stemmatics and society in early modern england

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Stemmatics and Society in EarlyModern EnglandMark Blanda

a De Montfort UniversityPublished online: 13 Aug 2013.

To cite this article: Mark Bland (2014) Stemmatics and Society in Early Modern England, StudiaNeophilologica, 86:sup1, 29-47, DOI: 10.1080/00393274.2013.822743

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Stemmatics and Society in Early Modern England

MARK BLAND*

“Stemmatics and Society in Early Modern England” is concerned with thetransmission and circulation of manuscript verse in the early seventeenth cen-tury, and with the evidence this reveals about authorship and identity. Inparticular, it uses stemmatic analysis to demonstrate the textual and socialhistory of three poems: the first two are anonymous, but have been associatedwith Donne; the third, by Jonson, has been subject to speculation about theidentity of its subject. The article demonstrates that ‘A Paradox’ (Who so termslove a fire) is associated with the Middle Temple in the late 1590s, and the circleof Sir John Davies. It then investigates the attribution history of ‘TheExpostulation’ to Jonson and Donne, and demonstrates that it can be by neither,but that it is possibly by Sir John Roe. Finally, it identifies ‘Elizabeth, L. H.’ asElizabeth, Lady Hoby and thus demonstrates how Amelia Lanyer gained accessto Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ in 1609.

I

The circulation of manuscripts, like the provenance of books, tells us a great dealabout the life of texts in society. Often manuscripts and books are revealing of socialconnections that wemight not otherwise suspect, or theymay give concrete evidenceof connections that have otherwise only been speculated about. In the examples thatfollow, stemmatics will be used both to reveal identity and to correct argumentsabout authorship and association. This can be done because the evidence from booksand manuscripts is never exclusively textual. In the case of Jonson’s library, forinstance, his books show that he knewWilliam Dakins, one of the translators of theKing James Bible, and Edmund Gunter, a mathematician, neither of whom hementions elsewhere.1 This ought not to surprise us unduly: like Jonson, bothDakins and Gunter attended Westminster; what it reminds us, however, is thatthere is another hinterland to the life of a writer that the texts of poems or playsmay not, inevitably do not, record.

Our knowledge of scribal manuscript activity in the early seventeenth centuryis very fragmented. For every manuscript where we know who was responsible, orthe context in which it was created, there will be several, perhaps many more,where we have very little idea of what the document represents. There are severalthings we can do to begin to rectify this gap in our knowledge. First we can look atthe material aspects of the manuscript: at the paper, the script, the binding (or lackof it), and whether the texts suggest any particular set of associations. Such firstimpressions will normally indicate whether we are dealing with a manuscript that

*Mark Bland, De Montfort University. Email: [email protected] gave Jonson his copy of Sir Tomas More, Opera (Louain, 1566): CanterburyCathedral, shelfmark W2/A-2–18; Gunter gave Jonson a copy of his The Description andUse of His Majesties Dials (STC 12524; 1624): British Library, shelfmark C.60.f.7.

Studia Neophilologica 86: 29–47, 2014

Copyright © 2013 Society for Studia Neophilologica http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2013.822743

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mailto:[email protected]

ought to have some identifiable provenance, or whether we are dealing withsomething where the manuscript yields little that is informative. Second, we cantake specific texts within the volume and compare them to other versions. In doingso, we ought to be able to establish the place of the manuscript in the line oftransmission and thus its contextual relationship with other documents, some ofwhich we may know rather more about. Such an approach is slow and painstaking,subject to doubt and difficulty, yet it is the only way in which we will begin toseparate the straws in the haystack of documents to find the needle within.

As an example, it might be worth considering Huntington HM 198 part 2.This manuscript is composed of several separate sheaves that appear to havebeen written within a secretariat by several scribes at once (Bland 2010:125–126).2 As well as paper with the arms of Burgundy, it includes paperfrom the firm of Nicholas Heusler in Basle (Figure 1).

Both these papers can be dated c.1615: a slightly earlier date for the manuscriptthan that indicated by Beal, and more likely because of the way in which themanuscript was created.3 Within the manuscript are texts by Dudley, Lord North,Nicholas Hare, and Francis Beaumont, all of whom were at the Inner Temple. Thetexts of North and Hare are rare (that of North is in a unique early state),4 which

Figure 1. Watermark of the firm of Nicolas Heusler, Basle: Huntington MS M198 part 2.

2Further details will be given in Bland, Mark. 2014. The Internal Structure of someJonson-Donne Manuscripts. Huntington Library Quarterly 77, special issue ed. R.Bullard.3Beal suggests c.1620 (Beal 1980: 253 (Δ26)); see also Bland 2010: 34–39 on paper.4The name Victoria is used in Huntington HM198 part 2; elsewhere (Bodleian Library,Oxford, MS North e.1 and e.2, Rosenbach Library, Philadelphia, MS 240/1, and A Forestof Varieties (1645)) his Muse is Cœlestia.

30 M. Bland Studia Neophilologica

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might well indicate a small coterie; the texts of Beaumont are more common;however, when one does the stemma for Beaumont’s poems to Jonson, it turns outthat Huntington 198 part 2 is the best text (Bland 2005a: 139–179). The cumulativeevidence therefore indicates that we are dealing with an Inner Temple manuscriptprepared c.1615–1618 and that, as a first step, significantly reduces the number ofscribal hands one might study to identify who was responsible for creating themanuscript.

Stemmatics, and the implications of what such analysis of manuscript tradi-tions reveals, remains a very misunderstood area of bibliographical and textualresearch. In part, this is owing to the problems associated with late medievalmanuscripts, raised by Kane and Donaldson amongst others, about the efficacyof stemmatics for understanding manuscript traditions; a concern that, in turn,has been amplified by present debates over the nature of textual authority and therole of the editor in determining what it is that a scholarly edition purports torepresent. The use of stemmatics, it should be said, does not require rigidadherence to the concept of an ideal text, nor does it justify indecisiveness.What it does offer is an insight into both the mutation of the text and, as crucially,into its social history through manuscript transmission.

Stemma work in two directions: the closer one is to the top, the more one isenabled to make a pragmatic reconstruction of what the original document(s)looked like. On the other hand, as the stemma proceeds downwards and outwardsit maps the social history and circulation of the text. In this sense the variant isless significant as an ‘error’, than as a key to establishing networks and relation-ships. If stemmata are employed across different texts and authors present in thesame manuscripts, it becomes possible to use known information about theprovenance of some materials to give context to those documents whose associa-tions have yet to be identified. In early seventeenth century manuscript studies,our problem is that so far we have only focused on one author (Donne) ratherthan several authors and so we have not explored the way in which such stemmamight be mutually informative. To take but one example: there are 13 manu-scripts of Overbury’s A Wife representing five distinct stages of revision, with thefirst, second and seventh printed editions descending from different lines ofrecension.5 The earliest state, written c.1601–1602, is that found in the GroupII manuscripts of Donne; the later version is that represented by British LibraryHarley MS 4064 of the Group I tradition. What that suggests is that the ‘Group I’and ‘Group II’ traditions of Donne’s manuscripts are chronologically the wrongway round in terms of their nomenclature and their state of order and revision.

Before turning to three examples of transmission history from the early seven-teenth century, a comment needs to be made, albeit in a very cursory manner, aboutthe broad problems raised by the study of classical and medieval manuscripts inorder to differentiate the early modern period from its predecessors. The issue isabout information. With classical texts, stemmatics proved convenient because thenumber of surviving witnesses was small, and the time period between witnesseswas in the order of decades and centuries (Clark 1918; Reynolds 1983). Thedirection of descent was therefore rarely in question. Unless there was evidence tothe contrary, it was assumed that all texts descended from a final authorial version.Further, omitted passages made it easier to hypothesise connections between wit-nesses even when the variants were significantly different, whilst fragments could be

5The textual history of A Wife will be dealt with in Mark Bland, Jonson and Donne:Manuscript Traditions, Connections, and Revisions, forthcoming.

Studia Neophilologica Stemmatics and Society in Early Modern England 31

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fitted to the main body of evidence. As a consequence, the stemma, so constructed,disguised a great many problems because the information was not only sparse, butthe problems that they raised tended to occur in the witnesses from the late medievaland early modern period that were held to be less textually useful. Papyrologicaldiscoveries, especially the ‘wild papyri’ of Homer, have complicated this view, butoverall classical scholars still proceed on the basis that definable groups of witnessesexist that can then be reconciled with each other to establish the correct reading.

The moment that such an approach began to be applied to late medieval texts,that telescopic view of recension was compressed and, at the same time, the paucityof the intermediate witnesses became a more obvious problem because of theapparent conflation or contamination of sources. The lack of authorial copies orcopies that could be clearly demonstrated to have been produced under authorialsupervision meant that direction was difficult to establish. The possibility of author-ial revision and multiple states of the original text further complicated attempts todetermine the lines of recension. The practices of professional scribal production,where manuscripts were often made up in booklets, added the possibility of con-flating the work of different scribes, and hence possibly different sources, within asingle document (Hanna 1996: 21–59). These manuscripts could then be copiedagain in a way that might erase such underlying evidence. As a consequence, thestemma could be constructed in several ways all of which justified different out-comes: hence the scepticism that has arisen about the value of the method. The firstthing, therefore, is to note that this approach to the problem is textually driven andthat may not be the best way to resolve the issue unless it is married to a materialanalysis of the relevant documents.

The problem is the word textual because it disguises much of what we are reallydoing when we try to construct the stemma for an early modern manuscript versetradition. We are dealing with a series of scribal witnesses: some are single authorcollections or separates, but most are documents that assemble together texts fromdifferent sources. There are several hundred of these miscellanies, some of whichhave ownership associations, but many of which do not. Further, the texts in thesemanuscripts range from those with known associations (the poems of Donne,Jonson, and so on), poems of disputed origins, to poems with no known attribution.Our first problem, therefore, is not to understand the texts as such, but to understandthe documents as sociable collections of verse, and it is here that stemmatics hassomething rather important to tell us because what it can do is help to establish theconnections and to localise the social networks.

Some of the arguments against the use of stemmatics for early modern textsare based upon misunderstandings and careless work. Both Leishman and Wolf,for instance, claimed that stemma were ineffective as a tool for analysing themiscellanies of the period, but one ought to note as well that their selection ofwitnesses was partial and very incomplete (Leishman 1945; Wolf II 1948). Wolf,for instance, studied Walton Poole’s ‘If shadows be a picture’s excellence’, butcollated barely half of the 77 surviving copies. His conclusion that the stemmawas too problematic to be meaningful therefore needs to be revisited in the lightof a more complex and informed understanding of the poem’s transmissionhistory. Nevertheless, Wolf’s work is regularly cited as a justification for doingnothing. Usually, this reticence is further bolstered with the arguments putforward by Kane and Donaldson over Piers Plowman.

If there is reason for concern in constructing stemma for seventeenth centurymanuscripts the issues raised by Harold Love are more pertinent (Love 1984). Lovewas particularly interested in restoration satire and libertine verse, much of itanonymous. For Love, the problem of contamination is compounded by that of


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direction. In other words, if one does not knowwhat the source text ought to be, thenthe analysis of the variants and thus the contamination between independent lines ofrecension becomes more opaque andmuch depends uponwhether a particular line ofrecension can be established. One has to begin with an assumption that a certainversion of the text represents a likely point of departure and then see what happenswhen the collations are prepared. Under such a scenario, it may be possible toconstruct the stemma in two or more different ways and to have distinct versions andvariations from such a text. This simply points to the other problem: authors revise,sometimes more than once, and however one goes about analysing the material, thatfact needs to be borne in mind when the variants are such that the results cannot bereadily explained by other means (Bland 2010: 147–182).

With regards to the analysis of verse miscellanies from the early seventeenthcentury, most of the work has been driven by scholars working on the poems ofDonne. In many respects the Variorum edition is admirable in its willingness totreat each poem as a separate entity, in its willingness to recognise authorialrevision as a source for variation, and in the level of textual data that the editorspresent. Reading through the collation notes to a poem might not be everyone’sidea of how to spend a Sunday, but it is possible if one disagrees with the editorsto go back and reconstruct why they have reached the decision they did and whydisagreement might be possible. The problem with their stemma is that they seemto assume that Donne only ever revised once and so minimise authorial agency,potentially drawing the wrong conclusions from their effort.

With Jonson, the kind of reservations that were put forward by Love do nothave to be considered, as we have better information with which to control theanalysis. Owing to the authority of the 1616 Workes we have a control text forunderstanding the manuscript texts associated with that volume that readilyidentifies the direction of the contamination and extent of authorial revision.What is evident from the manuscript versions is that Jonson did revise his work,sometimes more than once. Further, as the Poems section of the 1616 Workeswas not supervised by Jonson during the proofs, it does contain errors that themanuscripts (some autograph) reveal. For the poems in The Underwood, theissue is slightly different because the texts were printed after Jonson’s death, andit is evident that the compositors made serious mistakes at the press. For thesepoems, the manuscript versions offer control texts that allow one to reconsiderevery variant and its implications without a predisposition that assumes that theprinted text must be automatically correct, as earlier editors have done.

In order to select the best manuscript witnesses for editorial purposes, it isnecessary to treat each poem separately and prepare each and every stemmaticdiagram afresh, for what is true of one poem in a collection may not be true ofanother, and what is true of one author in a group of manuscripts is almostcertainly not true of another. Hence, part of the issue with the stemmatic analysesof Donne’s poems is that little work has been done on the other poems to befound in those manuscripts, including those by Jonson. Inevitably, both differ-ences and complications will arise that challenge our understanding of what theevidence represents; and this, in turn, has a bearing on what the texts tell us aboutthe social networks to which they belong.

II

Rather than starting with Jonson, it is worth having a look at the pseudo-Donnepoem known as ‘A Paradox’ or ‘Who so termes love a fire’. This poem has been


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clearly identified as not being by Donne, but its origins have not been deter-mined. What the textual stemma demonstrates is that first it had two histories(Figure 2): the pivotal point of transition being through MS 9.

In what follows, it should be said that the system adopted for sigla is amodified version of that outlined by Harold Love (Love 2002). Love hasproposed that manuscripts are identified by the combination of a location identi-fier and a shortened call number, similar to the mnemonics used by Grierson andGardner. Thus, Harley becomes H, Stowe St, and Sloane Sl, with the number

Figure 2. ‘A Paradox: that Love is no fire’.


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following. For the location identifier, Love suggested either that used by theShort Title Catalogue for books printed before 1640, or Wing for those printedbetween 1641 and 1700. As Love was a Rochester scholar it is perhaps naturalthat he preferred Wing, but for present purposes the sigla used by the Short TitleCatalogue has been used. For those locations not covered by the STC, in theDonne Variorum identifier has been adopted as these do not conflict with anyadopted by the STC editors. Hence British Library Harley MS 4064 has the siglaL H4064.

The best manuscript of ‘A Paradox’ is Bodleian Library Add MS B.97, forwhich we have some information: this is the Leweston Fitzjames MS and is wellknown to Davies scholars as an important witness to the poems of that author(Krueger 1962). Fitzjames was admitted to the Middle Temple in the mid-late1590s, so what this stemma tells us is that ‘A Paradox’ has strong links to theMiddle Temple: an association that points to Davies, Hoskins, Rudyerd and theirilk. Secondly, one might note the position of British Library Harley MS 4064 andits later twin Bodleian Rawlinson Poetry MS 31. Harley MS 4064 is an importantDonne manuscript of the Group One tradition, and what we know about this isthat it may have come to Harley amongst some purchases made from theCavendish family. If this is the case, with the stress firmly on the if, then it ispossible that Harley MS 4064 is in some way associated with Sir Henry Wotton,who was at the Middle Temple, who was closely associated with Donne, andwho was a tutor for the Cavendish family around 1612. I suspect therefore thatthe fact that the Donne poems in Harley that are not in Rawlinson is owing to thefact that these copies were amongst the material that Wotton returned to Donne,whilst the fact that ‘A Paradox’ is in both manuscripts is further evidence on itsnon-canonical status.

Elsewhere in the early part of the stemma of ‘A Paradox’ we see theconnection between MS 4 and the Group 2 tradition of Donne, includingTrinity College, Dublin MS 877 and its copy Harvard Eng MS 966.3; BritishLibrary Stowe MS 962, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.12; and BritishLibrary Additional MS 18647. From MS 3 we see the connection to anothergroup of related manuscripts that are often closely associated with Harley andRawlinson, including British Library Egerton MS 923 and National Library ofWales MS 12443A. Out of the MS 4 Group 2 line there then descends a furthersequence from MS 5 including Bodleian Library MS Don b.9 and Harvard EngMS 966.5, with the last descendant of this early tradition being DerbyshireRecord Office MS D258/34/26/1. The sibling of this last manuscript is the MS9 that leads to the second tradition.

The story after MS 9 is really quite different to the early history of ‘AParadox’: the tight group of associations at the top gives way to a loosertransmission history amongst a collection of miscellanies with little in commonexcept their Oxford associations. It is interesting, however, to note those associa-tions: between Elias Ashmole’s miscellany (Bodleian Library Ashmole MS 47)and Rosenbach 239/18; between the Wheeler manuscript, Folger MS V.a.322,and another now at St John’s Cambridge, MS S.32 (they both share copies ofJonson’s Pindaric Ode); and between another Folger manuscript, MS V.a.245,and Rosenbach MS 239/23. Those pairings recur in other stemmas and they mayhelp us establish with greater clarity the social networks that they represent:information that would be particularly useful if, for instance, we were to edit themanuscript poets of the 1620s and 1630s like George Morley, Walton Poole,Zouch Townley and John Grange.


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III

If the stemma for ‘A Paradox’ is informative of one pseudo-Donne poem, then itis worth looking at another disputed text. It is well known that ‘TheExpostulation’ appears in both Donne’s 1633 Poems, and Jonson’s 1640Workes. The matter was first raised by Gifford, then later in the nineteenthcentury Symonds and Swinburne took opposed views, and the issue has gener-ated sporadic debate from Briggs onwards, much of it documented by the recentelegies volume of the Donne Variorum (Stringer 2000: 933–940). The firstmodern approach to the poem was by Briggs, a great and often overlookedJonson scholar, in 1917. He pointed out that the poem contained many referencesto classical sources and especially Seneca’s De Clementia (Briggs 1917:290–292). Nevertheless, Herford following Swinburne and Fleay rejected ‘TheExpostulation’ with three other poems as part of the Jonson canon (H&S: II,383–384). The matter was returned to by Briggs in a review of the first twovolumes of the Oxford Jonson that has been overlooked by the editors of theVariorum. Briggs stated:

The present editors, like Fleay, deprive Jonson of all four [poems] and assign them to Donne;they justify this action by a discussion of the style of the elegies, which, they say, reveals mentalprocesses different from Jonson’s. To me, on the other hand, the style does not suggest Donne’sauthorship, but rather that of an imitator and I am confident that at times I can detect the genuineaccents of Jonson (Briggs 1927: 409–410).

The matter was taken up by Evelyn Simpson in 1939, who ignored Briggs anddiscussed the issue with reference to only Wilder who (the year before Briggs’review) had written in defence of Jonson (Wilder 1926), and Newdigate who hadedited the Poems and argued for Jonson’s authorship, noting the debt to Catullus(Newdigate 1936: xi–xii). For Simpson, the matter was black and white: Donnewas the author of ‘The Expostulation’ and Jonson of the other three elegies. Hercase started out as an attack on Wilder:

Wilder argues that the fact that the poem is ascribed to ‘J. D.’ (John Donne) in the Hawthorndenmanuscript is not sufficient proof. He seems to be totally unaware that the testimony of thismanuscript, important as it is, does not stand alone, but is supported by a large body of othermanuscripts. Any poem which appears as Donne’s in these manuscripts would have a strongclaim to be attributed to him even if it had not been printed in the edition of 1633, but thecombination of manuscript evidence with that of editions of 1633, 1635, and 1639 is sopowerful as to be quite decisive in favour of Donne’s authorship. (Simpson 1939: 276)

The large body of other manuscripts to which Simpson refers turns out to beHarvard English MS 966.3, which Simpson never saw in person, and that carriesno such attribution.6 The dozen manuscripts cited by Grierson and the additionalmanuscript cited by Simpson all have verse by other poets, and the only othermanuscript among those listed by Grierson with an attribution is Harvard EngMS 966.1. Grierson, in turn, had simply included ‘The Expostulation’ in hisedition of Donne because, he argued, the only poems that occur in Donne’s 1633Poems that are not supported by the Group One and Group Two manuscripts, areBasse’s ‘Epitaph on Shakespeare’ and the translation of Psalm 137 (Grierson

6The manuscript is Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Eng. 966.3 f.35r–36r.Simpson was misled by a printed edition of the manuscript that attributed the poem toDonne.


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1912: II, cxxvi). In fact, ‘The Expostulation’ does not appear in any of the GroupOne manuscripts other than the miscellany Harley 4064, or in all of the GroupTwo manuscripts, and most notably it is not in British Library Additional MS18646, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.12 and the Dolau Cothai manuscriptfrom the National Library of Wales. ‘The Expostulation’ thus failed Grierson’sown test of genuineness alongside these other two poems. As to the authority ofNational Library of Scotland MS 2067, the Hawthornden manuscript, that is amatter to which the discussion will return. For the moment, Simpson’s argumentconcerning the other three elegies is of import as well:

Throughout the three elegies for which the external evidence is in favour of Jonson’s authorship[ie. they are present in the 1640 Workes], there runs a thread of mediæval convention by whichthe lady is ‘mistress’ and the lover her ‘servant’. … On the other hand, in The Expostulation wehave no use of the terms ‘mistress’ and ‘servant,’ and this is in harmony with the rest of Donne’slove-poetry. … When we find that in the three elegies which external evidence would ascribe toJonson, there are no less than eight instances of a usage which is not found at all in Donne’sundoubted work, we have reason for asserting that here the evidence of style supports theexternal evidence. (Simpson 1939: 279–280)

On the other hand, in the three songs ‘To Celia’ and the ten poem sequence ‘ACelebration of Charis’, Jonson does not use such terms either. As all four poemshave been called into question, it is as important to find reasons to support theattribution to Jonson, other than the merely negative one that they are not byDonne.

Percy Simpson (following his wife) accepted the three elegies as genuine andrestored them to the canon, with a note about the matter that strongly cited her inhis commentary (H&S: XI, 66–70). At the same time, he noted that two otherpoems in ‘The Underwood’ are by Sidney Godolphin and Sir Henry Wotton.‘The Expostulation’ is, therefore, not the only stray. Furthermore, Briggs’ doubtsare important because they were known by the Simpsons, and his reviews werekept by Oxford University Press (OUP). In other words, Evelyn Simpson’sarticle deliberately ignored Briggs (who by then was dead), and in so doingshe assigned his views to oblivion.

Since then the debate has continued, and the caution shown by Gardner hasbeen the most balanced of the responses (Gardner 1965: xxxv–xxxviii, 224–225).Gardner treated ‘The Expostulation’ as dubia, noting both the extent of theclassical borrowings, and the possibility of collaboration. She divided the poeminto four parts, suggested (following Leishman) that the phrase ‘Kinges dogges’indicated a date for composition after March 1603, and she found the weight ofclassical borrowing, the shifts in emotional register, and the attitudes expresseduncharacteristic of Donne. In response to Gardner’s comments, the debatebecame more varied, and this is detailed by the Variorum. For present purposes,the important contributions are the two stylometric studies by Daniel Greenblattand Heyward Brock (Greenblatt 1973; Heyward Brock 1978), and the views ofthe Variorum editors.

Greenblatt’s approach was to consider the poem for its metrical patterningagainst a sample group of five elegies by Donne, and five by Jonson (Greenblatt1973: 91).7 The factors that he took into account were the complexity of themetrical pattern, the relative place of the stress against the structure of the

7Greenblatt used Jonson Und. 18, 19, 38, 40, 41 and Donne Bracelet, Jealousie, Mistressto Bed, Change, His Picture, Perfume as his controls.


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pentameter, and the prominence of the stress against its place in the line.Greenblatt tested the uniformity of data from his Donne sample group againstthe ‘The Perfume’ and found consistency. He then tested ‘The Expostulation’ andfound considerable variance. His choice of Jonson texts, however, is less con-vincing if only because three of the five elegies he chose came from the groupthat had been called into doubt. This part of his data is therefore biased towardsthe material that was itself being questioned. Further, all the poems chosen for hissample are, arguably, from later in Jonson’s career, rather than belonging to theOdes and related verse letters that Jonson was writing in 1600–1603.

The results of Greenblatt’s tests led him to state:

The coincident voices of these several statistical tests say that the probability of Donne writingan elegy in rhymed iambic pentameter couplets with the metrical features of ‘The Expostulation’is exceedingly low. It would take extraordinarily strong evidence from other sources to makeDonne a likely choice as author of the poem. At the same time, the homogeneity of ‘TheExpostulation’ with the Jonson sample in all tests gives us, not positive evidence that Jonsonwrote the poem, but at least no particular reason to rule him out as the possible author on strictlymetrical grounds. (Greenblatt 1973: 98)

In effect, Greenblatt confirms Briggs’ suspicion that the poem has another voice:an imitator of Donne with genuine accents of Jonson. The weakness of theargument is not his critique of the attribution to Donne, it is the material hechose to represent Jonson. His results credibly show that there is very littlechance that the author of the poem is Donne; his discussion of Jonson ismeaningless.

Heyward Brock was unaware of Greenblatt’s work when he ran his ownstatistical tests. His chosen method was tagmemic clause-analysis, and he studiedall four questioned poems against a sample of three by Jonson and two byDonne. His conclusions were that the first and last of the questioned poems(Und. 38 and 41) were by Jonson, that the other elegy was on balance morelikely to be by Jonson and that ‘The Expostulation’, ‘reveals no telling featuresthat allow us to choose one poet over the other’ (Heyward Brock 1978: 522).Faced with this result, Brock supported his attribution to Donne by reverting tothe ‘external evidence’ argument:

All features considered, the case is too close to decide, and so we must turn to external evidence,which as has been cogently argued by Evelyn Simpson, greatly favors Donne. (Heyward Brock1978: 522)

The position of the Donne Variorum is little different. In 1988, Sullivan arguedthat the presence of ‘The Expostulation’ in the Dalhousie manuscripts ‘power-fully’ supported the attribution to Donne as they did not include any poems byJonson (Sullivan II 1988: 11). In the elegies volume, the Variorum editors alsotook the view that proof that Jonson did not write the poem meant that Donnedid. Thus, they remarked that:

recognition of the position of [the 1640 Workes] within this family and, more broadly, of thisfamily’s place within this elegy’s general transmissional history resolves the disputed questionof Jonson’s possible authorship of the poem. (Stringer 2000: II, 374)

While this statement (as we shall see) is true, the implication that the removal ofJonson resolves the issue of authorship is naïve. Gardner, for one, had consideredthe attribution to Jonson as ‘worthless’ (Gardner 1965: xxxv). That was not the


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issue that she sought to address. As Gardner remarked, ‘we need positive reasonsfor ascribing a poem to Donne, not the merely negative reason that we cannotpropose another author’ (Gardner 1965: xliv). This is, in fact, the problem thatthe stylometric tests ought to have sampled, and it is a matter that the Variorumeditors ought to have dealt with as well. Instead the Variorum states that ‘thiselegy clearly has an extensive early history [my italics] of circulation as Donne’squite apart from any association with Jonson’ (Stringer 2000: II, 374). Morecorrectly, it has a history of unattributed circulation in collections with poems byDonne, and that is a different matter altogether. It is not in the Group Onemanuscripts, or the Westmoreland manuscript: the two collections that consistonly of poems by Donne.

The issue, then, is not one of ‘Donne or Jonson’, but what happens if wecompare ‘The Expostulation’ both against their work, and the poems ofBeaumont, Hare and Sir John Roe. As the Variorum editors remark, ‘Thispoem, more than any other of the Elegies, is indebted to the classical Latinpoets’ (Stringer 2000: II, 940).8 This is important because Roe fits such adescription: he was often confused with Donne by compilers of verse miscella-nies and his poetry was absorbed into the 1635 Poems; he was close to Jonsonand died in his arms; and he shared with Jonson a more stoical set of references,as well as the explosive openings and vigorous tone we associate with Donne.9 Itwould be entirely characteristic of Roe to draw on a Stoic like Seneca, but evenmore importantly the overall tone and style of the poem is characteristic of him.Further, if the reference to the ‘Kinges dogges’ does date the poem to after 1603,then it was written after Donne’s marriage and retirement to Mitcham, but whilstRoe was at his most active.

At this point, therefore, it would help to look at the stemma for ‘TheExpostulation’ (Figure 3). This, once again, the Variorum editors failed to resolvefully, although the key variants can be established. Instead, they simply groupedthe manuscripts into families – a method that disguises the remove that anymanuscript might be from the source of the poem (Stringer 2000: II, 388–390).There is a small amount of independent agreement where a compiler has eithermade a mistake in common with another line of recension, or reverted to anearlier reading, but none of the examples are anything more than singular-pluralchanges or the misreading of similar letterforms. On re-analysis, the suggestionby the Variorum that the poem may have been revised certainly presents thesimplest solution to unravelling the relationship between the two textual tradi-tions for the poem, but rather than there being one variant between the traditions,there are six. The order in which the revision took place is less apparent.

There are twenty-nine manuscripts of the poem, two of which are extracts. Ofthe extracts, one was copied c.1700 from a printed text, the other is associatedwith a manuscript copy derived from the 1635 Poems, but with the independentvariants that gave rise to Folger MS V.a.162. This manuscript, and the twoextracts, are, therefore, of no consequence. The 1635 Poems derives from the1633 Poems but has been compared with Harvard English 966.5 and shares someof that manuscript’s readings. The remaining 26 manuscripts, and the two printedtexts from the 1633 Poems and Jonson’s 1640 Workes, all fall within the twoclearly defined traditions. Of the 26 manuscript witnesses only three suggest anattribution: on the left, Harvard English 966.5 (the O’Flahertie Manuscript) has a

8Donne, Variorum, II, 940.9For the main details of Roe’s life, see Ribiero 1973.


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Figure3.

‘The

Expostulatio

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al28

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FolgerV.a.162

;thefour

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note in the compiler’s hand ‘Qre if by Donne or Sir Thomas Roe’; on the right,the Hawthornden manuscript attributes the poem to ‘I. D.’, as does HarvardEnglish MS 966.1. Unfortunately, this last manuscript attributes two poems byRoe, two poems by Beaumont, one poem by Hoskins, one poem by the Countessof Bedford, one poem by Edward Herbert, one poem by the Earl of Pembroke,and one other, to Donne: it is not a reliable witness.10 In none of the othermanuscripts can ‘The Expostulation’ be attributed to Donne from context as allare coterie compilations, with verse by Beaumont, Roe, Jonson, and Hoskins.Usually, ‘The Expostulation’ is found in the midst of this material, rather thanamongst poems by Donne. The general evidence for attribution is, therefore, veryweak.

When we look at the stemma more closely, the problems deepen. On the left-hand side, nine of the ten manuscripts have poems by Sir John Roe: theexception being Yale Osborn b.197. The problem with ascribing the poem toRoe on this basis, is not the note ‘Qre if by Donne or Sir Thomas Roe’, for theconfusion between Sir Thomas and his long dead cousin is quite understandableand the note appears as well against ‘Sleep, next society’ (which is by Sir JohnRoe). The problem is that Harvard English 966.5 (prepared c.1632) is at leastfour recensions removed from its original source. On the right-hand side, onlythree of the sixteen manuscripts do not contain poems by Roe, and the threeexceptions are the related group of Cambridge Additional MS 8470, RosenbachMS 1083/17, and the Meisei manuscript. As for the case that has been made foran attribution to Donne: the Dalhousie manuscripts which Sullivan believed‘powerfully’ supported the attribution are four removes from their originalsource. The same is true of the Hawthornden Manuscript on the right. Ratherthan offering the strongest possible support for an attribution to Donne, theirtestimony is so weak as to weigh no more seriously than the compiler’s query inHarvard English 966.5. The case made by Evelyn Simpson for Donne’s author-ship on external evidence does not, therefore, withstand scrutiny. In addition, thestylometric evidence produced by Brock and Greenblatt (as opposed to Brock’sreliance on Simpson in lieu of decisive evidence) offers no clear support forDonne’s authorship.

Three parts of the stemma require comment: first, the copies that descendfrom MS 9; second, those that descend immediately from MS 2; and third, therelationship between Trinity College, Dublin, MS 877 and the copies descendingfrom MS 10. Three traditions descend from MS 9: the Hawthornden andWedderburn manuscripts (National Library of Scotland MS 6504);11 theHarley-Rawlinson pair and Jonson’s 1640 Workes. The problem with the attribu-tion to Donne in the Hawthornden manuscript is not simply its distance from thesource; what stands out is the way in which this group is in direct conflict withthe remainder of its family. The copy to be found in Jonson’s Workes need not, ofcourse, have come from Jonson’s papers: as his literary executor, Sir KenelmDigby might have added the poem from his own material if he thought it was byJonson; alternatively, Jonson may have ‘improved’ a corrupt copy of the poem

10‘True Loue findes witt’ (f.28r), ‘Come Fates I feare yow not’ (ff.36r–37r), ‘An Elegy onthe Death of Elizabeth Countess of Rutland’ (ff.46r–47v), ‘An Elegie on the deathe of theLadie Markham’ (ff.47v–48r), ‘Absence heare thou my protestation’ (f.33r-v), ‘Deathe benot proud thy hand giues not this blowe’ (f.44r-v), ‘Vengeance will sitt’ (f.41r-v), ‘If herdisdaine in yow lest Change can moue’ (f.41v) and ‘A silly Iohn supriz’d with ioy’ (f.24v).11Respectively, National Library of Scotland MS 2067 and MS 6504.


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that had been passed to him.12 What we do know is that this copy derives fromMS 9 like the rest of the family.13

As to the other scribal copies descending from MS 9, the Hawthornden manu-script is in the hand ofWilliamDrummond, and this has been adduced as proof of itsauthority.14 The title on the front of the volume is in the hand of Drummond’s son,and was added c.1700 (Bland 2005b). The booklet is quired in eights with the firsttwo and last two leaves left blank, implying that it could have been integrated into alarger collection if Drummond had so desired. Drummond’s collection begins withseven coterie poems by Pembroke, Rudyerd, Roe, Hoskins and another unsignedpiece. There follow thirteen poems by Donne, ‘The Expostulation’, and Hoskins’‘Upon Absence’. The volume finishes with fifteen epigrams by Donne. The Donnepoems are a distinctive group: two satires, The Storm and the Calm, the funeralelegies for Lady Markham and Cecilia Bulstrode, two verse letters to Wotton (onespecifically dated 20 July 1598), and only one of the songs and sonnets (I am twofools I know). Thus, it is a collection of mainly social and satirical verse to whichDrummond had access. The manuscript appears to have been copied from booklets.The main collection of Donne poems appear to be a sheaf slipped in between thecoterie poems, with the epigrams being a separate collection added at the end. ‘TheExpostulation’ immediately precedes Hoskins’ poem. Such a place on the margin ofthe collection renders its status the least certain.

As a consequence, it is worth looking at the Wedderburn manuscript. Whatdistinguishes this collection from Hawthornden is both its completeness and thedeliberate division of the manuscript into parts. Further, Hawthornden cannotderive from Wedderburn as it has dates (e.g. Satire 4) that the other does not. Thetwo manuscripts must, therefore, have some relation to a common parent ortwins. There seems to be the same underlying group of papers, but there issimply much more in Wedderburn. Again the division into sections seems toanticipate that more material would be forthcoming, and then filled in later byother hands. The first section is given over to poems by Donne, the second tocoterie poems in which the poem by Pembroke is removed and two by Wottonadded, and the third (written in from the back) to Overbury’s Wife and theassociated ‘Characters’. Hence, Wedderburn would both appear to suggest theattribution to Donne and its marginality as ‘The Expostulation’ is placed at thevery end of a run of Donne poems. This clearly derives from the way in whichthe compiler of MS 15 organized the loose papers that formed the underlyingcollection. The placement of the poem does not offer confidence to the attribu-tion made by Drummond. Rather, it suggests that the compiler was uncertain butbelieved the poem to be by Donne, and that Drummond wished to identify whothe authors were, not because of his knowledge, but owing to his distance fromthe literary society to which he wished to belong.

The compiler of MS 16, who supplied poems to the Group One tradition, hadno such doubts about the history of ‘The Expostulation’. On this basis, it seemslikely that the compiler supplied poems of undoubted authenticity to the GroupOne tradition except when it was known that a better copy might be available

12Some lost loose papers that belonged to Digby were printed for the Roxburghe Club, buthave disappeared (Bright 1877). They contain scribal copies of poems by Jonson andBeaumont.13cf. Simpson 1939: 282, who claimed it was ‘impossible to say’ whether the Jonson copywas ‘autograph or not’.14The paper is pot, with the initials ‘NB’ and chainlines of 21mm.


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elsewhere (for instance, from the Countess of Bedford). Importantly, in HarleyMS 4064, ‘The Expostulation’ precedes a run of poems by Sir John Roe.

Clearly, in this instance, the stemma reveals that the source for the 1633 Poemswas outside the Group One tradition, and whilst the stemma may disguise anintermediary between MS 2 and 1633, we have no other witness to confirm this.The same is true of Trinity College, Dublin, MS 877. What is certain is that thesource that gave rise to these copies was remarkably close to the author of them. Like‘Sappho and Philaenis’, ‘The Expostulation’ was a poem that was added to 1633 inpursuit of completeness. We need not, however, assume that the source on which1633 drewwas necessarily knowledgeable about the origin of the poem. ChristopherBrooke, for instance, died in 1628 and his books and manuscripts were being kept intrust for his son at Lincoln’s Inn (Brooke 1628). If ‘The Expostulation’ was foundamongst his papers, the conclusion may have been drawn that it was by Donnesimply because of a similarity in tone to Donne’s known work and the long enduringfriendship of the two men. The presence of the poem in 1633 without the support ofthe Group One tradition or the Westmoreland manuscript is more of a problem thanthe Variorum editors acknowledge.

The other striking feature of the stemma is the distance between TrinityDublin MS 877 and the British Library Lansdowne MSS 740–Texas Techgroup. In the stemma for ‘The Bracelet’, for instance, these manuscripts areshown as a single family, and this is true for all the other elegies where all thesemanuscripts are present except for ‘To his Mistress Going to Bed’ (Stringer 2000:II, 46, 193). In ‘The Expostulation’, the distance between these manuscripts islarge enough as to raise questions as to why they do not directly share a closefamilial ancestor. At the same time, it is worth noting that the close connectionbetween the Group One tradition, as witnessed by the Harley–Rawlinson group,and the Group Two tradition of the Lansdowne–Texas Tech group is unusual initself. In the case of Overbury’s Wife, Roe’s poems, and those of Donne, whatcharacterizes these groups are their differences, not their similarities. Time andagain, textual stemmata radically divide the groups rather than connect them. Inthis case, the stemma looks odd, or to put it another way, it looks ‘un-Donne’.

What now needs to happen with the debate over the authorship of ‘TheExpostulation’ is to put aside the attempts to attribute the poem to either Donne orJonson, and to recognise that it is almost certainly by neither of them: the principalattribution to both of them descends from exactly the same source. If a furtherstylometric study were undertaken, then it should rather focus of Roe and Hare,15

with perhaps Francis Beaumont as a control. Such a study should proceed from thefrank recognition that not all competent seventeenth-century poems need to havebeen written by authors who are now taught in the higher curriculum. An arthistorian would immediately recognise that the lack of evidence for ‘the master’shand’ suggests rather the ‘workshop’ or ‘school’ of the more famous name. Literarystudies should not be exempt from the same rigour.

IV

One final example, and this time it is from a poem by Jonson. The ‘Epitaph onElizabeth L. H.’ (Epig. CXXIV) has been the subject of repeated speculation as to

15A possible attribution to Hare was suggested by Robbins 2008: II, 473–474.


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whom the subject might be.16 The poem was the single most copied of theEpigrammes in the seventeenth century and beyond. Unlike ‘The Expostulation’where the stemma only serves to confirm ambiguity or doubt over authorship, thehistory of ‘Elizabeth L. H.’ in manuscript reveals who the subject was, and it isthe highest quality surviving manuscript that does so. Further, as a consequenceof that information, it is possible to demonstrate how Amelia Lanyer gainedaccess to ‘To Penshurst’ soon after it was written.

The stemma for ‘Elizabeth L. H.’ (Figure 4) reveals a relatively uncompli-cated textual history as the poem was passed from hand to hand with the textbeing gradually corrupted and then truncated as it did so. Like ‘TheExpostulation’, it was a poem that was revised, in this case for the 1616Workes, and seven of the surviving manuscripts derive from that source ratherthan social circulation. In all, there are 23 surviving manuscripts: three belongingto the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the remaining thirteen seven-teenth-century copies deriving from the first state of the poem; there is also acopy in Wits Interpreter that derives from an early manuscript source.Lansdowne MS 777 f.60r, listed by Beal in his Index of English LiteraryManuscripts, is a parody (Beal 1980).17

Jonson made four revisions to the poem, changing ‘Wilt’ to ‘Would’st’ in line1, ‘Hearke’ to ‘In’ in line 2, ‘most’ to ‘all’ in line 7, and ‘hidden’ to ‘buried’ inline 8. Among changes in the first state, ‘hidden’ first became ‘hid’, which thenled to ‘in’ becoming ‘within’ to correct the metrics; and ‘Hearke’ later became‘Heare’. At MS 9, the 1616 Workes reading ‘buried’ was introduced to replace‘hidden’ but otherwise the variants remain as would be expected; from MS 10onwards, the poem becomes truncated, and from MS 11 it is reduced to four linesonly. At MS 12, the order of ‘beauty’ and ‘vertue’ in lines 4 and 6 is reversed.The changes to the 1616 Workes tradition involve alterations to lines 10 and 11.

Of the manuscripts that attribute identity, the truncated version of BritishLibrary Harley MS 6057, which identifies the subject as ‘Mris Bowlstred’ (CecilaBoulstrode) is at least six removes from the first version of the poem, whilstBodleian Library Rawlinson MS D 1092, which identifies the subject as QueenElizabeth, is a descendant of the 1616 Workes. The other identification, ofElizabeth Sidney, occurs in a nineteenth-century manuscript with the truncatedfour-line version, Bodleian Library MS Eng. Misc e.219. All these attributions,therefore, can be dismissed as speculative. On the other hand, the very bestmanuscript, Beinecke Library Osborn MS b200, identifies the subject as ‘LadyEliz. Hobby’, and this attribution is unquestionably correct.18

It may come as a surprise that the subject of the poem was an 81-year-old lady.Elizabeth Hoby (1528–1609: née Cooke, later Russell) was the sister of Mildred,wife of William, Lord Burghley. She married Sir Thomas Hoby, the translator ofCastiglione’s The Courtier (STC 4778; 1561). Her second marriage was to ThomasRussell, heir to the earldom of Bedford. She was the matriarch of an extended family

16Candidates have included Bess of Hardwick (van den Berg 1981); Elizabeth, LadyHatton (Daniels 1989); Elizabeth Sidney and Cecilia Bulstrode (Major 1976) Elizabeth,Lady Hunsdon (McKenzie 1962), and a mother pregnant with an illegitimate child(Tabachnick 1971).17The manuscripts are JnB 122-36.5 plus British Library Add MS 29492, f.38v;Brotherton Library L t 20 B, p.126; Nottingham University PwV 30, p.343; Folger MSV.a.275, p.156 and Beinecke Osborn MS fb143, p.34.18Burrow has described Hoby as a ‘not implausible candidate’ but described the subject as‘not finally identified’ (CWBJ 2012: V, 184).


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that included both Hoby and Russell children. The reason she has no name or title inthe poem is because Thomas died ten months before his father, and so his sonFrancis, who later married Lucy Harrington, inherited the earldom instead. HenceElizabeth was deprived of the right to become dowager Countess of Bedford in herown right, although she was the mother-in-law of Lucy.

Elizabeth died in August 1609 and is buried in the church at Bisham with anelaborate funeral monument.19 An autograph copy of Jonson’s poem would havebeen placed inside the vault. There can be little doubt that Lucy requested the

Figure 4. ‘Epitaph on Elizabeth, L. H.’

19See Hoby 1609; Heal 1996.


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poem, and that Jonson attended the funeral. During June and July, Jonson hadbeen writing ‘To Penshurst’, and as well as the epitaph, he must have brought acopy of his new poem, perhaps to show the Countess.20 Bisham is the nextvillage to Cookham. Jonson worked with Amelia Lanyer’s brother Robert, whowas a musician; and he must have either shown Amelia the poem, or givensomeone a copy (her brother perhaps) who then showed it to her. Lanyer’s ‘ToCookham’ recounts the events of 1609 including the arrival and departure of thegreat ladies: It is clearly written early in 1610 after they have left. Attempts toclaim precedence for Lanyer’s poem in the history of the country-house poemare, therefore, without foundation.

V

One final comment: stemmatics tells us of the life of a text in society; it can beused to help resolve issues of association and identity, as a tool for scepticism,and as a means of reconstructing historical narratives. As such they are vital toour sense of how the social networks of manuscript culture functioned. Theexamples given here simply illustrate a method of thinking and its consequences.The point is not to privilege manuscript over print as such, but rather to recognisethe genetic stages through which texts evolved, and the networks through whichthe witnesses were transmitted. Our scholarship ought to be based on aninformed understanding of that history: it is a modest ambition, but one withsometimes radical consequences. All too often statements are made about authorsand readers without any reference to the evidence, and it is time we understoodthe evidence for what it is and put it back at the heart of the study of books andmanuscripts as witnesses to the social and imaginative lives of those whom wechoose to be interested in. Understanding the history of the transmission of textsis not always easy but it is always informative.

REFERENCES

Manuscripts

Brooke 1628. National Archives, London, PROB/11 154, ff.378r–79v.Hoby 1609. National Archives, London, PROB11/113/546.OUP. Oxford University Press Archives, file PB/ED/007694: 445.1,2/DMD.

Printed Books

Beal, Peter (ed.). 1980. Index of English literary manuscripts 1450–1625. 2 vols. London & NewYork: Mansell.

Berg, Sara van den. 1981. A Jonsonian crux: The identity of ‘Elizabeth, L. H.’. Studies in Philology78, 32–46.

Bland, Mark. 2005a. Francis Beaumont’s Verse Letters to Ben Jonson and ‘The Mermaid Club’.English Manuscript Studies 12, 139–179.

Bland, Mark. 2005b. Further information: Drummond’s Democritie, A Labyrinth of Delight and his‘Certain Informations and Manners of Ben Jonson’. TEXT 17, 145–186.

Bland, Mark. 2010. A guide to early printed books and manuscripts. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.Bland, Mark. forthcoming. The internal structure of some Jonson-Donne manuscripts. Huntington

Library Quarterly 77, special issue, ed. R. Bullard.

20The date of ‘To Penshurst’ is defined both by events in the Sidney family and by thelocation of King James and Prince Henry during June–July when they went hunting. In1609, they were in Kent. See the relevant sections of the Calendar of State Papers andBrennan & Kinnamon 2003.


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Brennan, Michael G. & Noel J. Kinnamon. 2003. A Sidney chronology: 1554–1654. Basingstoke:Ashgate.

Briggs, W. D. 1917. Source-material for Jonson’s Underwoods and miscellaneous poems. ModernPhilology 15, 277–312.

Briggs, W. D. 1927. Review of Charles Herford & Percy Simpson, Ben Jonson, 2 vols, 1925. ModernLanguage Notes 42, 404–411.

Bright, H. A. (ed.). 1877. Poems from Sir Kenelm Digby’s papers. London: Roxburghe Club.Clark, A. C. 1918. The descent of manuscripts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CWBJ: Bevington, David, Martin Butler & Ian Donaldson (eds.). 2012. The Cambridge edition of the

works of Ben Jonson, 7 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Daniels, E. F. 1989. Epitaph on Elizabeth L.H. Explicator 48, 10–12.Gardner, Helen (ed.). 1965. John Donne: The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.Greenblatt, D. L. 1973. Generative metrics and the authorship of ‘The Expostulation’. Centrum 1,

87–104.Grierson, H. J. C. 1912. The poems of John Donne. 2 vols. Oxford, Oxford University Press.Hanna, Ralph. 1996. Pursuing history: Middle English manuscripts and their texts. Stanford: Stanford

University Press.Heal, Felicity. 1996. Reputation and honour in court and country: Lady Elizabeth Russell and Sir

Thomas Hoby. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society VI(6), 161–178.H&S: Herford, Charles, Percy Simpson & Evelyn Simpson (eds.). 1925–1952. Ben Jonson, 11 vols.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.Heyward Brock, D. 1978. Jonson and Donne: Structural fingerprinting and the attribution of Elegies

xxxvii–xli. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 72, 519–528.Krueger, Robert. 1962. Sir John Davies: Orchestra complete, Epigrams, unpublished poems. Review

of English Studies n.s. 13, 17–29 & 113–124.Leishman, J. B. 1945. You meaner beauties of the night. A study in transmission and transmogrifica-

tion. The Library IV: 26, 99–123.Love, Harold. 1984. The ranking of variants in the analysis of moderately contaminated manuscript

traditions. Studies in Bibliography 37, 39–57.Love, Harold. 2002. Systematising sigla. English Manuscript Studies 11, 217–230.Major, J. M. 1976. A reading of Jonson’s ‘Epitaph on Elizabeth L. H.’. Studies in Philology 73, 62–

86.McKenzie, J. 1962. Jonson’s ‘Elizabeth, L. H.’. Notes and Queries n.s. 9, 210.Newdigate, Bernard (ed.). 1936. The poems of Ben Jonson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Reynolds, L. D. (ed.). 1983. Texts and transmission. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Ribiero, A. 1973. Sir John Roe: Ben Jonson’s friend. Review of English Studies n.s. 24, 153–164.Robbins, Robin (ed.). 2008. The poems of John Donne. 2 vols. Edinburgh: Longman.Simpson, Evelyn. 1939. Jonson and Donne: A problem of authorship. Review of English Studies 15,

274–282.Stringer, Gary et al. (eds.). 2000. The Variorum edition of the poetry of John Donne, vol. 2: The

Elegies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Sullivan, Ernest W., II. (ed.) 1988. The First and Second Dalhousie manuscripts: Poems and prose by

John Donne and others, a facsimile edition. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.Tabachnick, S. E. 1971. Jonson’s ‘Epitaph on Elizabeth L. H.’. Explicator 29, unpaginated.Wilder, M. L. 1926. Did Jonson write ‘The Expostulation’ attributed to Donne? Modern Language

Review 21, 431–435.Wolf, Edwin, II. 1948. ‘If shadows be a picture’s excellence’: An experiment in critical bibliography.

Papers of the Modern Language Association 63, 831–857.


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stemmatics and society in early modern england

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