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Authoritative Manuscript Corrections in
Donne's Biathantos
by
Ernest Sullivan
Mr. John Sparrow's article, "Manuscript Corrections in the Two Issues of Donne's Biathanatos," The Book Collector, 21 (Spring, 1972), 29-32[1] describes three groups of manuscript corrections occurring in his copy of the first issue and his copy of the second issue of the first edition of Biathanatos.[2] First, in each copy of each issue on the first leaf (¶3) of the
From just the information that the corrections in the second group occur only in Mr. Sparrow's copy of the second issue and that the correction in the third group occurs only in his copy of the first issue, one could not determine whether the corrections in the second and third groups are authoritative or whether any of the groups of corrections are related; however, all seven of the manuscript corrections found by Mr. Sparrow in either his copy of the first issue or in his copy of the second issue also occur in a single copy of the first issue at the Yale University Library. These corrections in the Yale copy of the first issue in conjunction with those in Mr. Sparrow's copy of each issue prove that all of the corrections are authoritative and that these alterations probably represent an effort on the part of the younger Donne to have some copies of the first issue of Biathanatos corrected.
Comparison of the corrections in the Epistle Dedicatory in Mr. Sparrow's copies with those in the Yale copy shows that a single emendator almost certainly made all six of the corrections in the Epistle Dedicatory. The corrections (on sigs. ¶3 and ¶3v) common to all three copies are identical and in the same hand;[6] thus, these four corrections were certainly
Even though we cannot specifically identify the particular emendator, we do know that all of the corrections in the Epistle Dedicatory were quite likely made at the publishing house. Since all six of the corrections in the Epistle Dedicatory appear in a single copy (Yale) of the first issue, they must all have been made during the manufacture or sale of the first issue. According to Mr. Sparrow (pp. 30 and 31), all of these corrections (except the one on the recto of sig. ¶3, facing the cancel title page in his copy of the second issue) in both of his copies offset. All the corrections in the Epistle Dedicatory of the Yale copy of the first issue also offset; hence, all six corrections were made at some time after the sheets of the first issue had been folded. Since the correction on the recto of sig. ¶3 did not offset on the cancel title page, we can reasonably assume that this correction (as well as the other corrections if made at the same time)[8] had been made before
The probability that the corrections on sig. ¶4v (as well as those in the rest of the Epistle Dedicatory if also made at the same time) were made after the sheets had been bound or prepared for binding is further increased by the fact that the corrections on sig. ¶4v offset on sig. (*) 1. We know that the settings on the recto and verso of sigs. (*) 1.2 were printed on the same sheet as the settings on the recto and verso of sigs. Ee1.2.[10] As I have shown in my dissertation (pp. 121-122), the settings of the rectos and versos of sigs. (*) 1, (*) 2, Ee1, and Ee2 were arranged in the formes so that after printing the sheet could be cut in half with each of the halves to be then folded once and placed in the appropriate location in the volume. Thus, the corrections on sig. ¶4v could offset on sig. (*) 1 only if the sheets were in position for binding or already bound when the correction was made. The corrections in the Epistle Dedicatory, then, were almost certainly made while the sheets of the first issue were in position for binding or already bound and before the sheets were reissued by Moseley.
Since the six corrections in the Epistle Dedicatory were almost certainly made by a single emendator at a single point in time, they very likely have the same authority, and the nature of some of these corrections suggests that they are all authoritative. This near certainty that all of the corrections in the Epistle Dedicatory were made by the same person at the
The emendator of the Epistle Dedicatory may not have also made the correction from 'exacted' to 'exalted' on sig. Ee2 of the text of the Yale and Sparrow copies of the first issue, and we do not know when the correction was made, but this correction in the text of Biathanatos is very likely related to those in the Epistle Dedicatory and even more certainly authoritative. As Mr. Sparrow notes (p. 30), the correction on sig. Ee2 does not appear to be in the same hand as those corrections in the Epistle Dedicatory. The handwriting evidence is not conclusive, however, since the only letter offering direct comparison is an 'e'.[12] Unless, then, some as yet undiscovered examples of this correction on sig. Ee2 come to light in copies other than those also containing the manuscript corrections in the Epistle Dedicatory, the case for a single emendator or a pair of emendators working together on a limited number of copies being responsible for all seven of the corrections seems more plausible than the case that the corrections on sig. Ee2 are unrelated to those in the Epistle Dedicatory.
The authority of this correction on sig. Ee2 is even more certain than the authority of those corrections in the Epistle Dedicatory, contrary to the implications of Mr. Sparrow's article. Mr. Sparrow notes (p. 30) that this correction is the only one in the body of the text of Biathanatos, that this correction does not occur in his copy of the second issue, and that this correction is in a different hand from those in the Epistle Dedicatory. Given only these three observations, one could not logically conclude that the correction was authoritative; in fact, one might suspect the opposite. Knowing, however, that the Yale copy of the first issue also has this correction at the same place in the body of the text of Biathanatos, we can
The occasion for making the corrections cannot be precisely determined, but enough evidence exists to warrant conjecture that the younger Donne had the publisher make them. Because six of the seven corrections cluster in the Epistle Dedicatory, it would seem very possible that the younger Donne (who would have been especially interested in the correctness of the Epistle Dedicatory),[17] in looking over the Epistle Dedicatory after all of the sheets had been printed (and many probably bound or sold), noticed the apparent errors and called them to the attention of the publisher. Given also that (1) the only other correction occurs on sig. Ee2 and that (2) a sheet containing sig. Ee2 could easily have been adjacent to a sheet containing the Epistle Dedicatory at the publisher's (assuming that the preliminary materials were printed in the same order as they appear in the first edition and that the sheets at the publisher's were in the order in which they were printed), we can suspect that the younger Donne, in examining the Epistle Dedicatory, also glanced at the adjacent sheet (containing sigs. Ee1, Ee1v, Ee2, Ee2v, (*) 1, (*) 1v, (*) 2, and (*) 2v) and happened to recognize the erroneous reading of 'exacted' (which, as the last word in the first line on sig. Ee2, would have been in a conspicuous location). Since the need for the correction of 'exacted' and the correct emendation to 'exalted' almost certainly would not be apparent to an average person from a glance at the sheet, and since we know that the correction was not the result of extensive checking of the first edition against the printer's manuscript, we can reasonably infer that someone acquainted with the text of Biathanatos, as was the younger Donne, initiated the correction.
The presence of the corrections on both sheet ¶ (containing the Epistle Dedicatory) and the sheet containing sig. Ee2—which could have been seen together only while the sheets were in their uncut state—suggests that some time passed between the initial recognition of the need for correction
The presence of all the corrections in a single copy of the first issue, the near certain authority of the corrections, the clustering of the corrections in the Epistle Dedicatory, the existence of the corrections (many in the same hand) in at least three copies of the first edition, and the likelihood that the need for the corrections was recognized before the sheet containing sig. Ee2 was cut even though the corrections were not actually made until after the sheets in these three copies had been cut and bound, all imply that the corrections represent an effort by the younger Donne, acting through the publisher, to improve the readings in some copies of the first issue.
Although two of these seven manuscript corrections may appear trivial ('al most' to 'almost' and 'allarums' to 'allarums)'), and another ill-advised ('morir.' to 'morir,' immediately before the closing 'Your Lordships . . .'), two corrections do involve stylistic differences ('the' to 'this' and 'writ' to 'writen'), and two others yield clearly superior readings ('truth." to 'truth,' and 'exacted' to 'exalted'), the former creating a substantially different interpretation of the Epistle Dedicatory. Before the correction from 'truth.' to 'truth,' (l. 7) the phrase 'firme and established truth' (ll. 6-7) referred back to 'this Doctrine' (l. 6). As Mr. Sparrow argues (p. 31), 'this Doctrine' is undoubtedly an allusion to the 'Doctrine' of Donne's treatise, that suicide is not always a sin. In this context, the Epistle Dedicatory would seem to support the integrity of Donne's argument—an integrity that has been questioned at length in A. E. Malloch's unpublished dissertation, "A Critical Study of Donne's Biathanatos" (Toronto, 1958) and in Richard Hughes' The Progress of the Soul: The Interior Career of John Donne (1968). After the correction, however, the phrase 'firme and established truth' refers forward to the Spanish proverb, 'Da vida osar morir' (l. 8). In the new context, then, the closing sentence of the Epistle Dedicatory need not be read as supporting the integrity of Donne's announced 'Doctrine'.
These manuscript changes in the first edition of Biathanatos are relatively rare; they do not occur in the copies of the first issue of the first edition at CLUC, CSmH, DLC (ND 0332947), MH (Augustus Jessopp's
A final problem posed by Mr. Sparrow in a note on page 31 ("how it was that the younger Donne, when he presented a copy [of Biathanatos] to [Constantine] Huygens in 1649, was able to quote verbatim from a letter sent by his father to [Lord] Herbert more than thirty years before") can be solved by the knowledge that in 1642 Lord Herbert of Cherbury presented his manuscript copy of Biathanatos (containing the letter by Donne to Lord Herbert on the leaf of the title page) to the Bodleian Library, where the younger Donne surely would have had access to it. The younger Donne printed the letter on pages 20-21 of his edition of Letters to Severall Persons of Honour: written by John Donne (London: J. Flesher, 1651).
Notes
The quarto first edition was printed (with an undated title page) in 1647 by John Dawson. By late 1647, Humphrey Moseley had obtained the sheets of Dawson's undated issue and reissued these same sheets with a cancel title page bearing Moseley's name and dated 1648. The new title page is the only difference between the sheets of the two issues. Proofs of the identity of the printer, dates of publication, and the order of the issues may be found in pages 135-136 and 142-146 of my dissertation, "A Critical, Old-spelling Edition of John Donne's Biathanatos" (UCLA, 1973).
The Epistle Dedicatory, authored by the younger Donne, is addressed 'TO THE Right Honourable THE LORD PHILLIP HARBERT [Herbert],' Earl of Montgomery and fourth Earl of Pembroke (1584-1650), who, according to the DNB, "accepted the dedication of numerous books" (IX, 662).
No attempt appears to have been made to obliterate the comma (the letters 'en' have simply been written above the comma); thus, I retain the comma in my descriptions of this correction.
The correction more literally appears as 'al=most' and differs from the others under discussion in that it involves only an accidental failure of a type to print in some copies: copies of the first issue of the first edition at the Harvard University Library (MH: Augustus Jessopp's copy), Henry E. Huntington Library (CSmH), Library of Congress (DLC: ND 0332947), Princeton University Library (NjP), and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (CLUC), as well as the second issue copies at the British Museum (L: George Thomason's copy), CSmH, and Union Theological Library (NNUT) all read 'al-most'. Hence (though it seems unlikely) this correction could have been made independently of the others and could derive from another copy of the first edition. The word 'al-most' is entirely on line 16; it is not hyphenated because split at the end of a line.
Mr. Sparrow's article contains (pp. 34-36) photographic reproductions of the corrections in the Dedicatory Epistle in his copies.
It is, of course, barely possible, as Mr. Sparrow's conjecture (see note 8) could imply, that two emendators worked on the Epistle Dedicatory (one making the corrections on sigs. ¶3 and ¶3v and the other making those corrections on sig. ¶4v) or that a single emendator made the corrections at two separate points in time, but the facts that all of these corrections involve a single sheet, that, significantly, the corrections on sig. ¶4v are on the same forme as those on sig. ¶3, and that the corrections were made at approximately the same time (as shown below) all suggest that these corrections would have been handled as a unit by a single emendator.
Because his copy of the first issue lacked the punctuation corrections on sig. ¶4v, Mr. Sparrow conjectured that not all of the punctuation corrections were made at the same time as the other corrections: "If the corrections [in punctuation] in the concluding lines of the Dedication were made . . . by someone in the publisher's office, their absence from my copy of the earlier issue can only, it seems, be explained by supposing that some of the folded sheets had been corrected, and sold, before the mistake in the punctuation of 'truth.' was detected" (p. 32). Mr. Sparrow's conjecture could theoretically be correct if read to mean that the emendator began making the punctuation corrections sometime after the sheets of the first issue had been folded and positioned for binding and after the corrections on leaf ¶3 had been made on some copies of the first issue unavailable to the emendator while making the punctuation corrections (although the fact that his copy of the first issue lacks the corrections in punctuation could more reasonably be explained as a careless omission by the emendator), but the existence of the punctuation corrections in the Yale copy of the first issue means that his conjecture should not be read as implying that the differences between his copies result from any changes associated with the production or sale of the second issue.
According to Philip Gaskell's A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972), the final folding of sheets printed in the seventeenth century usually took place at the bindery (p. 147). The fact that the corrections in the Epistle Dedicatory occur in more than one copy, offset (with the exception of that on sig. ¶3 of Mr. Sparrow's copy of the second issue) in a manner showing that the sheets had been folded for the final time, and do not appear in printed form in any of the copies of either issue of the first edition listed in note 5, reasonably establishes that these corrections do not represent a proof state of the text and therefore were not made during the printing of the first edition of Biathanatos.
See Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne, 4th ed. (1973), p. 119 and my dissertation, pp. 121-122. The text of Biathanatos ends on sig. Ee2v, and sigs. (*) 1, (*) 1v, (*) 2, and (*)2v contain preliminary materials, specifically a list of 'Authors cited in this Booke.'
On the basis that (1) his two copies are from different provenances, (2) there is no list of Errata in the book, (3) some of the corrections are not obvious, and (4) the corrections are in the same hand, Mr. Sparrow (pp. 30-31) concludes that the corrections on sigs. ¶3 and ¶3v probably derive from the editor's manuscript of the Epistle Dedicatory. He also speculates (p. 32) that the punctuation corrections on sig. ¶4v were also made in the publisher's office, leaving the reader to infer that Mr. Sparrow also considered the punctuation corrections authoritative.
The method used for making the correction in the text does, however, also differ from the method used in the Epistle Dedicatory. In the text, 'exacted' is entirely blotted out and 'exalted' written in the margin, 'exacted' being the last word in the line. The emendator of the Epistle Dedicatory merely superimposed the corrections on the printed readings.
The inference that the manuscript correction on sig. Ee2 is not a random event is strengthened by the fact that this manuscript correction is the only correction in the text in the Sparrow and Yale copies of the first issue.
As with some of the corrections in the Epistle Dedicatory, the correction of 'exacted' to 'exalted' was not obvious enough for the printer of the second edition to make the emendation. The sentence in the first edition of Biathanatos reads as follows: "As to cure diseases by touch, or by charme, (both which one (h) excellent Chirurgian, and one (i) excellent philosopher, are of opinion may be done, because what vertue soever the heavens infuse into any creature, man, who is Al, is capable of, and being borne when that vertue is exacted, may receive a like impression, or may give it to a word, or character made at that instant, if he can understand the time) though these, I say be forbidden by divers Lawes, out of a Just prejudice that vulgar owners of such a vertue, would mis-imploy, it, yet none mislikes that the Kings of England & France, should cure one sicknesse by such meanes, nor (k) that the Kings of Spaine should dispossess Dæmoniaque persons so, because Kings are justly presumed to use all their power to the glory of God; So is it fit, that this priviledge [suicide] of which we speak should be contracted and restrained" (pp. 216-217).
For a discussion of the similarities between the printer's manuscript copy of Biathanatos (a copy not known to be extant) and the Bodleian manuscript copy of Biathanatos, see pages 147-152 of my dissertation. The Bodleian manuscript, however, certainly did not serve as the printer's copy, and it is extremely unlikely that the correction from 'exacted' to 'exalted' derives from the Bodleian manuscript; the manuscript had been in the Bodleian since 1642, and the first edition was not published until 1647. I doubt that someone would check a single reading from a book being published in London with a manuscript at Oxford, and if he had extensively checked the readings of the first edition with the Bodleian manuscript, he probably would have made many other much more obviously needed changes.
G. Blakemore Evans, in Allan Holaday's The Plays of George Chapman: The Comedies: A Critical Edition (1970), describes (pp. 559-560) many such non-autograph but apparently authoritative manuscript corrections in four copies of George Eld's first edition of Chapman's The Memorable Maske (London, 1613). David F. Gladish, in his edition of Sir William Davenant's Gondibert (1971) lists (pp. xxix-xxx) and accepts the authority of the five non-autograph manuscript corrections in the single copies of The Preface to Gondibert (Paris: Mattieu Gvillemot, 1650) at MH and the Bibliotheque Nationale as well as one additional such manuscript correction present only in the MH copy. Geoffrey Keynes, in his A Bibliography of Sir Thomas Browne (1968), notes (p. 74) the presence of the non-autograph manuscript corrections in three copies of Browne's Hydriotaphia and Garden of Cyrus (London: for Hen. Brome, 1658) first described and accepted as authoritative by John Carter in his edition of Urne Buriall and the Garden of Cyrus (1958), p. 116.
In another example of a work (Thomas Dekker's Match Me in London) in which corrections cluster in the dedication, Fredson Bowers, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker (1958), has argued that Dekker himself proofread the dedication and initiated the corrections (III, 259-261). In our case as well, the younger Donne certainly would have wanted to avoid any errors in his address to an important patron.
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