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Notes
No. II.8 in my Bibliography of John Oldham (1936; Kraus reprint, with addenda and corrigenda, 1969). I shall cite this as 'Oldham, Bibliography.'
See Paul G. Morrison, Index of Printers, Publishers and Booksellers in Donald Wing's Short-Title Catalog . . . 1641-1700 (1955), and H. R. Plomer, Dictionary of Booksellers and Printers, 1668-1725 (1922). Mary Crooke of Dublin, listed by Plomer, was obviously not printing for Hindmarsh.
Remains, 1684, is usually found as part of Works . . . Together with . . . Remains, 1684 (Oldham, Bibliography, No. II.12).
The other substantive editions of poems by Oldham are Upon the Marriage of the Prince of Orange with the Lady Mary, printed by T. N. for Henry Herringman, 1677; the piracy of Garnet's Ghost [1679]; The Clarret Drinker's Song, 1680; and the 'Ode for S. Cecilia's Day,' the libretto of A Second Musical Entertainment, 1685 (music by John Blow), printed by John Plaford for John Carr. See Oldham, Bibliography, Nos. II.1, 2, 4, 13.
The 1684 is the third part of The Works . . . Together with . . . Remains, 1684, and of those volumes with the same title, dated 1686, which are described in Oldham, Bibliography, as Nos. II.19, 20. No. II.21 is a different edition from these, also dated 1686; and the wrongly-dated 1683 Poems And Translations belongs to it as its third part. Some of the copies listed in Wing as first editions are actually of this reprint.
It is a pleasure to thank those who have facilitated this task: the Committee of the Central Research Fund, University of London; the staffs of the Bodleian and of the British Museum, Cambridge University, and Birkbeck College Libraries; and for access to their copies either in person or by microfilm, the Libraries of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Guildhall, London; the Huntington Library; the New-berry Library, Chicago; and the Libraries of Yale University and of the University of Texas at Austin. The copy in the W. A. Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, is too tightly bound for microfilm; my friend Professor Earl Miner kindly inspected it on my behalf. In the later stages of my investigation I have had welcome help from Mr. Brian Jenkins and Dr. Laurel Brake, successively Research Assistants in the English Department at Birkbeck. Dr. Brake was also of great help in examining a large number of publications printed by Mary Clark.
MS. Rawlinson Poet 123, pp. 61-64b; Some New Pieces, 1681, pp. 131-134. I shall refer to the MS. (Oldham, Bibliography, I.1) as MS.R.
In Poems, and Translations, 1683, I5 was cancelled in order to reduce to two lines what was evidently a four-line allusion to Hindmarsh. See Oldham, Bibliography, p. 23.
Ll. 7, 39, 113, 128, 137, 201, 251, 254, 260, 276 of the 'Satyr,' and l. 72 of the 'Apology'. I give the line-numbers of the poems for reference to my forthcoming edition.
MS.A is No. I.11 in Oldham, Bibliography: 'A Satyr Against Vertue' is on ff. 116v-112r (MS. inverted). For MS.m (I.16 in the Bibliography), see H. M. Margoliouth (ed.), The Poems & Letters Of Andrew Marvell, I, 318.
MS.A, copied apparently before the 'Apology' was appended to the 'Satyr', and (apart from the autograph) the only text I know which identifies the spokesman as a 'Court Hector' (vz. Rochester), does not have the readings of the Errata (which agree with the autograph) for p. 104, l. 6; p. 112, ll. 5 and 8; and p. 113, l. 2 (ll. 113, 248, 251, 260 of the 'Satyr'). MS.m diverges from the Errata (and autograph) at ll. 7, 39, 44, 64, 113, 238, 248, 251, 276, 281 of the 'Satyr' and l. 72 of the 'Apology' (cp. errata for p. 97, l. 7; p. 99, l. 14; p. 100, l. 2; p. 101, l. 7; p. 104, l. 6; p. 111, l. 9; p. 112, ll. 5 and 8; p. 113, l. 17; p. 114, l. 5; and p. 119, l. 1).
The fourth, for p. 118, l. 17 ('Apology,' l. 70) corrects 'it' to 'them': the autograph has 'em'.
An attempt in the 1670's to naturalise 'tuant' from French soon withered. All but one of the OED's examples belong to 1672-3. Oldham used the word in writings of 1676, 1681, and 1682.
When ll. 16 and 199, omitted in 1679 and 1681,
but already in the autograph, are restored to 'A Satyr Against Vertue',
Oldham is correcting; when 'Satyrs Upon The Jesuits', II. 257, is changed
from And scatter wide destruction all
around
to And spread avoidless ruine all
around
he is removing a tautology, and revising the phrase away from its source
in Otway.
Heavy italicisation, more or less of this kind, is not peculiar to one compositor. Even in volumes from Mary Clark's shop, the workman is sometimes merely reproducing the italicisation, hardly if at all distinguishable from L's, of an earlier edition set up elsewhere, cp. Henry Dodwell, Two Letters of Advice, second edition, 1680, printed 'by M. C. for Benjamin Tooke', with the first edition, Dublin, 1672, printed by Tooke for Joseph Wilde; and The Poems of Horace, ed. Alexander Brome, third edition, 1680, printed for Henry Brome by M. C., with the first edition, 1666, printed for him by E. Cotes. Compared with L in Satyrs Upon The Jesuits, however, Cote's compositor does seem more consistently predictable in his choice of words for italicisation.
Pp. 63, 52, 53; Satyr III, ll. 493, 272, 289. There are thirty-nine italicised words on p. 54; thirty-one on p. 55.
They are on F1v, F2v, F3r, F3v. Evidently he began at the beginning of the first whole sheet allotted to him, and set seriatim.
Because he was completing the page for L, whose stint the copy (for this last page of 'Satyrs Upon The Jesuits' to be set) filled without trouble.
On p. 16 and probably p. 12, the length of the lines next above and next below would have prevented a turn-over; the same cause, complicated by a triplet-bracket, operated on p. 21. On p. 33 a turn-over for l. 1 was impossible because l. 2 also exceeded the measure: and an overflow was used for l. 2, to match l. 1.
I assume that the copy was cast off, and the text, excluding preliminaries, estimated to fill nine sheets, B-K8. The simplest division would then be to allot the copy for the first four sheets to one compositor, and for the remaining five to the other, the original intention being, I take it, that Compositor L should set B, C, D, and E. In the event, Compositor M turned back to help him with D and E.
Similar evidence from shortage of W's is employed by Robert K. Turner, Jr., 'The Printing of Philaster Q1 and Q2,' The Library, 5th series, 15 (1960). Warned by D. F. McKenzie, 'Printers of the Mind,' Studies in Bibliography, 22 (1969), 15 f., 18 f., 28-40, I am aware that it presumes a compositor working continuously on the pages in question. But since L and M appear to be completing a rush job, the assumption here should be a safe one.
Professor David Foxon kindly allowed me to consult him about the possible implications of this bibliographical fact. He is not, of course, responsible for my hypothesis.
'Satyr Upon A Woman' (Satyrs Upon The Jesuits, 1681, second issue); 'Paraphrase upon the 137. Psalm', 'Paraphrase upon the Hymn of St. Ambrose' (Some New Pieces, 1681), and 'Upon a Printer' (id., second issue); the ode on Jonson, and the 'Dithyrambique' (Poems, And Translations, 1683). Cp. MS.R., pp. 54-60, 21-26, 45-53a, 61-64b, 32-44, 205-211, 213.
For assistance in checking and tabulating authorial and compositorial spellings I am indebted to Dr. Leba Goldstein.
Oldham once has 'homag', but it is in a crowded marginal note: in the text opposite, the spelling is 'homage'.
Eg. 'chast', 'sence', 'soveraign', 'aw', 'brest', 'spite', 'Tho'', 'marr', 'interr', 'summ', 'shamm', 'bin'.
These double-consonant spellings in 1681 are probably all derived from the autograph copy-text. Oldham has 'pitty', 'disswades', 'attone', 'awfull', 'painfull', 'allmost', 'Chapple', 'byass', 'deterr', for example. But his practice is very varied: e.g. 'uncontroul'd', 'dazling', 'foretel'.
The printer's autograph copy, unlike the extant autograph, may have had 'Favourites'; the word occurs six times in MS.R, three with the 'our' and three with the 'or' spelling.
Oldham is not absolutely incapable of the spelling 'virtue', but in MS.R he uses it only in two marginalia, where he has picked it up from his source for the first. This, on p. 249, is a quotation from Dryden's All For Love, 1678. The spelling is repeated on p. 250 in a phrase adapted from Otway's Don Carlos. 'Virtue' there is Oldham's word, not Otway's, but the spelling is obviously influenced by the one from Dryden just before.
My figures for 'sense' (absent from MS.R) are: Compositor M, 10; Compositor SJ82, 12; Some New Pieces, 15; Poems, And Translations, 16; Remains, 6; and for 'sence', MS.R, 41; M, 3; SJ82, 4; Some New Pieces, 19; Poems, And Translations, 3; Remains, 7.
My search for variant formes in Poems, And Translations, 1683, is still not quite completed. But K Inner is uncorrected in a copy in my possession, while in the Folger, Harvard, and W. A. Clark (Los Angeles) copies, it is corrected, with 'Guillim' for 'Guilliam' on K3v, and 'T has' for 'Tas' on K8r.
The hypermetrical and awkward line:
But who has kill'd been often clapt, and oft has rhim'd
(in Poems, And Translations, 1683, p. 167), no doubt results
from 'often' having been placed in the margin as a revision of 'oft has', and
then mistakenly inserted before 'clapt'.
In 'The Passion of Byblis' l. 100 (Satyrs Upon The Jesuits, 1681, p. 124) where
Oldham probably recollected Virgil's simile (Aeneid XII 908 ff.):
velle videmur et in mediis conatibus aegri succidemus
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