4 - John Donne and the circulation of manuscripts

Summary

John Donne (1572–1631) is clearly the most striking instance of a major Tudor-Stuart poet who flourished in the context of a manuscript culture. Although, with apparent reluctance, Donne allowed in his own lifetime the publication of one major verse composition, his Anniversaries (1611–12), as well as two occasional commendatory and elegiac poems, and although a trickle of epigrams, miscellaneous verses and snippets from his works made their way into printed miscellanies of the period as his poetry came increasingly to be treated as a common commodity, the vast majority of his poetical output was certainly confined to manuscripts. Moreover, the sheer quantity of manuscript copies of poems by him which still survive (4,000-odd texts in upwards of 260 manuscripts) – and which must be only a fraction of the number once in existence – indicates beyond doubt that Donne was the most popular English poet from the 1590s until at least the middle of the seventeenth century.

Donne’s own attitude to their circulation was – eventually, at any rate – one of considerable ambivalence, and sometimes outright concern. For the publication of his Anniversaries, for instance, Donne felt obliged to apologize for having, as he says, ‘descended to print anything in verse … and do not pardon myself’. Publication in print, where poems could be made available to all and sundry without any discrimination was, perhaps, construed as at the very least a lapse in gentlemanly taste and decorum. This was just one of a number of social, political and psychological considerations which would explain the lack of enthusiasm he felt about the prospect of publishing some of his poems late in 1614, when, as he confided to his friend Sir Henry Goodyer, he was under pressure from the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Somerset, to do so.