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Notes
E.g. Hallett Smith, "Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder," The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams et al. (1962), I, 404; Franklin Dickey, "Collections of Songs and Sonnets," Elizabethan Poetry, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, No. 2 (1960), pp. 31-32, 34. Cf. Ruth Hughey ed., The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry (1960), II, 162. To be sure, earlier scholarship had already pointed the way to this rewriting: Hyder E. Rollins summarizes and accepts it in "Marginalia on Two Elizabethan Poetical Miscellanies," Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. J. G. McManaway (1948), p. 457.
E.g. reviewer in RES, N.S., VIII (1957), 282: "Since he dates Stark 1547-9 it is not clear why it is necessary to postulate another edition in 1549 to account for the attack of John Hall in 1550."
I list them in the order in which they occur in F, using the following sigla in addition to those already explained in the text. For poems included in K. Muir ed., Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, 3rd impression [rev.], The Muses' Library (London, 1960), I give at the head of the entry the number assigned to the poem by Muir. For convenience' sake I shall so refer to the poems throughout the rest of this article, and to the book as Muir, Wyatt. N.B. Numbers above 213 represent Muir's classification of "Doubtful Poems." Bl=Blage MS. (Trinity Coll. Dublin MS. D.2.7, ed. K. Muir, Sir Thomas Wyatt and his circle, Unpublished Poems Edited from the Blage Manuscript, English Reprints Ser., No. 18 [Liverpool, 1961] — hereafter referred to as Unpub. Poems). E = Egerton MS. (Brit. Mus. MS. Eg. 2711). T = Songs and Sonnets (London: R. Tottel, 1557). M = Brit. Mus. MS. Add. 18752. A = Arundel Harington MS. (ed. Hughey).
In this collation I ignore spelling differences except where they are rhythmically significant. No. 43 is identical in S and F except for one verbal change ("The" to "That") and the omission of two words. All these variants may be ascribed to carelessness in typesetting of F; since D has the S readings, the changes certainly do not represent F's improvement on S by means of collation with a D derivative. In No. 66 F has eight variations from S, seven of which are clearly corruptions, probably compositor's errors. The eighth corrects an error in S, replacing "true" in line 23 with "Trow" and thus restoring the D reading (where E has "Thinck"). "True not alone vnder the sunne" is an obvious mistake, capable of correction without consulting a manuscript. In No. 103 there are several variants between S and F, and we shall have to examine them in detail to discern what happened. line 6 D Remember oft thow hast me eaysyd S Remembre thou hast oft ple< > F Remember how thou hast oft pleased Here either F restores a word dropped in S, by reference to a manuscript text or, equally well, by conjecture; or S, in not having "how," is actually closer to D, from which F departs. line 26 D Syns thow hast taken payn thys space S Syns thou hast taken payne this space F Seyng thou hast taken payne this space Here F is clearly farther from D than is S. line 30 D my pen I prithe wryght no more S < >y the write no more F My pen I pray the to wryt no more. Again, by a probable compositorial error, F is farther from D. The same may be said of line 10: D & yet my pen thow canst no more S And yet my pen thou canst< > more. F And yet my pen thou canst do no more. Although Fraser supplies "do no" from F to fill the gap caused by the deterioration of S, it is apparent from the photograph he supplies (Plate [III]) that there is room for only one word in S. line 3 D & hathe in hold [sic] my hart so sore S And hold my harte so< > F and hath in hold, my hart so sore F corrects a slip in S and in so doing restores the D reading. This may have been done by collation with a manuscript, but more likely is based on line 28 of the same poem. line 7 D & all my payne full well apeaysyd S And my sorowes also eased F And al my sorowes also eased Since F's line is so far, generally, from D's, the restoration of "al" is better attributed to a simple metrical "improvement" than to collation. line 25 D alas my pen now wryght no more S Alak my pen now wryte no more F Alas my pen now wryte no more. Collation of S with a manuscript seems a laborious way to effect this little change. line 27 D to folow that whych dothe me chace S To folow that which doth the chase F To folow that whych doth me chase A careful editor would have seen that S was corrupt and guessed at "me." line 14 D syns we do lose that other save S Sens we do lose let other sau< > F <Seyng> we doe lose and other saue All three versions differ. I have no explanation, but it is not relevant to our present concern. (The first word in F is partially trimmed away, but there is enough left to justify the reading I have given.) S omits line 20 entirely, and to show the relationship between the three versions I must give the whole stanza: lines 16-20 D yn worthe to vse another waye not as we would but as we maye for ons my losse ys past Restore & my desyre ys my desyre my pen yet wryght a lytyll more S < >to worke an o< > N< > For els my lif< > paste < > And my desyre is my decaye F And vse to worke another way Not as ye would but as ye may For els my lyfe is past restore and my desire is my decay and yet my pen now wryt no more. Obviously S has omitted a line and F fills the gap — perhaps by manuscript authority (not that of D, however), but just as likely by independent conjecture based on the analogy of all the other stanza endings. If the D reading is right, however, in breaking this analogy in line 20 ("wryght a lytyll more" rather than "no more"), the likelihood is all the more that the line supplied in F is a sheer guess. line 29 D Now hast thow browght my mynde to passe S ndA now thou hast this brought to passe F And now to haue brought this to passe While differing from S, F is no closer to D. I can make more sense out of the Court versions of the line, and they help to make more complete the parallel of the final stanza with the first. It is probably D itself which should be emended.
The preceding footnote supports this statement for Nos. 43, 66, and 103. In No. 226, F omits a word from the S text ("euen," line 4) and corrects three S misprints (lines 15-16). It is not clear why F substitutes "with" for "to" in line 8 and four times changes "ye" to "you," but from the lack of any other evidence that manuscript authority was consulted, one hesitates to call in such an explanation for any of these changes. In No. 227, seven of the fourteen lines extant in F contain variants from S. As the S text of lines 2, 4, 6, and 7 is supported by another source, M, it appears that the readings of F are in error. (As M has an entire stanza not found in S or F, it may be considered to possess separate authority and thus to provide meaningful corroboration for S. The additional stanza, She hath myne hart al other before so hath she my body she may be sure nothyng on erth may glad me more then to spende them both to do her plesure, follows line 4.) On the other hand, when F replaces "to" with "do" in line 11 it is an obvious correction. Only lines 3 and 10 give us real difficulty. 3 S Alas her loue doth me so blinde F Alas her ioy doth so bind M Alas here yee doth me so bynde 10 S And if I do not I shall not spede F And if I dare not, I shal not spede M [line 14] yf I speke not I shuld not spede The reading of F is not palpably inferior to that of S: on line 10, some may prefer it. Still, as F is obviously corrupt elsewhere it would be reasonable to ascribe these differences to the same cause, were it not that F agrees with the word "bynde" in M. This is the nearest we get to an emendation requiring the introduction of fresh textual authority after S. It is not, in my judgment, near enough. I thank T. S. Pattie, Assistant Keeper of Manuscripts, British Museum, for verifying my notes on M; and the staffs of the Folger Shakespeare Library and the British Museum for the courtesy of access to F and D, respectively.
It may be suggested that since No. 225 and "Fortune what ayleth the," in F but not in S, are also found in the Blage MS. (Muir, Unpub. Poems, pp. 87, 90), this MS. entered the Court tradition sometime after S. But No. 66 is also in Bl, and where S and F differ from all other texts they agree with Bl (e.g. line 18). It would thus appear that Bl, or a related manuscript, entered the Court tradition before S; and No. 225 and "Fortune what ayleth the" could have entered then as well, if we grant that they might have been among the pages now missing from S.
Smith, loc. cit. (note 1). Cf. Kenneth Muir, Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool, 1963), p. 220: "A number of his lyrics, it is true, had appeared in his lifetime without his name in The Court of Venus." Muir's book reached me only after the completion of this article.
Cf. C. C. Stopes, Shakespeare's Industry (1916), pp. 314-315, 320-321; E. K. Chambers, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Some Collected Studies (1933), p. 208. J. W. Hebel and H. H. Hudson, Poetry of the English Renaissance (1929), p. 913, come closest to such a statement but remain less definite; and in the 1953 revision (Tudor Poetry and Prose, pp. 1187, 1193) the point is silently dropped.
The prologue begins: "In the moneth of may when the new tender grene/Hath smothly couered the ground. . . ." In a notice in 1548 that probably refers to Gybson's edition, John Bale cites De curia Veneris with this opening: "In maio cum virescerent" (Fraser, p. 12; cf. pp. 22, 31). Leaves now missing from B must have contained the same prologue now extant in F only.
Kenneth Muir, "Unpublished Poems in the Devonshire MS," Proc. of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Soc. (Lit. and Hist. Sec.), VI, iv (1947), 282.
The poem is No. 159 in Muir, Wyatt. The same version appears in Tottel's Miscellany (ed. H. Rollins [Cambridge, Mass., 1928-1929], I, 82) and in the Blage MS., fol. 87. Muir, Unpub. Poems, p. 16, prints it as the first stanza of a longer poem and comments (p. xiv) that the entire poem "is certainly Wyatt's . . . because the first stanza appears in D . . . in the group of poems generally accepted as his." Mrs. Annabel Endicott, of the University of Toronto, who read an early draft of this article and made several helpful suggestions, called to my attention that the other three stanzas of this "poem" in Bl are of eight lines, riming ababbaba, and have not even the same theme as No. 159. Clearly it was a mistake to attach them to the D poem — a mistake made by the copyist who wrote fol. 87 in Bl and uncorrected till now.
See H. A. Mason, Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period (London, 1959), pp. 156-174; John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (Lincoln, Neb., 1963), pp. 110-111 and 405 (on No. 55 in E), 212, 340 (R4: cf. Wyatt's No. 161), 346 (R13, line 21: cf. No. 117, line 20, and No. 177, line 24); R. A. Fraser ed., The Court of Virtue (1565) by John Hall (New Brunswick, N. J., 1961), pp. 375-376 n.; and H. Rollins ed., The Paradise of Dainty Devices (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), pp. 182-183. To the last reference, notes on the phrase "had I wist," we may add a poem found in the Blage MS. (Muir, Unpub. Poems, p. 19). Cf. also Muir, Life and Letters, pp. 224, 235, 239ff. Finally, see Raymond Southall, The Courtly Maker (1964), pp. 1ff., and Patricia Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Background (1964), Appendix G, "Clichés in the Medieval Lyric."
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