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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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