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Notes
I am indebted to Professor Southall for confirming the accuracy of these observations; he points out that the grid measurements of the paper throughout are 17 mm. between 20 laid lines and 21-24 mm. between the chain lines.
"Modern" is a relative term here; the watermark dates this leaf 1807, and it (with the other "modern" leaves) was no doubt inserted when E was re-bound in c. 1810.
Cf. Southall, p. 160, and see also, for a more detailed account on this matter, R. C. Harrier, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poetry (1975), p. 2.
The title of this poem (first line: "When Dido feasted first the wandering Trojan knight") is Wyatt's own. My practice in this paper will be to refer to poems by their first lines as they appear in my edition. The fact that the lines are modernized will facilitate finding the poems in other editions, and I also modernize—for convenience—other quotations, unless I indicate otherwise.
Harrier (above, note 3) is wrong in stating (p. 213) that "Vulcan begot me" is written in Wyatt's "italic holograph": no one, either before the appearance of his book or after, has supported him in this assertion.
The reason for this is that Harrier is the only modern scholar to print the E poems in the order of the manuscript. The numbers which follow are therefore Harrier's, though the first lines (modernized) remain those of my edition. Readers who have no access to Harrier may wish to know that numbers in Harrier's edition (arabic) correspond to those in mine (roman) as follows: 1-74=I-LXXIV; 75=CV; 76-77=LXXV-LXXVI; 78=CVI; 79-85=LXXVII-LXXXIII; 86=CVII; 87-89=LXXXIV-LXXXVI; 90-92=LXXXVII; 93-109=LXXXVIII-CIII; 110-123=CVIII; 124=CIV.
I discuss the nature of his revisions in my article "Rhetoric and Revision in Wyatt's Poems," AUMLA 31 (May 1969), 63-75.
There is a splendid modern edition by H. E. Rollins, Tottel's Miscellany (1557-1587), 2 vols. (1928-29, rev. ed. 1965). There is also an adequate facsimile of the sole surviving copy of the first edition (Bodleian Library, Oxford) by Scolar Press Ltd. (1967).
It would also be possible to argue for Wyatt's authorship on the basis of verse forms used (e.g. sonnets, strambotto's, etc.), although the fact that he is known to have introduced them in England does not preclude the possibility that other poets may have imitated him so successfully that we can now no longer keep his work apart. A more promising approach, I feel, is to study all the references to autobiographical events in the poems; I do this—as part of my argument—in a separate paper "Are Wyatt's Poems in Egerton MS. 2711 in Chronological Order?" which I hope to publish soon.
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