Problems in Editing John Donne's Letters: Unreliable Primary Materials

ABSTRACT

This paper is part of a Literature Compass panel cluster on the forthcoming Oxford edition of Donne's letters.

Margaret Maurer introduces the cluster which offers papers by the three editors and seeks to examine the new directions the edition will pursue. The papers were originally delivered to the members of the John Donne Society in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in February 2008.

The cluster is made up of the following articles:

'The Oxford Edition of Donne's Letters: Well Underway', Margaret Maurer, Literature Compass 5 (2008), [DOI link].

'"Apparitions, and Ghosts": H(a)unting Donne's Letters', M. Thomas Hester, Literature Compass 5 (2008), [DOI link].

'"Only in Obedience" to Whom? – The Identity of a Donne Correspondent', Dennis Flynn, Literature Compass 5 (2008), [DOI link].

'Problems in Editing John Donne's Letters: Unreliable Primary Materials', Ernest W. Sullivan, II, Literature Compass 5 (2008), [DOI link].

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This essay examines some of the difficulties in producing the kind of edition of Donne's prose letters that everyone would like – one that establishes the canon, dates, recipients, and texts that accurately represent what Donne wrote. By examining the texts of the two Donne letters that survive in holograph as well as in various seventeenth-century printings (letters to Edward Herbert and Lady Kingsmill) as well as one to the Duke of Buckingham that survives in holograph and in a nineteenth-century transcription and printings, I show how editorial intervention and physical degradation have so compromised the texts of some of the letters in Donne's Letters to Severall Persons of Honour (1651) and A Collection of Letters, Made By Sr Tobie Mathews (1660) and even in the holograph to Buckingham that the surviving texts (including their dates and recipients) of nearly all of Donne's letters are problematical. Worse, the evidence shows that the changes to the originals would not have been recoverable had these few holographs not survived. Any edition of Donne's prose letters, then, will have to attend to risk assessment as well as to the traditional features of an edition.