sic_] blowne in, by thy first breath. ' This error is
found in all the three manuscripts. It may, however, have come from
the common source of this poem, and there are divergences in order and
text which make me think that they are thus derived from one common
source.
A special interest attaches to this collection, apart from the
relative excellence of its text and soundness of its canon, from the
probability that a manuscript of this kind was used for a large, and
that textually the best, part of the edition of 1633. This becomes
manifest on a close examination of the order of the poems and of their
text. Mr. Gosse has said, in speaking of the edition of 1633: 'The
poems are thrown together without any attempt at intelligent order;
neither date, nor subject, nor relation is in the least regarded. '
This is not entirely the case. Satires, Elegies, Epigrams, Songs are
grouped to some extent. The disorder which prevails is due to two
causes: (1) to the fact that the printer set up from a variety
of sources. There was no previous collected edition to guide him.
Different friends supplied collections, and of a few poems there were
earlier editions. He seems to have passed from one of these to another
as was most convenient at the moment. Perhaps some were lent him only
for a time. The differences between copies of _1633_ show that it was
prepared carefully, but emended from time to time while the printing
was actually going on. (2) The second source of the order of the poems
is their order in the manuscripts from which they were copied. Now
a comparison of the order in _1633_ with that in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_
reveals a close connexion between them, and throws light on the
composition of _1633_.
It is necessary, before instituting this comparison with _1633_, to
say a word on the order of the poems in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ themselves,
as it is not quite the same in all three. _H49_ is the most irregular,
perhaps therefore the earliest, each of the others showing efforts
to obtain a better grouping of the poems. All three begin with the
_Satyres_, of which _D_ and _Lec_ have five, _H49_ only four; but
the text of _Lec_ differs from that of the other two, agreeing
more closely with the version of _1633_ and of another group of
manuscripts. They have all, then, thirteen _Elegies_ in the same
order. After these _H49_ continues with a number of letters (_The
Storme_, _The Calme_, _To S^r Henry Wotton_, _To S^r Henry Goodyere_,
_To the Countesse of Bedford_, _To S^r Edward Herbert_, and others)
intermingled with Funeral Elegies (_Lady Markham_, _Mris Boulstred_)
and religious poems (_The Crosse_, _The Annuntiation_, _Good Friday_).
Then follows a long series of lyrical pieces, broken after _The
Funerall_ by _A Letter to the Lady Carey, and Mrs. Essex Rich_, the
_Epithalamion_ on the Palatine marriage, and an _Old Letter_ ('At once
from hence', p. 206). The lyrical pieces are then resumed, and the
collection ends with the Somerset _Eclogue_ and _Epithalamion_, the
_Letanye_, both sets of _Holy Sonnets_, a letter (_To the Countesse of
Salisbury_), and the long _Obsequies to the Ld. Harrington_.
_D_ makes an effort to arrange the poems following the _Elegies_ in
groups. The _Funeral Elegies_ come first, and two blank pages are
headed _An Elegye on Prince Henry_. The letters are then brought
together, and are followed by the religious poems dispersed in _H49_.
The lyrical poems follow piece by piece as in _H49_, and the whole
closes with the two epithalamia and the _Obsequies to the Ld.
Harrington_.
The order in _Lec_ resembles that of _H49_ more closely than that of
_D_. The mixed letters, funeral elegies, and religious poems follow
the _Elegies_ as in _H49_, but _Lec_ adds to them the two letters
(_Lady Carey_ and _The Countess of Salisbury_) and the _Letanie_ which
in _H49_ are dispersed through the lyrical pieces. _Lec_ does not
contain any of the _Holy Sonnets_, but after _The Letanie_ ten pages
are left blank, evidently intended to receive them. Thereafter, the
lyrical poems follow piece by piece as in _D_, _H49_, except that _The
Prohibition_ ('Take heed of loving mee') is omitted--a fact of some
interest when we come to consider _1633_. _Lec_ closes, like _D_, with
the epithalamia and the _Obsequies to the Lo: Harrington_.
Turning now to _1633_, we shall see that, whatever other sources the
editor of that edition used, one was a collection identical with, or
closely resembling, _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, especially _Lec_. That edition
begins with the _Progresse of the Soule_, which was _not_ derived from
this manuscript. Thereafter follow the two sets of _Holy Sonnets_, the
second set containing exactly the same number of sonnets, and in the
same order, as in _D_, _H49_, whereas other manuscripts, e. g. _B_,
_O'F_, _S_, _S96_, which will be described later, have more sonnets
and in a different order; and _W_, which agrees otherwise with _B_,
_O'F_, _S_, _S96_, adds three that are found nowhere else. The sonnets
are followed in _1633_ by the _Epigrams_, which are not in _D_, _H49_,
_Lec_, but after that the resemblance of _1633_ to _D_, _H49_, _Lec_
becomes quite striking. These manuscripts, we have seen, begin
with the _Satyres_. The edition, however, passes on at once to the
_Elegies_. Of the thirteen given in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, _1633_ prints
eight, omitting the first (_The Bracelet_), the second (_Going to
Bed_), the tenth (_Loves Warr_), the eleventh (_On his Mistris_),
and the thirteenth (_Loves Progresse_). That the editor, however,
had before him, and intended to print, the _Satyres_ and the thirteen
_Elegies_ as he found them in _his_ copy of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, is
proved by the following extract which Mr. Chambers quotes from the
Stationers' Register:
13^o September, 1632
John Marriot. Entered for his copy under the hands of Sir
Henry Herbert and both the Wardens, a book
of verse and poems (the five Satires, the first,
second, tenth, eleventh and thirteenth Elegies
being excepted) and these before excepted to
be his, when he brings lawful authority.
vi_d. _
written by Doctor John Dunn
This note is intelligible only when compared with this particular
group of manuscripts. In others the order is quite different.
This bar--which was probably dictated by reasons of propriety, though
it is difficult to see why the first and the eleventh _Elegies_ should
have been singled out--was got over later as far as the _Satyres_ were
concerned. They are printed after all the other poems, just before
the prose letters. But by this time the copy of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ had
perhaps passed out of Marriot's hands, for the text of the _Satyres_
seems to show that they were printed, not from this manuscript, but
from one represented by another group, which I shall describe later.
This is, however, not quite certain, for in _Lec_ the version of the
_Satyres_ given is not the same as in _D_, _H49_, but is that of this
second group of manuscripts. Several little details show that of
the three manuscripts _D_, _H49_, and _Lec_ the last most closely
resembles _1633_.
Following the _Elegies_ in _1633_ come a group of letters, epicedes,
and religious poems, just as in _H49_, _Lec_ (_D_ re-groups
them)--_The Storme_, _The Calme_, _To Sir Henry Wotton_, ('Sir, more
than kisses'), _The Crosse_, _Elegie on the Lady Marckham_, _Elegie
on Mris Boulstred_ ('Death I recant'), _To Sr Henry Goodyere_, _To Mr.
Rowland Woodward_, _To Sr Henry Wootton_ ('Here's no more newes'), _To
the Countesse of Bedford_ ('Reason is our Soules left hand'), _To
the Countesse of Bedford_ ('Madam, you have refin'd'), _To Sr Edward
Herbert, at Julyers_. Here _1633_ diverges. Having got into letters
to noble and other people the editor was anxious to continue them,
and accordingly from another source (which I shall discuss later)
he prints a long series of letters to the Countess of Bedford, the
Countess of Huntingdon, Mr. T. W. , and other more intimate friends
(they are 'thou', the Countesses 'you'), and Mrs. Herbert. He perhaps
returns to _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ in those to _The Lady Carey and Mrs.
Essex Riche, from Amyens_, and _To the Countesse of Salisbury_; and,
as in that manuscript, the Palatine and Essex epithalamia (to which,
however, _1633_ adds that written at Lincoln's Inn) are followed
immediately by the long _Obsequies to Lord Harrington_. Three odd
_Elegies_ follow, two of which (_The Autumnall_ and _The Picture_,
'Image of her') occur in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ in the same detached
fashion. Other manuscripts include them among the numbered _Elegies_.
_The Elegie on Prince Henry_, _Psalme 137_ (probably not by Donne),
_Resurrection, imperfect_, _An hymne to the Saints, and to Marquesse
Hamilton_, _An Epitaph upon Shakespeare_ (certainly not by Donne),
_Sapho to Philaenis_, follow in _1633_--a queerly consorted lot. The
_Elegie on Prince Henry_ is taken from the _Lachrymae Lachrymarum_ of
Joshua Sylvester (1612); the rest were possibly taken from some small
commonplace-book. This would account for the doubtful poems, the only
doubtful poems in _1633_. These past, the close connexion with our
manuscript is resumed. _The Annuntiation_ is followed, as in _H49_,
_Lec_, by _The Litanie_. Thereafter the lyrical pieces begin, as in
these manuscripts, with the song, 'Send home my long strayd eyes
to me. ' This is followed by two pieces which are not in _D_, _H49_,
_Lec_,--the impressive, difficult, and in manuscripts comparatively
rare _Nocturnall upon S. Lucies day_, and the much commoner
_Witchcraft by a picture_. Thereafter the poems follow piece by piece
the order in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_[18] until _The Curse_ is reached. [19]
Then, in what seems to have been the editor's or printer's regular
method of proceeding in this edition, he laid aside the manuscript
from which he was printing the _Songs and Sonets_ to take up another
piece of work that had come to hand, viz. _An Anatomie of the World_
with _A Funerall Elegie_ and _Of the Progresse of the Soule_, which
he prints from the edition of 1625. Without apparent rhyme or reason
these long poems are packed in between _The Curse_ and _The Extasie_.
With the latter poem _1633_ resumes the songs and (with the exception
of _The Undertaking_) follows the order in _Lec_ to _The Dampe_, with
which the series in the manuscripts closes. It has been noted that in
_Lec_, _The Prohibition_ (which in _D_, _H49_ follows _Breake of day_
and precedes _The Anniversarie_) is omitted. This must have been the
case in the manuscript used for _1633_, for it is omitted at this
place and though printed later was probably not derived from this
source.
With _The Dampe_ the manuscript which I am supposing the editor to
have followed in the main probably came to an end. The poems which
follow in _1633_ are of a miscellaneous character and strangely
conjoined. _The Dissolution_ (p. 64), _A Ieat Ring sent_ (p. 65),
_Negative Love_ (p. 66), _The Prohibition_ (p. 67), _The Expiration_
(p. 68), _The Computation_ (p. 69), complete the tale of lyrics. A few
odd elegies follow ('Language thou art,' 'You that are she,' 'To
make the doubt clear') with _The Paradox_. _A Hymne to Christ, at the
Authors last going into Germany_ is given a page to itself, and is
followed by _The Lamentations of Jeremy_, _The Satyres_, and _A Hymne
to God the Father_. Thereafter come the prose letters and the _Elegies
upon the Author_.
What this comparison of the order of the poems points to is borne out
by an examination of the text. The critical notes afford the materials
for a further verification, and I need not tabulate the resemblances
at length. In _Elegie IV_, for example, ll. 7, 8, which occur in all
the other manuscripts and editions, are omitted by _1633_ and by
_D_, _H49_, _Lec_. Again, when a song has no title in _1633_ it
has frequently none in the manuscript. When there are evidently two
versions of a poem, as e. g. in _The Good-morrow_ and _The Flea_, the
version given in _1633_ is generally that of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_. Later
editions often contaminate this with another version of the poem. At
the same time there are ever and again divergences between the edition
and the manuscript which are not to be ignored, and cannot always be
explained. Some are due to error in one or the other, but some point
either to divergence between the text of the editor's manuscript and
ours, or to the use by the editor of other sources as well as this.
In the fifth elegy (_The Picture_), for example, _1633_ twice seems
to follow, not _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, but another source, another group of
manuscripts which has been preserved; and in _The Aniversarie_ ll. 23,
24, the version of _1633_ is not that of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ but of
the same second group, which will be described later. On the whole,
however, it is clear that a manuscript closely resembling that now
represented by these three manuscripts supplied the editor of _1633_
with the bulk of the shorter poems, especially the older and more
privately circulated poems, the _Songs and Sonets_ and _Elegies_. When
he is not following this manuscript he draws from miscellaneous and
occasionally inferior sources.
It would be interesting if we could tell whence this manuscript was
obtained, and whether it was _a priori_ likely to be a good one. On
this point we can only conjecture, but it seems to me a fairly tenable
conjecture (though not to be built on in any way) that the nucleus of
the collection, at any rate, may have been a commonplace-book which
had belonged to Sir Henry Goodyere. The ground for this conjecture is
the inclusion in the edition of some prose letters addressed to this
friend, one in Latin and seven in English. There is indeed also one
addressed to the Countess of Bedford; but in the preceding letter to
Goodyere Donne says, 'I send you, with this, a letter which I sent to
the Countesse. It is not my use nor duty to do so. But for your having
it, there were but two consents, and I am sure you have mine, and you
are sure you have hers. ' He goes on to refer to some verses which are
the subject of the letter to the Countesse. There can be no doubt that
the letter printed is the letter sent to Goodyere. The Burley MS. (see
Pearsall-Smith's _Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton_, Oxford, 1907)
gives us a good example of how a gentleman in the seventeenth century
dealt with his correspondence. That contains, besides various letters,
as of Sidney to Queen Elizabeth on the Anjou marriage, and other
matter which recurs in commonplace-books, a number of poems and
letters, sent to Wotton by his friends, including Donne, and
transcribed by one or other of Wotton's secretaries. The letters have
no signatures appended, which is the case with the letters in the
1633 edition of Donne's poems. Wotton and Goodyere did not need to be
reminded of the authors, and perhaps did not wish others to know. The
reason then for the rather odd inclusion of nine prose letters in a
collection of poems is probably, that the principal manuscript used
by the printer was an 'old book'[20] which had belonged to Sir Henry
Goodyere and in which his secretaries had transcribed poems and
letters by Donne. Goodyere's collection of Donne's poems would not
necessarily be exhaustive, but it would be full; it would not like the
collections of others include poems that were none of Donne's; and its
text would be accurate, allowing for the carelessness, indifference,
and misunderstandings of secretaries and copyists.
After _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, the most carefully made collection of Donne's
poems is one represented now by four distinct manuscripts:
_A18. _ Additional MS. 18646, in the British Museum.
_N. _ The Norton MS. in Harvard College Library, Boston, of which an
account is given by Professor Norton in a note appended to the Grolier
Club edition.
_TCC. _ A manuscript in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge.
_TCD. _ A large manuscript in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin,
containing two apparently quite independent collections of poems--the
first a collection of Donne's poems with one or two additional poems
by Sir John Roe, Francis Beaumont, Sir Thomas Overbury, and Corbet;
the second a quite miscellaneous collection, put together some time in
the thirties of the seventeenth century, and including some of Donne's
poems. It is only the first of these which belongs to the group in
question.
These four manuscripts are closely connected with one another, but a
still more intimate relation exists between _A18_ and _TCC_ on the
one hand, _N_ and _TCD_ on the other. _N_ and _TCD_ are the larger
collections; _A18_ and _TCC_ contain each a smaller selection from the
same body of poems. Indeed it would seem that _N_ is a copy of _TCD,
A18_ of _TCC_.
_TCD_, to start with it, is a beautifully written collection
of Donne's poems beginning with the _Satyres_, passing on to an
irregularly arranged series of elegies, letters, lyrics and epicedes,
and closing with the _Metempsychosis_ or _Progresse of the Soule_ and
the _Divine Poems_, which include the hymns written in the last years
of the poet's life. _N_ has the same poems, arranged in the same
order, and its readings are nearly always identical with those of
_TCD_, so far as I can judge from the collation made for me. The
handwriting, unlike that of _TCD_, is in what is known as secretary
hand and is somewhat difficult to read. What points to the one
manuscript being a copy of the other is that in 'Sweetest Love, I do
not go' the scribe has accidentally dropped stanza 4, by giving its
last line to stanza 3, and passing at once to the fifth stanza. Both
manuscripts make this mistake, whereas _A18_ and _TCC_ contain the
complete poem. In other places _N_ and _TCD_ agree in their readings
where _A18_ and _TCC_ diverge. If the one is a copy of the other,
_TCD_ is probably the more authoritative, as it contains some marginal
indications of authorship which _N_ omits.
_TCC_ is a smaller manuscript than _TCD_, but seems to be written
in the same clear, fine hand. It does not contain the _Satyres_, the
Elegy (XI. in this edition) _The Bracelet_, and the epistles _The
Storme_ and _The Calme_, with which _N_ and _TCD_ open. It looks,
however, as though the sheets containing these poems had been torn
out. Besides these, however, _TCC_ omits, without any indication
of their being lost, an _Elegie to the Lady Bedford_ ('You that are
she'), the Palatine Epithalamion, a long series of letters[21]
which in _N_, _TCD_ follow that _To M. M. H. _ and precede _Sapho to
Philaenis_, the elegies on Prince Henry and on Lord Harington, and
_The Lamentations of Jeremy_. There are occasional differences in
the grouping of the poems; and _TCC_ does not contain some poems by
Beaumont, Corbet, Sir John Roe, and Sir Thomas Overbury which are
found in _N_ and _TCD_.
before the edition was issued, and either by authority or agreement
took it over. Marriot remained the publisher. The title-page which in
_1649_ was identical with that of _1635-39_, except for the change of
date and the 'W' in 'WITH', now appeared as follows:
POEMS,
_By_ J. D.
WITH
ELEGIES
ON THE
AUTHORS DEATH.
TO WHICH
_Is added divers Copies under his own hand
never before in print. _
_LONDON_,
Printed for _John Marriot_, and are
to be sold by _Richard Marriot_ at his shop
by _Chancery_ lane end over against the Inner
Temple gate. 1650.
The initials of the printer, M. F. , disappear, and the name of John
Marriot's son, partner, and successor, Richard, appears along with his
own. There is no great distance between St. Dunstan's Churchyard and
the end of Chancery Lane. With M. F. went the introductory _Printer
to the Understanders_, its place being taken by a dedicatory letter
in young Donne's most courtly style to William, Lord Craven, Baron of
Hamsted-Marsham.
In the body of the volume as prepared in 1649 no alteration was made.
The 'divers Copies . . . never before in print', of which the new editor
boasts, were inserted in a couple of sheets (or a sheet and a half,
aa, bb incomplete) at the end. These are variously bound up in
different copies, being sometimes before, sometimes at the end of
the _Elegies upon the Author_, sometimes before and among them. They
contain a quite miscellaneous assortment of writings, verse and
prose, Latin and English, by, or presumably by, Donne, with a few
complimentary verses on Donne taken from Jonson's _Epigrams_.
The text of Donne's own writings is carelessly printed. In short,
Donne's son did nothing to fix either the text or the canon of his
father's poems. The former, as it stands in the body of the volume
in the editions of 1650-54, he took over from Marriot and M. F. As
regards the latter, he speaks of the 'kindnesse of the Printer, . . .
adding something too much, lest any spark of this sacred fire might
perish undiscerned'; but he does not condescend to tell us, if he
knew, what these unauthentic poems are. He withdrew nothing.
In 1654 the poems were published once more, but printed from the same
types as in 1650. The text of the poems (pp. 1-368) is identical in
_1649_, _1650_, _1654_; of the additional matter (pp. 369-392) in
_1650_, _1654_. The only change made in the last is on the title-page,
where a new publisher's name appears,[11] as in the following
facsimile:
POEMS,
_By_ J. D.
WITH
ELEGIES
ON THE
AUTHORS DEATH.
TO WHICH
_Is added divers Copies under his own hand
never before in Print. _
_LONDON_,
Printed by _J. Flesher_, and are to be sold
by _John Sweeting_ at the Angel in
Popeshead-Alley. 1654.
James Flesher was the son of Miles Flesher, or Fletcher, who is
probably the M. F. of the earlier editions. John Sweeting was an
active bookseller and publisher, first at the Crown in Cornhill, and
subsequently at the Angel as above (1639-1661). He was the publisher
of many plays and poems, and in 1657 the publication of Donne's
_Letters to Severall Persons of Honour_ was transferred to him from
Richard Marriot, who issued them in 1651.
POEMS, &c.
BY
JOHN DONNE,
_late Dean of St. _ Pauls.
WITH
ELEGIES
ON THE
AUTHORS DEATH.
To which is added
_Divers Copies under his own hand_,
+Never before Printed. +
_In the SAVOY_,
Printed by _T. N. _ for _Henry Herringman_, at the sign of
the _Anchor_, in the lower-walk of the
_New-Exchange. _ 1669.
The last edition of Donne's poems which bears evidence of recourse
to manuscript sources, and which enlarged the canon of the poems, was
that of 1669. The younger Donne died in 1662, and this edition was
purely a printer's venture. Its title-page runs as opposite.
This edition added two elegies which a sense of propriety had hitherto
excluded from Donne's printed works, though they are in almost all
the manuscript collections, and a satire which most of the manuscripts
assign not to Donne but to Sir John Roe. The introductory material
remains as in _1650-54_ and unpaged; but the _Elegies to the Author_
are now paged, and the poems with the prose letters inserted in _1633_
and added to in _1635_ (see above, p. lxiii, note 8), the _Elegies to
the Author_, and the additional sheets inserted in _1650_, occupy pp.
1-414. The love _Elegies_ were numbered as in earlier editions, but
the titles which some had borne were all dropped. _Elegie XIIII_ (XII
in this edition) was enlarged. Two new Elegies were added, one (_Loves
Progress_) as _Elegie XVIII_, the second (_Going to Bed_) unnumbered
and simply headed _To his Mistress going to bed_. The text of the
poems underwent considerable alteration, some of the changes showing
a reversion to the text of _1633_, others a reference to manuscript
sources, many editorial conjecture.
The edition of 1669 is the last edition of Donne's poems which can
be regarded as in any degree an authority for the text of the poems,
because it is the last which affords evidence of access to independent
manuscript sources. All subsequent editions, till we come to those of
Grosart and Chambers, were based on these. If the editor preferred one
reading to another it was on purely internal evidence, a result of
his own decision as to which was the more correct or the preferable
reading. In 1719, for example, a new edition was brought out by the
well-known publisher Jacob Tonson. The title-page runs as over.
POEMS
ON SEVERAL
OCCASIONS.
Written by the Reverend
_JOHN DONNE_, D. D.
Late Dean of St. PAUL'S.
WITH
ELEGIES on the Author's Death.
To this Edition is added,
Some ACCOUNT of the LIFE
of the AUTHOR.
_LONDON_:
Printed for J. TONSON, and Sold by
W. TAYLOR at the _Ship_ in
_Pater-noster-Row_. 1719.
This edition opens with the Epistle Dedicatory as in _1650-69_,
which is followed by an abridgement of Walton's _Life_ of Donne. An
examination of the text of the poems shows clearly that this
edition was printed from that of 1669, but is by no means a slavish
reproduction. The editor has consulted earlier editions and corrected
mistakes, but I have found no evidence either that he knew the
editions of 1633 and 1635, or had access to manuscript collections. He
very wisely dropped the Satire 'Sleep next Society', inserted for the
first time by the editor of _1669_, and certainly not by Donne. It was
reinserted by Chalmers in 1810. [12]
These, then, are the early editions of Donne's poems. But the printed
editions are not the only form in which the poems, or the great
majority of the poems, have come down to us. None of these editions,
we have seen, was issued before the poet's death. None, so far as
we can discover (I shall discuss this point more fully later), was
printed from sources carefully prepared for the press by the author,
as were for example the _LXXX Sermons_ issued in 1640. But Donne's
poems were well known to many readers before 1633. One of the earliest
published references to them occurs in 1614, in a collection of
Epigrams by Thomas Freeman, called _Runne_ | _And a great Cast_ |
_The_ | _Second Book_.
Epigram 84.
To Iohn Dunne.
The _Storme_ describ'd hath set thy name afloate,
Thy _Calme_ a gale of famous winde hath got:
Thy _Satyres_ short, too soone we them o'relooke,
I prethee Persius write a bigger booke.
In 1616 Ben Jonson's _Epigrammes_ were published in the first (folio)
edition of his works, and they contain the Epigram, printed in this
edition, _To Lucy, Countesse of Bedford, with Mr. Donnes Satyres_. In
these and similar cases the 'bookes' referred to are not printed but
manuscript works. Mr. Chambers has pointed out (_Poems of John Donne_,
i, pp. xxxviii-ix) an interesting reference in Drayton's _Epistle to
Reynolds_ to poems circulating thus 'by transcription'; and Anthony
Wood speaks of Hoskins having left a 'book of poems neatly written'.
In Donne's own letters we find references to his poems, his paradoxes
and problems, and even a long treatise like the [Greek: BIATHANATOS],
being sent to his friends with injunctions of secrecy, and in the case
of the last with an express statement that it had not been, and was
not to be, printed. Sometimes the manuscript collection seems to have
been made by Donne himself, or on his instruction, for a special
friend and patron like Lord Ancrum; but after he had become a
distinguished Churchman who, as Jonson told Drummond, 'repenteth
highlie and seeketh to destroy all his poems,' it was his friends and
admirers who collected and copied them. An instructive reference to
the interest awakened in Donne's early poems by his fame as a preacher
comes to us from Holland. Constantine Huyghens, the Dutch poet, and
father of the more famous scientist, Christian, was a member of the
Dutch embassy in 1618, 1621-23, and again in 1624. He moved in the
best circles, and made the acquaintance of Donne ('great preacher and
great conversationalist', he calls him) at the house probably of Sir
Robert Killigrew. Writing to his friend and fellow-poet Hooft, in
1630, he says:[13]
'I think I have often entertained you with reminiscences of
Dr. Donne, now Dean of St. Pauls in London, and on account
of this remunerative post (such is the custom of the English)
held in high esteem, in still higher for the wealth of his
unequalled wit, and yet more incomparable eloquence in the
pulpit. Educated early at Court in the service of the great;
experienced in the ways of the world; sharpened by study; in
poetry, he is more famous than anyone. Many rich fruits from
the green branches of his wit[14] have lain mellowing among
the lovers of art, which now, when _nearly rotten with age_,
they _are distributing_. Into my hands have fallen, by the
help of my special friends among the gentlemen of that nation,
some five and twenty of the best sort of medlars. Among
our people, I cannot select anyone to whom they ought to be
communicated sooner than to you,[15] as this poets manner of
conceit and expression are exactly yours, Sir. '
This is a very interesting piece of evidence as to the manner in which
Donne's poems had been preserved by his friends, and the form in which
they were being distributed. There is no reference to publication. It
is doubtless due to this activity in collecting and transcribing the
poems of the now famous preacher that we owe the number of manuscript
collections dating from the years before and immediately after 1630.
Had Donne undertaken the publication of his own poems, such of these
manuscript collections as have been preserved--none of which
are autograph, and few or none of which have a now traceable
history--would have little importance for a modern editor. The most
that they could do would be to show us occasionally what changes a
poem had undergone between its earliest and its latest appearance.
But Donne's poems were not published in this way, and the manuscripts
cannot be ignored. They must have for his editor at least the
same interest and importance as the Quartos have for the editor
of Shakespeare. Whatever opinion he may hold, on _a priori_ or _a
posteriori_ grounds, regarding the superior authority of the First
Folio of Shakespeare's plays, no editor, not 'thirled to' a theory,
will deny that a right reading has been preserved for us often by the
Quartos and the Quartos only. No wise man will neglect the assistance
even of the more imperfect of them. Before therefore discussing the
relative value of the different editions, and the use that may be made
of the manuscripts, it will be well to give a short description of the
manuscripts which the present editor has consulted and used, of their
relation to one another, their comparative value, and the relation of
_some_ of them to the editions. It is, of course, possible that there
are manuscripts of Donne's poems which have not yet come to light; and
among them may be some more correctly transcribed than any which
has come into the present editor's hands. He has, however, examined
between twenty and thirty, and with the feeling recently of moving
in a circle--that new manuscripts were in part or whole duplicates of
those which had been already examined, and confirmed readings already
noted but did not suggest anything fresh.
I will divide the manuscripts into four classes, of which the first
two, it will be seen at a glance, are likely to be the most important
for the textual critic.
(1) Manuscript collections of portions of Donne's poems, e. g. the
_Satyres_. The 'booke' to which Freeman refers in the epigram quoted
above was probably a small collection of this kind, and we have seen
that Jonson sent the _Satyres_ to Lady Bedford, and Francis Davison
lent them to his brother. Of such collections I have examined the
following:
_Q. _ This is a small quarto manuscript, bound up with a number of
other manuscripts, in a volume (MS. 216) in the library of Queen's
College, Oxford. It is headed _Mr. John Dunnes Satires_, and contains
the five Satires (which alone I have accepted as Donne's own) followed
by _A Storme_, _A Calme_, and one song, _The Curse_ (see p. 41), here
headed _Dirae_. As Mr. Chambers says (_Poems of John Donne_, i, p.
xxxvi), this is probably just the kind of 'booke' which Freeman read.
The poems it contains are probably those of Donne's poems which were
first known outside the circle of his intimate friends.
What seems to be a duplicate of _Q_ is preserved among the Dyce MSS.
in the South Kensington Museum. This contains the five _Satyres_, and
the _Storme_ and _Calme_. The MSS. are evidently transcribed from the
same source, but one is not a copy of the other. They agree in such
exceptional readings as e. g. _Satyres_, I. 58 'Infanta of London'; 94
'goes in the way' &c. ; II. 86 'In wringing each acre'; 88 'Assurances
as bigge as glossie civill lawes'. The last suggests that the one is
a copy of the other, but again they diverge in such cases as III. 49
'Crants' _Dyce MS. _; 'Crates' _Q_; and IV. 215-16 'a Topclief would
have ravisht him quite away' _Q_, where the _Dyce MS. _ preserves the
normal 'a Pursevant would have ravisht him quite away'.
If manuscripts like _Q_ and the _Dyce MS. _ carry us back, as they seem
to do, to the form in which the _Satyres_ circulated before any of the
later collections of Donne's poems were made (between 1620 and 1630),
they are clearly of great importance for the editor. The text of the
_Satyres_ in _1633_ and the later editions, which closely resembles
that of one of the later MS. collections, presents many variants from
the older tradition. It is a difficult matter to decide how far these
may be the corrections of the author himself, or of the collector and
editor.
_W. _ This, the Westmoreland MS. , belonging to Mr. Edmund Gosse, is
one of the most interesting and valuable manuscripts of Donne's poems
which have come down to us. It is bound in its original vellum, and
was written, Mr. Warner, late Egerton Librarian, British Museum,
conjectured from the handwriting, 'a little later than 1625'. This
date agrees with what one would gather from the contents, for the
manuscript contains sonnets which must have been written after 1617,
but does not contain any of the hymns written just at the close of
Donne's life.
_W_ is a much larger 'book' than _Q_. It begins with the five
_Satyres_, as that does. Leaving one page blank, it then continues
with a collection of the _Elegies_ numbered, thirteen in all, of which
twelve are Love Elegies, and one, the last, a Funeral Elegy, 'Sorrow
who to this house. '[16] These are followed by an _Epithalamion_ (that
generally called 'made at Lincolns Inn') and a number of verse letters
to different friends, some of which are not contained in any of the
old editions. So many of them are addressed to Rowland Woodward, or
members of his family, that Mr. Gosse conjectures that the manuscript
was prepared for him, but this cannot be proved. [17] The letters are
followed by the _Holy Sonnets_, these by _La Corona_, and the book
closes (as many collections of the poems do) with a bundle of prose
_Paradoxes_, followed in this case by the _Epigrams_. Both the _Holy
Sonnets_ and the _Epigrams_ contain poems not printed in any of the
old editions.
It should be noted that though _W_ as a whole may have been
transcribed as late as 1625, it clearly goes back in portions to an
earlier date. The letters are headed e. g. To Mr. H. W. , To Mr. C.
B. , &c. Now the custom in manuscripts and editions is to bring these
headings up to date, changing 'To Mr. H. W. ' into 'To S^r Henry
Wotton'. That they bear headings which were correct at the date when
the poems were written points to their fairly direct descent from the
original copies.
If _Q_ probably represents the kind of manuscript which circulated
pretty widely, _W_ is a good representative of the kind which
circulated only among Donne's friends. Some of the poems escaped being
transcribed into larger collections and were not published till our
own day. The value of _W_ for the text of Donne's poems must stand
high. For some of the letters and religious poems it is our sole
authority. Though a unique manuscript now, it was probably not so
always, for Addl. MS.
23229 in the British Museum contains a single
folio which must have been torn from a manuscript identical with _W_.
The handwriting is slightly different, but the order of the poems and
their text prove the identity.
_A23. _ This same manuscript (Addl. MS. 23229), which is a very
miscellaneous collection of fragments, presented to the Museum by John
Wilson Croker, contains two other portions of what seem to have been
similar small 'books' of Donne's poems. The one is a fragment of what
seems to have been a carefully written copy of the _Epithalamion_,
with introductory _Eclogue_, written for the marriage of the Earl of
Somerset. Probably it was one of those prepared and circulated at
the time. The other consists of some leaves from a collection of the
_Satyres_ finely written on large quarto sheets.
_G. _ This is a manuscript containing only the _Metempsychosis_, or
_Progresse of the Soule_, now in the possession of Mr. Gosse, who
(_Life &c. of John Donne_, i. 141) states that it 'belonged to a
certain Bradon, and passed into the Phillipps Collection'. It is not
without errors, but its text is, on the whole, more correct than that
of the manuscript source from which the version of 1633 was set up in
the first instance.
(2) In the second class I place manuscripts which are, or aim at
being, complete collections of Donne's poems. Most of these belong to
the years between 1620 and 1633. They vary considerably in accuracy of
text, and in the care which has been taken to include only poems that
are authentic. They were made probably by professional copyists,
and some of those whose calligraphy is most attractive show that the
scribe must have paid the smallest attention to the meaning of what he
was writing.
Of those which I have examined, two groups of manuscripts seem to me
especially noteworthy, because both show that their collectors had a
clear idea of what were, and what were not, Donne's poems, and because
of the general accuracy with which the poems in one of them are
transcribed. Taken with the edition of 1633 they form an invaluable
starting-point for the determination of the canon of Donne's poems.
The first of these is represented by three manuscripts which I
have examined, _D_ (Dowden), _H49_ (Harleian MS. 4955), and _Lec_
(Leconfield).
_D_ is a small quarto manuscript, neatly written in a thin, clear hand
and in ordinary script. It was formerly in the Haslewood collection,
and is now in the possession of Professor Edward Dowden, Trinity
College, Dublin, by whose kindness I have had it by me almost all the
time that I have been at work on my edition.
_H49_ is a collection of Donne's poems, in the British Museum, bound
up with some by Ben Jonson and others. It is a large folio written
throughout apparently in the same hand. It opens with some poems and
masques by Jonson. A certain Doctor Andrewes' poems occupy folios
57-87. They are signed _Franc: Andrilla. London August 14. 1629_.
Donne's poems follow, filling folios 88 to 144_b_. Thereafter follow
more poems by Andrewes, Jonson, and others, with some prose letters by
Jonson.
_Lec. _ This is a large quarto manuscript, beautifully transcribed,
belonging to Lord Leconfield and preserved at Petworth House. Many of
the manuscripts in this collection were the property of Henry, ninth
Earl of Northumberland (1564-1632), the friend who communicated the
news of Donne's marriage to his father-in-law.
These three manuscripts are obviously derived from one common source.
They contain the same poems, except that _D_ has one more than _H49_,
and both of these have some which are not in _Lec_. The order of the
poems is the same, except that _D_ and _Lec_ show more signs of
an attempt to group the poems than _H49_. The text, with some
divergences, especially on the part of _Lec_, is identical. One
instance seems to point to one of them being the source of the others.
In the long _Obsequies to the Ld. Harrington, Brother to the Countess
of Bedford_, the original copyist, after beginning l. 159 'Vertue
whose flood', had inadvertently finished with the second half of l.
161, 'were [_sic_] blowne in, by thy first breath. ' This error is
found in all the three manuscripts. It may, however, have come from
the common source of this poem, and there are divergences in order and
text which make me think that they are thus derived from one common
source.
A special interest attaches to this collection, apart from the
relative excellence of its text and soundness of its canon, from the
probability that a manuscript of this kind was used for a large, and
that textually the best, part of the edition of 1633. This becomes
manifest on a close examination of the order of the poems and of their
text. Mr. Gosse has said, in speaking of the edition of 1633: 'The
poems are thrown together without any attempt at intelligent order;
neither date, nor subject, nor relation is in the least regarded. '
This is not entirely the case. Satires, Elegies, Epigrams, Songs are
grouped to some extent. The disorder which prevails is due to two
causes: (1) to the fact that the printer set up from a variety
of sources. There was no previous collected edition to guide him.
Different friends supplied collections, and of a few poems there were
earlier editions. He seems to have passed from one of these to another
as was most convenient at the moment. Perhaps some were lent him only
for a time. The differences between copies of _1633_ show that it was
prepared carefully, but emended from time to time while the printing
was actually going on. (2) The second source of the order of the poems
is their order in the manuscripts from which they were copied. Now
a comparison of the order in _1633_ with that in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_
reveals a close connexion between them, and throws light on the
composition of _1633_.
It is necessary, before instituting this comparison with _1633_, to
say a word on the order of the poems in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ themselves,
as it is not quite the same in all three. _H49_ is the most irregular,
perhaps therefore the earliest, each of the others showing efforts
to obtain a better grouping of the poems. All three begin with the
_Satyres_, of which _D_ and _Lec_ have five, _H49_ only four; but
the text of _Lec_ differs from that of the other two, agreeing
more closely with the version of _1633_ and of another group of
manuscripts. They have all, then, thirteen _Elegies_ in the same
order. After these _H49_ continues with a number of letters (_The
Storme_, _The Calme_, _To S^r Henry Wotton_, _To S^r Henry Goodyere_,
_To the Countesse of Bedford_, _To S^r Edward Herbert_, and others)
intermingled with Funeral Elegies (_Lady Markham_, _Mris Boulstred_)
and religious poems (_The Crosse_, _The Annuntiation_, _Good Friday_).
Then follows a long series of lyrical pieces, broken after _The
Funerall_ by _A Letter to the Lady Carey, and Mrs. Essex Rich_, the
_Epithalamion_ on the Palatine marriage, and an _Old Letter_ ('At once
from hence', p. 206). The lyrical pieces are then resumed, and the
collection ends with the Somerset _Eclogue_ and _Epithalamion_, the
_Letanye_, both sets of _Holy Sonnets_, a letter (_To the Countesse of
Salisbury_), and the long _Obsequies to the Ld. Harrington_.
_D_ makes an effort to arrange the poems following the _Elegies_ in
groups. The _Funeral Elegies_ come first, and two blank pages are
headed _An Elegye on Prince Henry_. The letters are then brought
together, and are followed by the religious poems dispersed in _H49_.
The lyrical poems follow piece by piece as in _H49_, and the whole
closes with the two epithalamia and the _Obsequies to the Ld.
Harrington_.
The order in _Lec_ resembles that of _H49_ more closely than that of
_D_. The mixed letters, funeral elegies, and religious poems follow
the _Elegies_ as in _H49_, but _Lec_ adds to them the two letters
(_Lady Carey_ and _The Countess of Salisbury_) and the _Letanie_ which
in _H49_ are dispersed through the lyrical pieces. _Lec_ does not
contain any of the _Holy Sonnets_, but after _The Letanie_ ten pages
are left blank, evidently intended to receive them. Thereafter, the
lyrical poems follow piece by piece as in _D_, _H49_, except that _The
Prohibition_ ('Take heed of loving mee') is omitted--a fact of some
interest when we come to consider _1633_. _Lec_ closes, like _D_, with
the epithalamia and the _Obsequies to the Lo: Harrington_.
Turning now to _1633_, we shall see that, whatever other sources the
editor of that edition used, one was a collection identical with, or
closely resembling, _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, especially _Lec_. That edition
begins with the _Progresse of the Soule_, which was _not_ derived from
this manuscript. Thereafter follow the two sets of _Holy Sonnets_, the
second set containing exactly the same number of sonnets, and in the
same order, as in _D_, _H49_, whereas other manuscripts, e. g. _B_,
_O'F_, _S_, _S96_, which will be described later, have more sonnets
and in a different order; and _W_, which agrees otherwise with _B_,
_O'F_, _S_, _S96_, adds three that are found nowhere else. The sonnets
are followed in _1633_ by the _Epigrams_, which are not in _D_, _H49_,
_Lec_, but after that the resemblance of _1633_ to _D_, _H49_, _Lec_
becomes quite striking. These manuscripts, we have seen, begin
with the _Satyres_. The edition, however, passes on at once to the
_Elegies_. Of the thirteen given in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, _1633_ prints
eight, omitting the first (_The Bracelet_), the second (_Going to
Bed_), the tenth (_Loves Warr_), the eleventh (_On his Mistris_),
and the thirteenth (_Loves Progresse_). That the editor, however,
had before him, and intended to print, the _Satyres_ and the thirteen
_Elegies_ as he found them in _his_ copy of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, is
proved by the following extract which Mr. Chambers quotes from the
Stationers' Register:
13^o September, 1632
John Marriot. Entered for his copy under the hands of Sir
Henry Herbert and both the Wardens, a book
of verse and poems (the five Satires, the first,
second, tenth, eleventh and thirteenth Elegies
being excepted) and these before excepted to
be his, when he brings lawful authority.
vi_d. _
written by Doctor John Dunn
This note is intelligible only when compared with this particular
group of manuscripts. In others the order is quite different.
This bar--which was probably dictated by reasons of propriety, though
it is difficult to see why the first and the eleventh _Elegies_ should
have been singled out--was got over later as far as the _Satyres_ were
concerned. They are printed after all the other poems, just before
the prose letters. But by this time the copy of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ had
perhaps passed out of Marriot's hands, for the text of the _Satyres_
seems to show that they were printed, not from this manuscript, but
from one represented by another group, which I shall describe later.
This is, however, not quite certain, for in _Lec_ the version of the
_Satyres_ given is not the same as in _D_, _H49_, but is that of this
second group of manuscripts. Several little details show that of
the three manuscripts _D_, _H49_, and _Lec_ the last most closely
resembles _1633_.
Following the _Elegies_ in _1633_ come a group of letters, epicedes,
and religious poems, just as in _H49_, _Lec_ (_D_ re-groups
them)--_The Storme_, _The Calme_, _To Sir Henry Wotton_, ('Sir, more
than kisses'), _The Crosse_, _Elegie on the Lady Marckham_, _Elegie
on Mris Boulstred_ ('Death I recant'), _To Sr Henry Goodyere_, _To Mr.
Rowland Woodward_, _To Sr Henry Wootton_ ('Here's no more newes'), _To
the Countesse of Bedford_ ('Reason is our Soules left hand'), _To
the Countesse of Bedford_ ('Madam, you have refin'd'), _To Sr Edward
Herbert, at Julyers_. Here _1633_ diverges. Having got into letters
to noble and other people the editor was anxious to continue them,
and accordingly from another source (which I shall discuss later)
he prints a long series of letters to the Countess of Bedford, the
Countess of Huntingdon, Mr. T. W. , and other more intimate friends
(they are 'thou', the Countesses 'you'), and Mrs. Herbert. He perhaps
returns to _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ in those to _The Lady Carey and Mrs.
Essex Riche, from Amyens_, and _To the Countesse of Salisbury_; and,
as in that manuscript, the Palatine and Essex epithalamia (to which,
however, _1633_ adds that written at Lincoln's Inn) are followed
immediately by the long _Obsequies to Lord Harrington_. Three odd
_Elegies_ follow, two of which (_The Autumnall_ and _The Picture_,
'Image of her') occur in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ in the same detached
fashion. Other manuscripts include them among the numbered _Elegies_.
_The Elegie on Prince Henry_, _Psalme 137_ (probably not by Donne),
_Resurrection, imperfect_, _An hymne to the Saints, and to Marquesse
Hamilton_, _An Epitaph upon Shakespeare_ (certainly not by Donne),
_Sapho to Philaenis_, follow in _1633_--a queerly consorted lot. The
_Elegie on Prince Henry_ is taken from the _Lachrymae Lachrymarum_ of
Joshua Sylvester (1612); the rest were possibly taken from some small
commonplace-book. This would account for the doubtful poems, the only
doubtful poems in _1633_. These past, the close connexion with our
manuscript is resumed. _The Annuntiation_ is followed, as in _H49_,
_Lec_, by _The Litanie_. Thereafter the lyrical pieces begin, as in
these manuscripts, with the song, 'Send home my long strayd eyes
to me. ' This is followed by two pieces which are not in _D_, _H49_,
_Lec_,--the impressive, difficult, and in manuscripts comparatively
rare _Nocturnall upon S. Lucies day_, and the much commoner
_Witchcraft by a picture_. Thereafter the poems follow piece by piece
the order in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_[18] until _The Curse_ is reached. [19]
Then, in what seems to have been the editor's or printer's regular
method of proceeding in this edition, he laid aside the manuscript
from which he was printing the _Songs and Sonets_ to take up another
piece of work that had come to hand, viz. _An Anatomie of the World_
with _A Funerall Elegie_ and _Of the Progresse of the Soule_, which
he prints from the edition of 1625. Without apparent rhyme or reason
these long poems are packed in between _The Curse_ and _The Extasie_.
With the latter poem _1633_ resumes the songs and (with the exception
of _The Undertaking_) follows the order in _Lec_ to _The Dampe_, with
which the series in the manuscripts closes. It has been noted that in
_Lec_, _The Prohibition_ (which in _D_, _H49_ follows _Breake of day_
and precedes _The Anniversarie_) is omitted. This must have been the
case in the manuscript used for _1633_, for it is omitted at this
place and though printed later was probably not derived from this
source.
With _The Dampe_ the manuscript which I am supposing the editor to
have followed in the main probably came to an end. The poems which
follow in _1633_ are of a miscellaneous character and strangely
conjoined. _The Dissolution_ (p. 64), _A Ieat Ring sent_ (p. 65),
_Negative Love_ (p. 66), _The Prohibition_ (p. 67), _The Expiration_
(p. 68), _The Computation_ (p. 69), complete the tale of lyrics. A few
odd elegies follow ('Language thou art,' 'You that are she,' 'To
make the doubt clear') with _The Paradox_. _A Hymne to Christ, at the
Authors last going into Germany_ is given a page to itself, and is
followed by _The Lamentations of Jeremy_, _The Satyres_, and _A Hymne
to God the Father_. Thereafter come the prose letters and the _Elegies
upon the Author_.
What this comparison of the order of the poems points to is borne out
by an examination of the text. The critical notes afford the materials
for a further verification, and I need not tabulate the resemblances
at length. In _Elegie IV_, for example, ll. 7, 8, which occur in all
the other manuscripts and editions, are omitted by _1633_ and by
_D_, _H49_, _Lec_. Again, when a song has no title in _1633_ it
has frequently none in the manuscript. When there are evidently two
versions of a poem, as e. g. in _The Good-morrow_ and _The Flea_, the
version given in _1633_ is generally that of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_. Later
editions often contaminate this with another version of the poem. At
the same time there are ever and again divergences between the edition
and the manuscript which are not to be ignored, and cannot always be
explained. Some are due to error in one or the other, but some point
either to divergence between the text of the editor's manuscript and
ours, or to the use by the editor of other sources as well as this.
In the fifth elegy (_The Picture_), for example, _1633_ twice seems
to follow, not _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, but another source, another group of
manuscripts which has been preserved; and in _The Aniversarie_ ll. 23,
24, the version of _1633_ is not that of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ but of
the same second group, which will be described later. On the whole,
however, it is clear that a manuscript closely resembling that now
represented by these three manuscripts supplied the editor of _1633_
with the bulk of the shorter poems, especially the older and more
privately circulated poems, the _Songs and Sonets_ and _Elegies_. When
he is not following this manuscript he draws from miscellaneous and
occasionally inferior sources.
It would be interesting if we could tell whence this manuscript was
obtained, and whether it was _a priori_ likely to be a good one. On
this point we can only conjecture, but it seems to me a fairly tenable
conjecture (though not to be built on in any way) that the nucleus of
the collection, at any rate, may have been a commonplace-book which
had belonged to Sir Henry Goodyere. The ground for this conjecture is
the inclusion in the edition of some prose letters addressed to this
friend, one in Latin and seven in English. There is indeed also one
addressed to the Countess of Bedford; but in the preceding letter to
Goodyere Donne says, 'I send you, with this, a letter which I sent to
the Countesse. It is not my use nor duty to do so. But for your having
it, there were but two consents, and I am sure you have mine, and you
are sure you have hers. ' He goes on to refer to some verses which are
the subject of the letter to the Countesse. There can be no doubt that
the letter printed is the letter sent to Goodyere. The Burley MS. (see
Pearsall-Smith's _Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton_, Oxford, 1907)
gives us a good example of how a gentleman in the seventeenth century
dealt with his correspondence. That contains, besides various letters,
as of Sidney to Queen Elizabeth on the Anjou marriage, and other
matter which recurs in commonplace-books, a number of poems and
letters, sent to Wotton by his friends, including Donne, and
transcribed by one or other of Wotton's secretaries. The letters have
no signatures appended, which is the case with the letters in the
1633 edition of Donne's poems. Wotton and Goodyere did not need to be
reminded of the authors, and perhaps did not wish others to know. The
reason then for the rather odd inclusion of nine prose letters in a
collection of poems is probably, that the principal manuscript used
by the printer was an 'old book'[20] which had belonged to Sir Henry
Goodyere and in which his secretaries had transcribed poems and
letters by Donne. Goodyere's collection of Donne's poems would not
necessarily be exhaustive, but it would be full; it would not like the
collections of others include poems that were none of Donne's; and its
text would be accurate, allowing for the carelessness, indifference,
and misunderstandings of secretaries and copyists.
After _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, the most carefully made collection of Donne's
poems is one represented now by four distinct manuscripts:
_A18. _ Additional MS. 18646, in the British Museum.
_N. _ The Norton MS. in Harvard College Library, Boston, of which an
account is given by Professor Norton in a note appended to the Grolier
Club edition.
_TCC. _ A manuscript in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge.
_TCD. _ A large manuscript in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin,
containing two apparently quite independent collections of poems--the
first a collection of Donne's poems with one or two additional poems
by Sir John Roe, Francis Beaumont, Sir Thomas Overbury, and Corbet;
the second a quite miscellaneous collection, put together some time in
the thirties of the seventeenth century, and including some of Donne's
poems. It is only the first of these which belongs to the group in
question.
These four manuscripts are closely connected with one another, but a
still more intimate relation exists between _A18_ and _TCC_ on the
one hand, _N_ and _TCD_ on the other. _N_ and _TCD_ are the larger
collections; _A18_ and _TCC_ contain each a smaller selection from the
same body of poems. Indeed it would seem that _N_ is a copy of _TCD,
A18_ of _TCC_.
_TCD_, to start with it, is a beautifully written collection
of Donne's poems beginning with the _Satyres_, passing on to an
irregularly arranged series of elegies, letters, lyrics and epicedes,
and closing with the _Metempsychosis_ or _Progresse of the Soule_ and
the _Divine Poems_, which include the hymns written in the last years
of the poet's life. _N_ has the same poems, arranged in the same
order, and its readings are nearly always identical with those of
_TCD_, so far as I can judge from the collation made for me. The
handwriting, unlike that of _TCD_, is in what is known as secretary
hand and is somewhat difficult to read. What points to the one
manuscript being a copy of the other is that in 'Sweetest Love, I do
not go' the scribe has accidentally dropped stanza 4, by giving its
last line to stanza 3, and passing at once to the fifth stanza. Both
manuscripts make this mistake, whereas _A18_ and _TCC_ contain the
complete poem. In other places _N_ and _TCD_ agree in their readings
where _A18_ and _TCC_ diverge. If the one is a copy of the other,
_TCD_ is probably the more authoritative, as it contains some marginal
indications of authorship which _N_ omits.
_TCC_ is a smaller manuscript than _TCD_, but seems to be written
in the same clear, fine hand. It does not contain the _Satyres_, the
Elegy (XI. in this edition) _The Bracelet_, and the epistles _The
Storme_ and _The Calme_, with which _N_ and _TCD_ open. It looks,
however, as though the sheets containing these poems had been torn
out. Besides these, however, _TCC_ omits, without any indication
of their being lost, an _Elegie to the Lady Bedford_ ('You that are
she'), the Palatine Epithalamion, a long series of letters[21]
which in _N_, _TCD_ follow that _To M. M. H. _ and precede _Sapho to
Philaenis_, the elegies on Prince Henry and on Lord Harington, and
_The Lamentations of Jeremy_. There are occasional differences in
the grouping of the poems; and _TCC_ does not contain some poems by
Beaumont, Corbet, Sir John Roe, and Sir Thomas Overbury which are
found in _N_ and _TCD_.
