Arthur F. Marotti

“Rolling Archetypes”: Christ Church, Oxford Poetry Collections, and the Proliferation of Manuscript Verse Anthologies in Caroline England

D iscussing the complex ways in which early modern texts circulated in the manuscript system of transmission, Harold Love used the term “rolling archetype” to designate “collections of related pieces” or the gathering of “separates” into larger units. He describes this process in relation to Parliamentary compilations but he also notes that, as poetical “separates” moved from one compiler to another, they were combined and new material was added. In most cases, those who copied poems into personal manuscript anthologies were not transcribing pieces that came to them singly, but rather groups or clusters of poems passed to them by family members, friends, or acquaintances. Hence many of the surviving manuscript collections from the period have sizeable overlaps in their contents, even, in some cases, a similar ordering of pieces. I focus here on some of the ways poetry originating in Christ Church, Oxford in the early seventeenth century circulated within the university and moved beyond its precincts to be combined with texts circulating in a larger social world. In early modern England one of the most favorable environments for the production of poetry was the university. Students rhetorically trained from an early age in poetic composition in both Latin and the vernacular both wrote and collected verse, compiling either personal or group anthologies of poems of interest to them and their fellows. Although students at both Oxford and Cambridge engaged in practices of verse-collection, translation and composition, some colleges were noteworthy for fostering these practices. Of these, Christ Church, Oxford, from the 1620s until the 1640s is perhaps the best example.

A New Manuscript Copy of a Poem by Queen Elizabeth: Text and Contexts

This essay announces the discovery of the first English manuscript copy of the poem Queen (then Princess) Elizabeth wrote when she was prisoner at Woodstock in 1554 and 1555, “Oh, fortune, thy wresting, wavering state,” a piece hitherto known only through transcriptions made by three foreign visitors. Found in a manuscript among the papers of the Gell family in the Derbyshire Record Office, the poem was copied, along with a unique translation of it into Latin, in a poetical and prose miscellany compiled by John Gell of Hopton Hall, Derbyshire, who was a student at Magdalen College, Oxford in the early seventeenth century. This article discusses Gell’s transcription of the poem and its Latin translation, in relation to the other surviving copies. It also analyzes the larger collection in which it is found, a typical early seventeenth-century university student’s collection containing a significant amount of Latin material as well as contemporary verse by John Donne, Francis Beaumont, Ben Jonson, Richard Corbett, and Sir Thomas Overbury along with older poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt, John Heywood, Sir John Harington, Sir Henry Lee and others. The anthology includes English translations of Latin texts and some twenty-two anonymous, apparently unique, poems, a large number for a relatively short collection. [A.F.M. and S.W.M]

The Circulation of Verse at the Inns of Court and in London in Early Stuart England

The material evidence of the surviving manuscript texts of English verse from the early modern period allows us to discern various socioliterary relationships. Verse was transmitted between particular individuals (often on single sheets suitable for enclosure in letters); it was circulated in bifolia and quires or booklets of poetry within restricted social groups; individual or group collecting produced compilations of poems within a particular environment, combined often with poems from other milieux. The circulation of manuscript verse within familial, collegial, or other social circles led to the creation of larger collections—either blank codices filled by a scribe or scribes or combinations of booklets or fascicles in volumes bound either in their own time or later. Sometimes the transcription of an anthology (either a poetical anthology or manuscript miscellany of verse and prose) took place over many years, if not decades. The movement of texts from the more to the less private circuits of communication could also result in their being gathered for printed poetical anthologies or miscellanies.1