Verse Libel in Renaissance England and Scotland, eds., Steven W. May and Alan Bryson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. xiii + 449 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-873921-0. £60 hardback.
The Burley Manuscript, ed., Peter Redford. Manchester: Manchester University Press. The Manchester Spenser. 2017. xiii + 442 pp. ISBN 978-1-5261-0448-9. £90 hardback.
These two books excavate an intriguing range of primary texts in poetry and prose, considerably broadening our understanding of early modern manuscript culture and providing plentiful raw material for future research. Peter Redford’s book prints texts from a single manuscript; Steven W. May’s and Alan Bryson’s is an anthology of a hitherto little-studied genre, Elizabethan verse libel. The sometimes rebarbative items in both collections find stout editorial advocacy. Redford, in particular, writes with an endearing old-fashioned warmth: it is as if we have been button-holed over a convivial glass of whisky by a manuscript collector eager to show us his latest acquisition and share his enthusiasm and pet theories about it with us. The importance of the primary material in both cases is hard to overstate.
Verse libels are speckled about many sixteenth-century verse miscellanies and also occur in a wide range of other contexts; by and large, however, they have evaded print publication in a kind of double elision: mainly restricted to manuscript circulation in their own day and to PhD theses in our own. [1] Since the appearance of the invaluable Early Stuart Libels website, Jacobean libels, far more numerous and linked to a wider range of political events than their Tudor precursors, have fared much better.[2] Manuscript scholars have tended to pass over Elizabethan libels swiftly, often doing little more than simply registering their presence. The work of May and Bryson means that there is now no longer any excuse for such neglect. Not only do they print a representative selection of poems, they also list and describe a wide range of other pieces in a generous Introduction, providing an impressively comprehensive overview of the genre. (The inclusion of poems produced in Scotland presumably explains why the collection is not simply called Elizabethan Libels).
After an opening miscellany of ‘Representative Libels 1562-1594’ - uncategorisable attacks on individuals - come three sections arranged by location (Scotland, the Inns of Court, Parliament and University) and one on Religion, the latter subdivided into three (attacks on specific clerics and anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant material). May and Bryson are keen to depoliticise these texts, claiming that ‘Our enjoyment … seldom depends on their political dimensions which, for the libels edited here, are generally marginal or altogether absent’ (vi). This seems an odd way of putting things, as many of the items in the book have their raison d’être in politics broadly considered - whether the decision of the Scottish lords to release the Earl of Northumberland to the English in 1572 (poems 40 and 40B), Queen Elizabeth’s French match (poems 28 and 29) or Scottish ministers’ support for a range of government policies in Edinburgh (poem 44). We learn nothing about many of the individuals libelled in this book beyond their support for a particular policy — the anonymous Vicar of Enborne’s notorious Catholicism, for example (poem 23). Meanwhile, May and Bryson themselves point out that the practice of libelling specific individuals in itself constitutes ‘a threat to civil society’ because of the centrality of personal ties (62), stressing that ‘the government’s paranoia about libels knew few boundaries’ (7). May and Bryson rightly highlight the rich variety of which the genre is capable - parodies of heraldry (poem 45) and religious rite (poem 24); dream vision (poem 18); emblems (poems 16a-h); double sonnets (poems 32 and 32a). The bar for ‘aesthetic’ (1) distinction seems rather low, however: by and large this is a genre in which meaning, resonance, literary effect, ideas and feelings all receive the bluntest of treatments. One of the most common forms is a sequence of short attacks on figures listed under a particular rubric, as seen, for example, in the ‘Oxford Libel’ (poem 49) and the copy-cat ‘Cambridge Libel’ (poem 50), jog-trot, pun-laden eviscerations of town and gown adultery. May and Bryson intriguingly suggest that the broken-backed metre of much of this verse is a product of Renaissance misunderstandings of Chaucer’s metre, an epiphenomenon of ‘the association of irreverent, satiric poetry with Chaucer’ (64).
The document of which Peter Redman’s book is a partial edition is one of the most elusive quarries of early modern English manuscript studies, having been repeatedly ‘rediscovered’ only to be lost again and again, gliding away, like a phantasmal white lady, from the gaze of archivists, cataloguers and Donne scholars. Long thought to have been destroyed in a fire and rediscovered by Peter Beal in Birmingham in 1976, this fat folio miscellany is currently held in Leicestershire Record Office, among the papers of the Finch family (true to form, it seems to have eluded the Record Office’s online catalogue). As a result of Redford’s extensive research - clearly a labour of love - the manuscript now springs to life, ‘a feast of poems and letters, essays and aphorisms, speeches, satires and sententiae’ (viii). We can even see, on the frontispiece, the forbidding face of the scribe, William Parkhurst, in an image on a medal struck during the Civil War. (Redford’s useful short biography in Chapter 4 tells us that the royalist Parkhurst, a figure omitted from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, was at one time Warden of the Mint). While some of the 163 poems in the manuscript seem to have been transcribed, in a dashing late version of Parkhurst’s hand, at this late point in his career (the last datable item is a unique anonymous elegy for Strafford (item 616), who was executed in 1640), the major interest of the manuscript relates to items written decades earlier, many of them probably copied when Parkhurst had been one of a cadre of young gentlemen working for Sir Henry Wotton at the English embassy in Venice.
The Wotton connection is the obvious reason for the appearance of numerous letters by John Donne, written between about 1598 and 1601 both to Wotton and to other correspondents, including, it seems, to his first wife, Ann More (items 438, 442 and 450).[3] My assumption would be that Wotton kept copies of his friend Donne’s letters and lent these copies to Parkhurst for recopying by an amanuensis during the time he spent working with Parkhurst in Italy some years later. Redford’s theory (in Chapter 5) that Parkhurst, at a time when he is not known to have had any contact with Wotton or Donne, secretly intercepted the correspondence for the King’s first minster Robert Cecil, is more exciting, but, I think, less likely.[4] Redford’s scepticism that a seventeenth-century manuscript collector should be interested in letters such as Donne’s to Wotton’s – in which little of substance is reported but which are characterised by an engaging language of friendship – seems strange, given his discovery that the Burley manuscript contains 34 English translations of letters by the fourth-century Latin writer Aurelius Symmachus, clearly intended as a set of models for precisely the sort of rhetorical practice also exemplified in the Donne letters. As Redford himself notes, Symmachus’s letters are practically indistinguishable from the seventeenth-century letters in the manuscript (346). A detailed mapping of Symmachus’s devices onto those of Donne, Wotton and others would be a worthwhile research project.
Much poetry by Donne also appears in the manuscript, alongside many of the usual suspects readers of seventeenth-century manuscript verse will expect to see: Jonson, Corbett, Strode, libels on the Carr marriage, ‘The Parliament Fart’, and so on. Wotton’s popular poem on the happy life (item 357) appears, as do two anonymous translations of Martial epigrams (items 553 and 554) that Redford attributes to Wotton (376-80). There are also a few anonymous poems unique to the manuscript, some sizeable chunks of prose connected with Wotton’s diplomacy and a selection of more ‘public’ prose texts, such as Ralegh’s short Guiana apology. Readers of Spenser Review will be particularly interested in the appearance of ‘eight sides in an Elizabethan-style secretary hand, with 28 extracts from the first, second and fourth books of Spenser’s Complaints [ie. The Ruines of Time, The Teares of the Muses and Mother Hubberds Tale (items 497-524)]’ (43-44). Redford’s main interest in these passages (which seem textually unconnected to the extracts in British Library Add. MS 34064) is as exhibits in an intriguing argument he makes about the importance of memory in the transcription of early modern poetry and prose (chapter 7). The suggestion that more early modern textual ‘copying’ than we realize derives from acts of memory has much to commend it, and it is true that J. B. Leishman’s observations on this topic (made more than 70 years ago) have never been adequately addressed by manuscript scholars.[5] Redford’s examples, however, are not very convincing — and in most cases he admits that alternative, purely chirographic, explanations of the variant in question are equally plausible. Faced with the Complaints passages, a sequence of extracts arranged in text order with no obvious linking theme, Redford bizarrely claims he can ‘draw no … conclusion’ other than that he is looking at a transcription of all that a particular individual ‘lacking the Spenser text’ could remember of the poems (44). The prevalence of ‘commonplacing’ in this period — a practice in which, routinely, manuscript compilers first copied everything that interested them in a particular text (only grouping their chosen extracts thematically later, if all) — is surely a much more plausible explanation.
May’s and Bryson’s editorial work for Verse Libel is deeply impressive. This is as ground-breaking and quietly revolutionary a work as May’s previous anthology The Elizabethan Courtier Poets, published almost thirty years ago.[6] This time, however, May has worked alongside a historian, and it shows: he and Bryson have dug deep into documentary source material to unearth an almost bewildering density of facts about the authors, objects and local contexts of the libels. In particular, the editors’ work in the Oxford and Cambridge archives casts a bright light on the composition and contexts of the salacious University poems. Building on May’s work on new sources in his Herculean Index of Elizabethan Poetry, meanwhile, Verse Libel brings to light many previously unknown texts of particular libels.[7]
May and Bryson bring to bear a great deal of information on each text, and the arrangement is by and large sensible. The text comes first, followed by an overview or ‘Commentary’, which in most cases readers will benefit from reading before the text. There are then detailed historical notes, textual notes (often a single long note, sometimes including relevant lists of variant readings). The textual notes together comprise a substantial contribution to the study of the transmission of early modern manuscript texts, though there is little acknowledgement of the possibility that texts may, in the manner of Redford, be transmitted via memorization, or that ‘inferior’ readings may be earlier ones. The editorial method will be familiar to readers of May’s previous scholarship: where possible, stemmas mapping out likely textual histories have been constructed, their bifurcations and direction partly dependent on judgments by the editors about whether specific variants are ‘errors’ and statistically-informed views about the reliability of individual manuscripts.
Compared to May and Bryson (an invidious comparison for any editor, admittedly), Redford’s editorial work has a somewhat casual air. There are far more literary notes than historical ones, and the information given sometimes seems basic, arbitrary or both. Only the more personal letters and the English poems are given in full; texts in foreign languages and the more ‘public’ prose are reduced to headings and incipits, including, unfortunately, the vivid ‘table talk’ adapted from Overbury’s Characters (items 96-206). We are told where some of these items may be found in full but by no means in every case. [8] There is a useful set of indices, including an index of prose incipits, and pie charts map the distribution of languages and genres across the manuscript. Redford tells us how ‘invaluable’ (17) an Access database he has constructed is for studying the manuscript; paradoxically, however, he offers us no means of accessing it. Redford’s comments on the existence of variant texts of items in the manuscript are haphazard and unsystematic. This is understandable, not just because of Redford’s theories about memorialization, but also because there are many more copies of popular seventeenth-century manuscript poems than there are of May’s and Bryson’s libels. Redford seems to have done his research before Peter Beal’s invaluable Index of English Literary Manuscripts appeared online; as a result, as an earlier reviewer has pointed out, he wrongly treats two poems as anonymous.[9] Instead of grouping what he has to say about particular texts with their transcriptions, Redford clumps much of his annotation into chapters on specific genres (chapter 9 on private letters, chapter 10 on English poetry) and the chapters about letter interception and memory (chapters 5 and 7). A reference number following the relevant poem or letter then guides the reader to a section within one of these chapters. This arrangement allows Redford to expatiate engagingly on a smorgasbord of general topics, with most sections of commentary glossing more than one text, but it is awkward for the reader.
The book’s arrangement makes it difficult to reconstruct a sense of the manuscript’s structure. Redford divides the manuscript up into six codicological/palaeographical sections, adding a couple of very small units to the four identified by Ilona Bell’s pioneering analysis.[10] In The Burley Manuscript, however, the points at which these divisions occur are invisible: folio references and item numbers succeed each other with no indication of where the major ‘Parts’ of the manuscript begin or end. Excellent observations about the physical structure of the manuscript are dotted about unpredictably throughout the text, with only a few of them appearing in Redford’s two short chapters on physical make-up (chapters 3 and 5).
A visit to the Leicestershire Record Office shows that there is more to be said about structure.[11] The basic arrangement of the manuscript appears to be as follows:
(a) A section of prose in Parkhurst’s hand , mainly texts of the Symmachus letters (fols. 1-39; items 1-43 in Redford’s edition).
(b) Mainly diplomatic prose, again in Parkhurst’s hand (fols. 40-121; items 44-231).
(c) Prose separates, i.e. individual gatherings not originally belonging together, deriving from many different sources and in many different hands (fols. 122-234; items 232-275).
(d) Prose, then verse in Parkhurst’s hand and in the hand of an unknown scribe, concluding with Donne’s prose Paradoxes (fols. 235-315; items 276-495).
(e) Verse separates, including the Complaints selections (fols. 317-320; items 496-524).
(f) Poems mainly in Parkhurst’s hand (fols. 321-337; items 525-544).
(g) More poems mainly in a later version of Parkhurst’s hand (fols. 338-373; items 545-616).
One might call this a ‘chiastic’ structure. A central section of prose followed by verse (d) is preceded by prose sections ((a), (b) and (c)) and followed by verse sections ((e), (f) and (g)).
The watermarks show that the sections belong together: (a) uses the same paper with the same watermark as (g) and (b)’s relationship with (f) is the same. My hypothesis is that Parkhurst, or whoever assembled the manuscript, started with four manuscripts, in each of which prose and poetry were grouped separately:[12] one manuscript (d) was kept together, and the others, including a collection of prose and verse separates (c) and (e) were split up, producing a single manuscript with a clear prose/verse split.
I have been fussy, perhaps over-fussy, about the details of Redford’s edition, so I feel I should conclude by saluting the considerable achievement it represents. There is no right way to present a modern edition of a complicated early modern miscellany such as the one Redford has been working with, and he is to be warmly applauded for his diligence in assembling his material, tracking down his sources and investigating an array of imponderable related issues, as well as for the appealing urbanity of his critical judgments. Scholars will use both of these invaluable books for years to come.
Jonathan Gibson
The Open University
[1] Exceptions proving the rule include Arthur Marotti’s path-breaking Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Presss, 1995), Ruth Hughey’s The Arundel-Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1960) and May’s own Henry Stanford’s Anthology: An Edition of Cambridge University Library Manuscript Dd.5.75 (New York: Garland, 1988). For a recent edition of a manuscript miscellany from the period, see Ink, Stink Bait, Revenge, and Queen Elizabeth: A Yorkshire Yeoman’s Household Book, edited by May and Arthur F. Marotti (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). Some of the libels in the anthology did appear in print in the sixteenth century, particularly, as a result of the ‘turbulent’ political situation, in Scotland (pp. 20, 39-47).
[2] ‘Early Stuart Libels: an edition of poetry from manuscript sources’, edited by Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae, Early Modern Literary Studies Text Series 1 (2005): http://purl.oclc.org/emls/texts/
[3] An argument first made in Ilona Bell, ‘“Under Ye Rage of a Hott Sonn & Yr Eyes”: John Donne’s Love Letters to Ann More’, in The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), pp.25-52.
[4] The ‘peculiarities of the letters’ of this type included in the Burley manuscript which Redford claims are explained by this theory—‘their existence at all, their being in the hands of other people than their originators, the lack of any established connection between Parkhurst and Wotton at the time of the letters, and the archiving of them, apparently by Parkhust’ (p.30) do not seem peculiarities at all to me. Thousands of letters exist in secretarial copies in this period.
[5] J. B. Leishman, ‘You Meaner Beauties of the Night’: A Study in Transmission and Transmogrification’, The Library 4th ser. 21 (1945), pp.99-121.
[6] Steven W. May, ed., The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991).
[7] Steven W. May and William A. Ringler, Jr., Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First-Line Index of English Verse, 1559-1603 (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004).
[8] Puzzlingly, there is no reference to the appearance of a transcription of the Burley text of Ralegh’s short Guiana ‘Apology’ (item 210) in another book in The Manchester Spenser series, Literary and Visual Ralegh, edited by Christopher M. Armitage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp.25-30.
[9] H. R. Woudhuysen, Review of The Burley Manuscript, Renaissance Quarterly 61 (2018), pp.324-6. Item 348 is by William Drummond and item 382 by Sir John Davies. The online version of the Index is CELM (Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700) and is at http://celm-ms.org.uk
[10] Bell, ‘“Under Ye Rage”’.
[11] I intend to say more about my findings there in later publications.
[12] I have discussed this sort of arrangement in more detail in ‘Casting off Blanks: Hidden Structures in Early Modern Paper Books’, in Material Readings of Early Modern Culture: Texts and Social Practices, 1580-1730, edited by James Daybell and Peter Hinds (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 208–228.
48.2.13
Comments
You must log in to comment.