Lara M. Crowley, Manuscript Matters: Reading John Donne’s Poetry and Prose in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2018. xix + 255pp. ISBN 9780198821861. £55 hardback.
‘That I might make your Cabinet my tombe’, begins the speaker of John Donne’s so-called ‘Epitaph on Himself’, requesting that this (female) addressee enclose his poem within her most intimate personal space. Leafing through British Library Add. MS 10309 (also known as the Bellasis Manuscript) last summer, however, I remember noticing an alternative, sexed-up version – substituting the ‘Cabinet’ for a ‘bed’, and its owner, just possibly, for a man. Such fleeting finds are often tantalising and nothing more. Given that, as Lara M. Crowley acknowledges in Manuscript Matters, early modern literary manuscripts can present modern readers with a bewildering variety of ‘forensic evidence’ (27) in their handwriting, textual selections and adaptations, paratexts, provenance markings, paper stocks, marginalia and ‘fingernail indentations’ (28), among other things, studying them properly is not always particularly practical or appealing. For those who take on this challenge, however, rich rewards lie in wait, allowing us ‘to let seventeenth-century audiences speak’ (27) and to recover the valuable ways in which those audiences – collectors, compilers, ‘reader-poets’ (208) and ‘owner-readers’ (211) – read, appropriated and otherwise interacted with some of the most famous literature in the English language. Focusing exclusively on the reception and transmission of works by Donne, by far the best represented contemporary author in manuscript sources, Manuscript Matters offers glimpses of how much modern readers and critics stand to learn from their earliest counterparts.
As is the case with the Bellasis Manuscript, the subject of Crowley’s fifth and final chapter, such scholarship can sometimes uncover ‘a sensitive literary mind consistently at work’ (185). A verse miscellany composed in a single, mostly italic hand, it contains eight poems by Donne, all of which have been stylistically smoothed out and thematically repurposed. Though it is not clear whether this literary mind belonged to the ‘Margerett Bellasys’ whose signature follows the manuscript’s ‘Table of the Characters’, a general trend is here apparent. Donne’s masculine lyrics are muted and adapted so as to emphasise a multivalent feminine perspective: sexually frustrated, idealistic, melancholy, romantic and religiously inclined. As it happens, Crowley may somewhat misread Donne’s mock-epitaph, denying its speaker any erotic subtext in arguing that the Bellasis adapter replaces an exclusively platonic advance with a romantic one (rather than, as I would suggest, making explicit that which was previously oblique). Nonetheless, this analysis sketches a fascinating reader-poet and sheds valuable light on the early reception of some of Donne’s best-known poems.
Elsewhere, Crowley hunts for fresh perspectives and evidence in manuscript witnesses of lesser-studied – and even non-canonical – works by Donne. Chapters two to four, like chapter five, are case studies on specific texts or groups of texts in specific manuscripts, teasing out what these artefacts can reveal about Donne’s more problematic and ‘just plain baffling’ (4) writings. Chapter two considers the epic poem Metempsychosis in the so-called ‘Gosse Manuscript’ at the Folger Shakespeare Library (MS V.a.241), arguing that this material-textual setting – or ‘contexture’, in Neil Fraistat’s coinage – shows how at least one contemporary read the poem as a topical political satire. Situating Metempsychosis alongside translated selections from Lucian’s dialogues and a fable about a power-hungry courtier, Crowley contends that this reader appears to explore parallels between Robert Cecil and George Villiers in the 1620s. Detecting similar themes in a selection of Donne’s short prose paradoxes in the ‘Gell Manuscript’ (Derbyshire Record Office, MS D258/7/13/6 [vi]), chapter three traces the literary significance of Thomas Gell, a hitherto neglected yet ‘prolific copyist’, an ‘indisputable Inns-of-Court reader and a collector of works by Donne and his associates’ (101). Noting how this manuscript groups these texts alongside extracts from a politically incendiary treatise by Francis Bacon and a previously unknown speech from the riotous Middle Temple revels (included as an appendix), Crowley builds usefully on the work of scholars like Michelle O’Callaghan who have demonstrated the central importance of the Inns-of-Court fraternities to the literary and satirical culture of the day. Focusing on readers such as Gell, she demonstrates, can alert us to the ‘rhetorical dissimulation’ (82) in early modern texts that might otherwise hide in plain sight.
Chapter four contains perhaps the book’s most significant scholarly intervention, bringing simultaneously the biases and assumptions of modern readers into collision with the kinds of evidence Crowley’s more objective methodology can unearth. This chapter offers an exhaustive reassessment of a verse translation of Psalm 137 (‘By Euphrates flowery side’), attributed to Donne in many seventeenth-century sources but since jettisoned from his canon on predominantly stylistic grounds. Collating and comparing early witnesses for the poem, especially in the important ‘Skipwith Manuscript’ (British Library Add. MS 25707), Crowley argues persuasively for its rehabilitation as a Donne composition. As she demonstrates, not only did the most authoritative early scribes, readers and editors assume this to be the case, but the poem also shares highly specific ‘topical, thematic and verbal connections’ (38) with Donne’s ‘Lamentations of Jeremy’ – the only Biblical verse translation he is known to have written. One happy by-product of this work is that Crowley sheds interesting new light on Francis Davison, the poet and verse translator hitherto assumed by modern critics to have written ‘Psalm 137’. A member of the Sidney-Essex faction in the 1590s, Davison was also, it seems, an avid literary fan: Crowley’s discovery of a list of ‘Manuscripts to gett’, written in his hand, is included here in facsimile form (British Library, MS Harley 298, fol. 159v). Among its items are the ‘Satyres, Elegies, Epigrams &c. by Iohn Don’, adding weight to the notion that Davison’s association with ‘Psalm 137’ might derive primarily from his identity as yet another reader of Donne. The list captures something of the fundamental magic of studying early modern manuscripts: such objects offer us a means imaginatively to cross the cultural and historical distance from which we view early modern readers, whose habits of thought and pen might not have been so different from our own.
Crowley’s book concurs with the work of a growing number of scholars that manuscripts ‘matter’ greatly to early modern literary studies (along with the ‘matters’ out of which they are constituted). Indeed, Donne has been particularly well served by such recent research. This is amply demonstrated by her introductory first chapter, which surveys comprehensively the outburst of scholarly activity to which the four subsequent chapters contribute. Following the publication of seminal monographs by Harold Love, Arthur F. Marotti, H. R. Woudhuysen and Peter Beal, resources such as the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, 1450–1700 (a product of both Crowley and Beal’s labours), and the landmark Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, a steady stream of books and essays has plugged gaps in our knowledge and understanding of contemporary print and manuscript culture, demonstrating the efficacy of the evidence-driven (rather than critic-driven) approach for which Crowley argues. As such, while it represents an important contribution towards this scholarly field, Manuscript Matters preaches, to some extent, to the converted.
What of unconverted readers? While Crowley’s first chapter serves as a brilliant introduction to the field, well stocked with explanations and citations, the following sections creak very slightly under the sheer weight of scholarly detail she supplies. Footnotes do not always seem necessary, and it is not always easy to sift what is new from what is not. Of course, bibliographical studies often strike a fine balance between the technical and the rhetorical, forced by their ‘forensic’ nature to work hard for those afflicted with the ‘archival shyness’ (27) Crowley rightly identifies as an issue. Just like the libraries and record offices in which manuscripts are held, this kind of scholarship can prove as much a barrier as an access point. To this end, Crowley’s lucid (and occasionally lively) prose offers clarity and interest throughout – though sources like Davison’s literary wishlist might also have been given greater prominence in order to capture the attention of specialists and non-specialists alike.
The discoveries and insights yielded by Crowley’s ‘manuscript first’ approach make Manuscript Matters a distinctive and worthwhile book, leading it into the diverse and unpredictable literary and historical terrain in which it is highly effective. Rather than pursuing studies of a specific theme, genre or archive (as in Daniel Starza Smith’s John Donne and the Conway Papers (2014)), Crowley freely follows the odds and ends that have evidently turned up on her considerable archival travels, giving space to critical perspectives that can cut through received thinking about a major canonical author. David Novarr, a pioneering Donnean, summed it up well forty years ago: ‘Scholars, like critics, enlarge our understanding of poetry by hanging up looking glasses at odd corners, and it becomes necessary to compensate for the distortion of their angle of vision. The whole business is sometimes disheartening, but it’s the only real business in town’.[1] Manuscript Matters provokes new thinking about this house of mirrors as we inherit it.
Charles Green
University of Birmingham
[1] David Novarr, The Disinterred Muse: Donne’s Texts and Contexts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980; repr. 2019), 10.
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This chapter offers an exhaustive reassessment of a verse translation of Psalm 137 (‘By Euphrates flowery side’), attributed to Donne in many seventeenth-century sources but since jettisoned from his canon on predominantly stylistic grounds.
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