FIRST LINE INDEX OF MANUSCRIPT POETRY IN THE FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY

"Indexing by first line has long been accepted as the single most satisfactory point of entry to collections of manuscript verse. Wider dissemination of the unique card-indices hitherto held solely in their libraries of origin across the world will enormously facilitate research in this rapidly developing field."

Hilton Kelliher
Curator of Manuscripts, British Library

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC is one of the world's great research libraries and has exceptional holdings of literary manuscripts from the 15th century through to the 18th century. It is especially strong for the Renaissance period and holds many important commonplace books and collections of poems. Scholars working at the Library have long had enjoyed access to the unique First Line Index of Manuscript Poetry in the Folger Shakespeare Library comprising of some 10,000 cards. Adam Matthew Publications is now pleased to make this resource available to scholars world-wide.

First Line Indexes to poetic manuscripts are essential reference tools for literary scholars. Such indexes take many years to assemble, but this labour saves later scholars a vast amount of time in carrying out a variety of searches. They are especially important for:

- Scholars working on editions of poets, who can track down many additional copies of chosen texts, enabling them to compare and collate variants

- Scholars trying to identify the author and date of a particular work which is unidentified. Additional copies may have these details or can provide clues to authorship and date through the context of the poem amongst other items

- Scholars assessing the frequency and dissemination of poetic works in manuscript and the culture of manuscript circulation. First Line Indexes often provide clues concerning families of manuscripts and, in turn, to the date and production of manuscripts.

Margaret Crum's magnificent First Line Index of Manuscript Poetry in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, 1969) was justly welcomed as a huge step forward in this field. However, other extant First Line Indexes have remained unpublished because of the cost and difficulties of realising a printed edition (including the manuscript Index of First and Last Lines in the Department of Manuscripts of the British Library which was the original inspiration for the Crum Index).

Adam Matthew Publications now overcomes these difficulties by presenting a series of First Line Indexes on microfiche and microfilm. Reproduced exactly as they appear in the original, we now offer the First Line Index of Manuscript Poetry in the Folger Library, Washington DC.

This is an index to the First Lines of Poems written in English before 1700, as they appear in manuscripts or in manuscript additions to printed books at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Occasionally, a later copy of the poem will be included. For the purposes of this Index a poem is a text whose lines rhyme; therefore a great assortment of verse is included, among them songs, prologues and epilogues. Many poems appear in multiple copies, several of the popular ones in as many as a dozen copies. The first line seen here may not necessarily be the first line of the complete poem, but only of the extract that has appealed to some compiler. At the beginning of the Index is a group of first lines that are not even complete. Two kinds of poems are not generally included: works wholly or mostly in verse, such as plays, and the couplets that often occur at the end of scenes or speeches in blank verse. Poems and songs that are an integral part of a larger work, such as those in Sir Philip Sidney's The Contess of Pembroke's Arcadia, and in Walter Montagu's plays, are included.

The card file has been compiled over several decades by a number of people, and this has lead to inconsistencies. The intention always has been to transcribe the spelling of the original, but this has not necessarily included capitalization and punctuation, nor, in earlier days, the distinction between 'i' and 'j', or 'u' and 'v'.

The cards have been filed as if the spelling had been modernised. As is usual with First Line Indexes, the initial articles have not been silently suppressed. A few features, however, may seem to depart from standard practice for First Line Indexes of Poems:
• 'Ye' is interpreted as 'you' or 'the' depending on the context
• 'I'lI' and 'We'll' are treated as though there were no apostrophe
• 'Mr' and 'Mrs' are read as 'Master' and 'Mistress'
• 'An' is occasionally treated as a 'a'. For example, 'an one-eyed boy' has been alphabetised as though it read 'a one-eyed boy'. When the 'e' of the definite article is dropped before a word beginning with a vowel and 'th' seemingly added as a prefix to that word, as in 'thambitious', the card is filed as though no elision had occurred; in the example cited it would be interpreted as reading 'the ambitious'.

If the name 'Crum' and a number should be visible on the card, they refer to the number assigned to that poem in Margaret Crum's First Line Index of English Poetry 1500-1800 in Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library Oxford (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1969).

This is an important bibliographical tool and reference work that will be welcomed by all scholars of literature.

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