John Donne. The
Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Vol 6: The
Anniversaries and the Epicedes and Obsequies.
Gen. Ed. Gary A. Stringer. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. lvii +
689 pp. Review by,
Claude J. Summers
University of Michigan, Dearborn csummers@umich.edu
Summers, Claude J. "Review of The Variorum Edition of
the Poetry of John Donne (vol. 6): The Anniversaries and The
Epicedes and Obsequies." Early Modern Literary
Studies 1.3 (1995): 6.1-10 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/01-3/rev_sum1.html>.
The appearance of the first volume in print of The
Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne
is an occasion for celebration. Among the most
ambitious and valuable collaborative scholarly
enterprises at the end of the twentieth century, the
Donne Variorum is an attempt both to digest the vast
and widely dispersed critical commentary on Donne and
to produce a reliable critical edition of the poems,
one based on an exhaustive survey of all known
manuscripts and significant printed editions. Even
before the appearance of its first volume (rather
confusingly designated as Volume 6 of a projected 8
volumes), the venture, underway since 1981, has
generated considerable excitement and a host of
valuable essays and books, mostly by its industrious
textual editors, Ted-Larry Pebworth, John T.
Shawcross, Gary A. Stringer, and Ernest W. Sullivan,
II. It is no exaggeration to say that scholars of
early modern literature have awaited the publication
of the Variorum edition with great anticipation. The
high hopes that have greeted the announcement of the
project and the periodic reports on its progress are
richly rewarded in this book, the first fruits of
many years of labor. On the basis of this superb
volume, one can safely predict that the Variorum
edition will not only be an invaluable compendium of
scholarship and criticism on a major early modern
poet, but it will also quickly displace every
previous edition and establish itself as the
authoritative text of the poetry of John Donne.
Volume 6 contains the texts and commentary on Donne's
first and second Anniversaries, the Funeral Elegy,
and the seven works traditionally designated Epicedes
and Obsequies. Each poem is followed by a textual
introduction and elaborate but accessible textual
histories and lists of variants. In addition, the
uncanonical elegy beginning "Death bee not
proude, thy hand gaue not this blowe," probably
written by Lucy, Countess of Bedford, is included as
an appendix, since it is connected artifactually and
critically to Donne's elegies on Cecilia Boulstred
("Language thou art too narrow" and
"Death I recant"). What links these
commemorative poems is their concern with death and
with the difficulties of mourning the loss of
particular individuals; each poem in the volume is
occasioned by the death of someone Donne knew or knew
of. Like much of Donne's work, including especially
his verse letters, with which they share many
affinities, these poems are at once occasional and
idealized. Even as they are implicated in the poetics
of patronage, they aspire to the timelessness of art;
even as they are carefully tailored performances that
respond to the particularities of their occasions,
they afford the opportunity for philosophical
speculation and considered self-figuration.
I regret that the editors chose not to include in
this volume the verse letter to Lady Bedford
beginning "You that are she and you," which
(as I have argued in a recent essay) is closely
related to "An Elegie vpon the death of the
Ladie Marckham," the two elegies on Cecilia
Boulstred, and the elegy by Lady Bedford, all of
which are presented here. Presumably the poem
beginning "You that are she and you" will
be published in Volume 5, devoted to Verse Letters,
though in his edition of 1967, John Shawcross
departed from other modern editors and placed the
poem among the Epicides and Obsequies, where it seems
to me that it really belongs. I assume that the
commentary in Volume 5 will note the relationship
between "You that are she and you" and the
Epicedes and Obsequies and direct the reader via
cross-references to Volume 6. But my point is that
the somewhat arbitrary assignment of poems to
particular volumes based on generic and thematic
considerations has the potential not only for
revealingly linking some works, but also for eliding
relationships among others, as is the case with these
poems, which together form a dynamic sequence.
While the Epicedes and Obsequies have generally (and,
in my view, unfortunately) been neglected or (I would
argue, wrongly) dismissed as sterile exercises in the
art of flattery, the Anniversaries have, at least
since Herbert J.C. Grierson's edition of 1912,
enjoyed a central place in Donne's canon,
particularly as embodying his extravagant wit and
arcane learning, but also as illustrating the
considerable interpretive difficulties inherent in
the Metaphysical mode itself. In the Variorum, the
commentary on the Anniversaries is presented in about
300 pages, while that on the seven Epicedes and
Obsequies requires about one third of that. As
digested in the Variorum, the commentary on the
Anniversaries not only epitomizes the history of
Donne's critical reception, but also provides a guide
to the shifting critical and scholarly concerns and
methodologies applied to early seventeenth-century
poetry more generally. The commentary in effect
recounts a fascinating history of the various
approaches of academic critics to poems that are
indisputably ambitious, yet puzzling and often
alienating to modern readers. The heroes of this
scholarly and critical saga turn out to be, in
addition to Grierson, such figures as Marjorie
Nicolson, George Williamson, O.B. Hardison, and,
especially, Louis Martz and Barbara Lewalski, who
have located the Anniversaries within significant
intellectual and poetic traditions, while also
illuminating their complex structure and accomplished
technique.
As presented by Commentary Editor Paul A. Parrish,
with the aid of Contributing Editors Donald R.
Dickson and Dennis Flynn, the Variorum Commentary,
which attempts to annotate everything published on
these works between 1612 and 1989, is a model of
concision, accessibility, and thoroughness. In terms
both of usefulness as a bibliographical tool and of
appeal to the scholarly reader, the organization is
exemplary. Because of the nature of the material,
commentary on the three poems grouped together as the
Anniversaries ("The First Anniversary,"
"A Funerall Elegie," and "The Second
Anniversary") is presented under several
headings, beginning with "General
Commentary," and running through eight large
topics such as "Donne, the Drurys, and
Patronage," "Genres and Traditions,"
"Language and Style," and concluding with
line-by-line "Notes and Glosses" on each of
the three poems individually. The commentary on the
Epicedes and Obsequies is similarly organized from
the comprehensive to the narrowly specific, beginning
with a brief section of general commentary on the
Epicedes and Obsequies as a group followed by
sections devoted to each of the seven poems, each
section beginning with general commentary followed by
"Notes and Glosses."
The general sections are written with unusual grace
and clarity to form absorbing historical essays,
while the notes and glosses are appropriately pointed
and pithy. Guided by the editor's controlling voice,
the general sections and topic essays efficiently
summarize a vast amount of scholarship and criticism,
but do so with a readability rare for reference
tools. While the material is advanced chronologically
and neutrally, with a minimum of editorial
interjections, the presentation rarely seems
mechanical or tedious. The commentary will be of
enormous use to scholars as an elaborately annotated
bibliography of immense scope and as a convenient
collection of glosses to particular lines and cruxes;
but it will also repay readers more generally
interested in these poems and in the history of
Donne's reputation. The Variorum summary of previous
scholarship and criticism is not only itself a
formidable accomplishment, but it is also sure to be
the cause of further achievements as well. It will
facilitate additional scholarship and stimulate new
approaches. Moreover, on the basis of this volume,
one can enthusiastically concur with the editors'
claim that the Variorum will "not only enable a
better appreciation of individual works and of
Donne's overall poetic achievement, but also provide
materials toward an enhanced understanding of the
aesthetic and intellectual history of the modern
period."
Spot-checking the impressive "Works Cited,"
I have found no omissions or inaccuracies of detail.
In addition, the summaries are, within the limits of
space, both faithful and fair. My only complaints
about the usefulness of the commentary are minor ones
involving bibliographical conventions and location of
materials within the volume. The "Works
Cited" list, to which the commentary is keyed,
is unsurprisingly located at the rear of the volume.
But the list of abbreviations used in the commentary
and the "Short Forms of Reference for Donne's
Works" are located at the front of the volume.
And because some of the short forms are far from
obvious and because the commentary refers to critics
only by their last names (even when there are several
critics with the same last names), the reader must
frequently refer both to the back of the book and to
the front of it, while keeping his or her place in
the middle, a procedure hardly conducive to the kind
of concentration demanded by the general essays. Such
complaints are minor indeed, for the book strives
toward a high degree of user-friendliness. It
provides, for example, frequent cross-references and
a helpful index to the authors cited in the
commentary. A more general index to other Donne poems
discussed in the volume would also be useful, as
would indexes to historical figures and subjects
discussed in the commentary.
The Variorum commentary makes a significant
contribution to the study of early modern literature,
yet the Variorum text is likely to make an even more
lasting one. What is revolutionary about the Variorum
text is that it recognizes that Donne was
preeminently a manuscript poet rather than a print
poet, and it therefore privileges the manuscript
tradition. With the exception of the Anniversaries
and the elegy on Prince Henry, which are among the
handful of poems that Donne published during his
lifetime, the other poems included in Volume 6
initially circulated in manuscript, like the vast
bulk of Donne's poetry. Breaking with an editorial
tradition that has generally looked to the
problematic posthumously published 1633 and 1635
editions of Donne's poems for copy-texts, the
Variorum edition generally chooses manuscript
copy-texts on the grounds that they are closer to the
lost originals than the first printings. And whereas
previous editors have created synthetic or eclectic
texts, adopting either 1633 or 1635 as copy-text and
generally following the printed version's
accidentals, while emending its substantives from
manuscript sources, the Variorum edition eschews
eclecticism. The practice of the Variorum textual
editors is to collate electronically every surviving
seventeenth-century manuscript and printed copy of
each poem, and on the basis of that collation to
construct for each poem a schema of textual
relationships that accounts for the permutations of
the texts. The copy-text that is finally chosen
"is what seems to be the earliest,
least-corrupted state of the text as preserved in the
best witness among the artifacts in which it
appears." Emendations of the copy-text are then
made very conservatively, primarily to expand scribal
abbreviations and brevigraphs and to impose certain
print conventions.
In addition to its revolutionary recognition of
Donne's practice of scribal publication, the Variorum
edition also advances our understanding of Donne's
poems by providing an amazing wealth of textual
information. The textual apparatuses following each
poem are impressive simply by virtue of their
comprehensiveness, including as they do textual
introductions, information on the copy-text, lists of
the sources collated, emendations of the copy-text,
historical collations that report all substantive and
possibly substantive variants in all
seventeenth-century sources, lists of verbal variants
in selected modern editions, schemata of textual
relationships, and analyses of early printed copies
that list press variants, ambiguous hyphenations, and
miscatchings. While at first glance, this information
may seem overwhelming and intimidating to casual
readers, these introductions and apparatuses are
actually quite comprehensible. Even critics and
students not primarily interested in textual matters
will find these apparatuses valuable, for they permit
the reconstruction of both authorial and
non-authorial versions of each poem and facilitate
the recovery of the works in their scribal
recensions. The Variorum texts and apparatuses are
certain to have a major impact on textual theory and
practice, especially as applied to coterie poetry of
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Volume 6 of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry
of John Donne is in itself a significant
contribution to early modern literary studies. But as
the first volume of an ambitious project, it has a
further importance as herald of the major achievement
that the completed edition promises. Indiana
University Press deserves commendation for producing
so complex a book so handsomely. At this time of
outrageous prices for slim scholarly books, it is
especially gratifying that support from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and several universities
have made it possible for the Press to market this
large book at a price under $50.00. This volume
belongs in every academic library and in the personal
library of every scholar seriously interested in the
works of John Donne.
