University of Virginia Library

II

Having considered what can be deduced concerning the physical manuscript and its textual relationship with the edition, I would now like to turn to the social context of compilation, a matter about which Vieth has assembled a wealth of data without actually proceeding to interpretation. In doing so I propose to use two approaches which have not so far been applied to the material. The first is comparison with analogous situations from a history of scribal publication of verse and prose miscellanies which reaches back to the reign of James I. The second, and more radical, is the analysis of the collection as a communal construct, reflecting three apparent layers of compilation. My aim in doing so is not to contravert Vieth's conclusions, which as a rule are carefully reasoned and presented with a scrupulous explanation of their limitations, but to suggest that a case can be made for possibilities that were rejected by him because they did not seem germane to the particular aims of his enquiry. Underlying both Vieth's and my own approaches to the collection is the desire to find a significant shape for the materials which would permit a further process of reasoning from the known to the unknown. In Vieth's case the shape educed was a linear one based on the sequence of items in the manuscript:

In this what is no more than a demonstrable tendency (that poems in a certain section of the manuscript seem to be mostly by Rochester) has been extended into a general principle for declaring some works authentic and others suppositious. The principle is then used to establish three working assumptions concerning the reliability of attributions which although printed by Vieth in italic type, as if they possessed the certainty of theorems, are in fact no more than plausible guesses (pp. 74, 86, 88). Making no pretence to conclusiveness, I would like to explore the possibilities of another shape which is not in this instance linear, but which involves trying to look at the collection as a series of strata, each laid in place by a separate community of readers.

The analysis of miscellanies as communal creations is a familiar enough technique to scholars of mediaeval poetry and becomes even more relevant with the advent of the seventeenth century when manuscript publication became a matter of choice rather than necessity and was normally undertaken with the explicit aim of restricting texts to a small group of the like minded. The composition and issuing of these texts might itself become a way of reinforcing the corporate ideology of such groups. Representative examples of such a process are to be found in the circulation of philosophical and religious verse within the Donne circle during the first three decades of the century, in the circulation of political tracts among the gentry of Kent during the decades prior to the civil war, in Henry King's production of collections of his own and others' poems at Christ Church Oxford, and in the production of miscellanies of the work of the court poets of Charles I.[11] In each of these instances, the aim of circulation was not to broadcast verse out to an indiscriminate public (though this sometimes happened over a period of years) so much as to use the exchange of writings in manuscript as a way of maintaining the coherence of a community which might well be a political or religious as well as a literary entity. In the cases of Donne and King, we see collections exchanged among groups of friends sharing religious and philosophic interests, but also concerned to advance each others' careers and to ease the path to patronage.[12] In that of the Kentish squires the exchange of manuscripts was helping to sustain a regional political structure whose members due to their scholarly interests and proximity to the capital were especially sensitive to ideological questions.[13] This "bonding" role of scribal transmission might require that the material so circulated should be of a kind to deter outsiders who might happen to encounter it. A student of Restoration poetry, if asked why such a collection as Osborn b. 105 should initially have been reserved for scribal transmission, would probably say because it was against the law to print obscene literature. But this in turn raises the question why obscene literature gets written in the first place—or did in the seventeenth century.

An answer to the latter question would be that the poetry of Rochester and his friends, published, as far as they were able to ensure, entirely in manuscript, was an ideological consciousness-raising exercise among a dissident political interest group at the court of Charles II. As regards the nature of this group, one must begin with the observation that although Rochester is the best represented poet and the obvious star of the collection (much as Carew had been in the miscellanies from the court of Charles I), Osborn b.

105 is in fact a composite anthology drawing on work from a number of writers, several of whom were friends of Rochester, others clients, and some enemies. The friends were members of a court faction among a number of other factions, composed of the Duke of Buckingham, the Earls of Rochester and Dorset, Sir Charles Sedley, Henry Savile, Fleetwood Shepherd, William Wycherley, George Etherege and a few hangers-on. Among the professional writers the one most consistently in receipt of their patronage was Thomas Shadwell, who by 1680 had dedicated Timon to Buckingham, The Miser to Dorset (the first of three such dedications) and A True Widow to Sedley, who was also reputed to assist him with the polishing of his plays. Buckingham, Dorset, Wycherley, Shadwell and Etherege are all represented in the compilation. Sedley's name occurs at a number of points in it and he may also be present as the author of either of two works of disputed authorship—"In the fields of Lincoln's Inn" and "Timon." All those named are included by Rochester in the roll-call of his literary friends at the end of "An Allusion to Horace" which can be seen as a kind of manifesto on behalf of the group: The faction admired Dryden up to a point but were strongly opposed to his politics. Besides he represented the new principled professionalism of the man of letters which challenged their aristocratic cult of amateurism and improvisation.[15] "An Allusion to Horace" and Buckingham's The Rehearsal give us their view of him. Although Rochester was the star writer, the political leader of the group was Buckingham, and their ideologue, Buckingham's long-term adviser, Andrew Marvell. They were thus Whig placemen in a Tory court, sceptical in religion but anti-Catholic in politics, French in culture but by now pro-Dutch in foreign policy, boon companions of the king yet resentful of the power of those unconstitutional ministers of state, his mistresses. They had been important to the king as a counterpoise to the partisans of his brother, James, Duke of York, but by 1680 they had lost his confidence through their links with Shaftesbury's campaign to exclude James from the succession. These matters are uncontroversial (except perhaps the role of Marvell) and the evidence for them has been available for many years in a series of studies by John Harold Wilson.[16] Poetry, along with sceptical philosophy and practical debauchery, was the bonding agent of a group whose ultimate rationale was political—the Erastian, anti-clerical wing of Shaftesbury's exclusionist alliance—and which through the influence of Buckingham, Dorset and Sedley was to play a significant part in bringing about the great political change of 1688. However, they differed from Shaftesbury in preferring William of Orange to Monmouth as heir in the place of James. This group is the first and most important of the literary communities who contributed material to Osborn b. 105.

To understand the next stage of the argument it will be helpful to turn to another model from the earlier Stuart period, that of the circulation of miscellanies of poems by Henry King and his friends produced under King's direction at Christ Church, Oxford during the 1630s. In an important unpublished dissertation by Mary Hobbs, the creation and dissemination of these collections is followed in exemplary detail.[17] To begin with they were intended for Christ Church readers and King's immediate circle of friends and performed, for that community, the bonding function already described in connection with Donne and the Kentish squires. It was not long, however, before they were also being copied in other Oxford colleges and then in London, where the Inns-of-Court, always an important centre for scribal publication, proved exceptionally receptive.[18] As this happened the contents of the collections were modified to accommodate the expectations of their new readerships. Hobbs's discussion, by relating changes in the contents of miscellanies to evidence of hands, scribes, owners and personal links between individuals who were connected in all these capacities with the manuscripts, shows how collections similar to MS1680H and Osborn b. 105 would vary not only through time but as a result of movement from community to community. In the case of the 1680 collections we possess neither the rich body of scribal recensions nor the knowledge of provenances that provide the basis for Hobbs's work; but guided by her conclusions we can suggest further levels of communal affiliation within the collection.

A second community that contributed items was also based at court. During the second half of the 1670s the proto-Whig Buckingham faction was challenged by another which was strongly Yorkist in its sympathies, headed by the Earl of Mulgrave and with Dryden as its professional luminary. Sir Carr Scroope seems also to have been associated with it for a while, though the reference to him in Mulgrave and Dryden's "An Essay on Satyr" of 1679 is an unflattering one.[19] Vieth has shown in detail how a substantial body of poems in the 1680 compilation were inspired by this antagonism.[20] An important show of strength of the Mulgrave group was the production in March 1677 of Nathaniel Lee's The Rival Queens, dedicated to Mulgrave and with a prologue by Scroope and commendatory verses by Dryden. Both versions of the collection contain attacks of particular virulence on Mulgrave and Scroope, while "An Allusion to Horace" contains a stinging reference to Mulgrave as Dryden's "foolish patron." Dryden counter-attacked in the preface to All for Love and assisted Mulgrave with the "Essay on Satyr" in which Buckingham, Dorset, Sedley and Rochester are assailed in the company of Shaftesbury, Halifax and Lord Chancellor Finch. Vieth was the first scholar to sort out the motivations and targets of the satires directed at Mulgrave and Scroope; but even he did not seem to grasp the political dimension of the exchanges or to understand that the allegiances of Absalom and Achitophel, in which Buckingham is demolished as Zimri and Mulgrave lauded as Adriel, were already overt in Osborn b. 105. (Basil Greenslade in his discussion of Rochester's political convictions has fallen into a similar error.[21]) The viewpoint of the Mulgrave faction is represented in the collection

by three items (all by Scroope) which appear in both Osborn b. 105 and 1680H—"In defence of Satyr," "Raile on poor feeble Scribler" and "I cannot change as others doe" along with a further four which appear only among the eleven additional poems in Osborn b. 105. These are a poem by Mulgrave himself, "On the Enjoyment of his Mrs" ("Since now my Silvia, is as kind as faire"), Dryden's "Mac Flecknoe"—an attack by the leading professional of one faction on the leading professional of the other—and two vicious attacks on Buckingham, "A New Ballad to an Old Tune Call'd Sage Leafe" and the "D: of B: Letany."

The presence of these pieces is significant for what it tells us about the intended audience of the two texts. Although the greater part of the compilation derives from the Buckingham faction, members of this faction would not wish to circulate poems by Mulgrave and his friends which were uncomplimentary to themselves. (The reverse would also apply.) This makes it likely that the core collection underlying 1680H and Osborn b. 105 was reedited outside the court by someone who, while obviously having a good source of supply within the Buckingham faction, felt no personal involvement in its squabbles and was quite happy to mingle work by members of both factions. 1680H is less offensive in this regard, since each of the three poems by Scroope, which are its only contribution from the opposition, is neutralised by an "answer." "I cannot change" is cruelly burlesqued as "I swive as well as others do"; "In defence of Satyr" is followed by the crushing "To wrack and torture thy unmeaning Brayne"; and "Raile on poor feeble Scribler" receives its comeuppance from "On Poet Ninny." (In the last of these cases, the reply is not part of the linked group containing the earlier parts of the exchange, and has become attached to another group satirising Mulgrave. However, it is likely that both it and Buckingham's satire on Scroope, "A Familiar Epistle to Mr Julian Secretary of the Muses," which follows it in Osborn b. 105 were meant to belong with the earlier Rochester-Scroope exchange.) This difference between the two collections must be regarded as supporting evidence for the hypothesis advanced earlier that the edition represents a prior state of the collection to Osborn b. 105. On the other hand, the case can not be pushed very far. Mac Flecknoe and "Since now my Silvia" are both long poems, in addition to being by authors other than Rochester, and a publisher of Whiggish inclination might have had his own reasons for suppressing satires on Buckingham. The remaining seven poems unique to Osborn b. 105 pose no such difficulties, being of a kind that might easily have appealed to members of the Buckingham faction.[22]

The third communal affiliation is with one of the Inns of Court. Among the poems common to both the printed and the manuscript versions of the compilation are four which can be linked to Gray's Inn: two of these are by Alexander Radcliffe, who entered the Inn in November 1669, and two by Aphra Behn, whose lover John Hoyle had enjoyed a long connection with the Inn before moving in January 1679 to the Inner Temple.[23] The Behn poems are a light piece of erotic verse "On a Giniper Tree now cut down to make Busks" and an elegy on the painter John Greenhill, a member of the

same dissolute half-world inhabited by Hoyle.[24] Osborn b. 105 adds a third poem, "One day the amorous Lysander." In this case, as Vieth pointed out, Behn is known on the basis of a letter first printed in 1718 to have sent a copy of the poem to Hoyle. (Maureen Duffy has cast doubt on the authenticity of the letter but on grounds which I believe to be questionable.[25]) Hoyle is known to have been a friend of Sedley, who was also a Whig, a freethinker and a libertine. Hoyle's murder by a Tory zealot in May 1692 was to draw from Sedley the bitter "A Ballad to the Tune of Bateman." Could Hoyle, a legal man active in literary and libertine circles, with contacts at court and with easy access to professional scriveners, have been connected with the compiling of Osborn b. 105? It is impossible to tell, but the theory of an Inns-of-Court provenance for the manuscript is attractive not only because it would place it in a line of such compilations reaching back to Donne's days at Lincoln's Inn, but would also explain how discriminations which would have been of vital interest to a partisan court readership would no longer be felt to apply.

Of course if Duffy is right in questioning the authenticity of the 1718 letter, the evidence for Hoyle's involvement is seriously weakened and with it that for a distinct "Gray's Inn" stage in the evolution of the collection. Here the crucial issue is that at a point which can not yet be determined the burgeoning collection ceased to be a private possession and came into the hands of a professional publisher of manuscripts. While a miscellany still in private hands would grow in ways dictated by the communal affiliations of successive copyists, a professional trader in lampoons would acknowledge no such restrictions but aim at presenting a mix of materials from different sources aimed at attracting the widest possible readership. At this point the assumptions underlying Hobbs's method would cease to apply.