ENGLISH CLANDESTINE SATIRE, 1660-1704

Popular Culture, Entertainment and Information in the Early Modern Period

Editorial Introduction
English Clandestine Satire, 1660-1704. microfilm Publication
By Harold Love

The manuscript sources made available in this collection have many uses. For historians they are an outspoken, completely uncensored expression of attitudes towards matters of state and prominent individuals. While much of what they allege is probably untrue, they still constitute an invaluable record of private and factional opinion at a period of rapid social change and momentous constitutional strife. For researchers into social structures, mentalities and gender issues, they provide rich documentation both of personal beliefs and public assumptions. For literary scholars they disinter the seedbed of the great tradition of Augustan satire which reached its fruition in Pope, as well as containing some of its first masterpieces in the longer satires of Marvell, Rochester and Dorset. (Dryden and Oldham too designed selective works for clandestine circulation.) The sources also illustrate a mode of textual communication in which topical verse, along with many other kinds of writing, was transmitted orally and in manuscript rather than through the press, being in this respect a test case for resistance to the encroachments of print culture.

This manuscript culture was the subject of my Scribal Publication in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: OUP, 1993) and my chapter in Volume  IV, pp. 97–121 of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (Cambridge: C.U.P.,  2002). Other studies offering valuable illumination include Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1995); Henry Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 297; Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: John Hopkins U.P., 1999) and The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, ed. Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge: CUP, 2004). The special case of Restoration scribally circulated satire was cursorily considered in one chapter of Scribal Publication (pp. 231–83).  In my English Clandestine Satire 1660–1702 (Oxford: OUP, 2004), a companion work to the present collection, I give a fuller and far more detailed, but still necessarily selective, account of what, for the sake of simplicity, I will call the lampoon tradition. Naturally this tradition was well established long before 1660— in fact there has probably never been a period of British life in which verse lampooning has not been a feature of village and folk culture. From the late sixteenth century onwards, lampoons imitating folk models began to be written and circulated by educated writers and became an intrinsic part of court and metropolitan culture. These pieces were usually fitted to broadside ballad tunes, and intended for singing; however, a parallel tradition of satires written in tetrameter or pentameter couplets, with cursory deference to classical models, could not escape the pull of the native lampoon and often exceeds it in outspokenness and indecency. The pre-1660 history of both forms of lampooning can be followed in Timothy Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and the Order of the Fancy (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1994); Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford: O.U.P., 2000),  pp. 299–334; Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–60 (Cambridge: C.U.P., 2002); and Andrew McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge: C.U.P., 2004), to name only the most important studies. My own concentration on the Restoration phase was guided by an appreciation that the four post-1660 reigns saw the lampoon tradition reach a previously unachieved fullness of social impact and artistic inventiveness, and yet that by 1700 it was beginning to yield primacy to print-mediated modes of public reprobation—a subject of great interest in its own right. The later Stuart period has also left an unprecedently full record of its heritage of orally and scribally circulated lampoons, the manuscripts that compose the present collection being the key records from this heritage. Study of them can be valuably supplemented by reference to John Harold Wilson’s anthology, Court Satires of the Restoration (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State U.P., 1976) and the seven volumes of Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse 1660–1714, gen. ed. George deF. Lord (New Haven: Yale U.P., 1963–75). The sixth POAS(Yale) volume, edited by W. J. Cameron, is particularly important for its documentation of the organisation responsible for the numerous anthologies of lampoons that were studied in his path-breaking ‘A late seventeenth-century scriptorium', Renaissance and Modern Studies 7 (1963), 25–52. POAS(Yale) is also of enormous help in establishing the historical context of lampoons.

Nonetheless, it is my English Clandestine Satire that offers the fullest introduction to the post-1660 lampoon. It distinguishes three strands, classified as the ‘court’, ‘town’ and ‘state’ lampoon. There are also chapters on the authorship of lampoons (a particularly thorny question), the relationship of the lampoon to gossip, the poetics of the lampoon, and its transmission and reception. Finally, it offers a first-line index to the principal manuscript sources for the tradition (pp. 307–414), which is also a finding list for the present collection (see below), and a bibliography of relevant studies.

Possibilities for investigation

At a basic level the archive provides texts, often in a number of variant versions, of a very large number of poems that were widely read in their time and in some cases for decades after but that, because they were only selectively transferred to print, will not be found in modern scholarly editions or the LION and ECCO digital corpora. Some were included in the original 4-volume Poems on Affairs of State series (London, 1704-07), which can be consulted in both digital archives, but which presented censored and often corrupt texts. POAS(Yale), while commendably well edited and annotated, only reprints a relatively small segment of the heritage. The following section looks at some of the many kinds of scholarly investigation made possible by the present archive.

Historical studies of individuals

Because of their preoccupation with personalities, lampoons are of great value for studies of prominent individuals. One must not expect fairness or balance in what the lampooners allege, but we are more than amply informed about what contemporaries thought about the them. English Clandestine Satire considers lampoon treatments of Lord Chief Justice Sir William Scroggs (pp. 123–31) and James Scott, Duke of Monmouth (pp. 131–39), each the subject of a long series of hostile representations. Numerous other individuals could be examined in the same way, with the innumerable attacks on Charles II, James II, and William and Mary and their favourites and real or alleged lovers being of particular interest. There are also repeated attacks on institutions — the court, the parliament, the professions, the stage, and the competing religious factions of the time. No historical study of any of these topics can fairly ignore the views, however prejudiced, of the lampooners. We are also quickly led to the theoretical question of how contemporaries tried to make sense of the private lives of others at a period prior to intimate biography. An initial search for references to a given individual might begin with the indexes to Wilson and POAS(Yale) and the digitised texts of the 1702–7 POAS in LION and ECCO. The first-line indexes in English Clandestine Satire can be used to locate additional MS locations for the poems identified. These MSS should then be searched for further references to the individual concerned.

Studies of ideology

A second kind of study would be less concerned with the precise subject of the lampoons as with the habits of mind that expressed themselves through the writing, circulation and reading of this material, and its ideological presuppositions. Such an enquiry might also consider whether the writing of lampoons should be considered a pathological or a socially healthful activity (it may well have been both), the nature of the existential stresses it sought variously to intensify and alleviate, and Foucaultian questions of the textual exercise of power. While the lampoon’s primary function was obviously that of demystifying power by destroying the dignity of those who wielded it, its writing was often in itself an exercise of power with direct political repercussions. It can also be seen as a marker of ideological struggles which lie below the radar of conventional narrative histories. The expressed viewpoints range from familiar Whig and Tory allegiances to a Libertine nihilism, inspired by Hobbes and Spinoza, in which all humane values are brought into question; but the satirists’ unexpressed assumptions are sometimes much more interesting. One might wish to ask whether the lampoon’s political role was always oppositional or may in some cases have been the neutralising one of a substitute for political action. Lastly, one would need to enquire whether the answers to these questions (and others which will easily suggest themselves) may have varied over the four decades that took the nation from the Restoration of Charles II via the Popish Plot and the Glorious Revolution to the accession of Anne­—all generously documented in the present collection.

Studies of Satirical Form

To use the archive as a laboratory for the study of satirical forms and techniques would require a contextualisation of the work of the Restoration satirists within both older and more recent traditions, advancing from the earliest preserved forms of Graeco-Roman satire (not overlooking the mimetic ones) to the extraordinarily varied satiric productions delivered by present-day media, particularly the internet, which distributes texts on a peer-to-peer basis similar to that of seventeenth-century scribal publication. Any attempt to generalise about the poetic forms used for the lampoon is quickly defeated by their variety. Alongside works closely or distantly derived from village reprobatory songs or the neo-classical epigram and formal verse satire, we encounter an astonishing range of parodic sub-traditions, including mock prophecies, liturgical parodies (the mock litany and mock sermon), mock epitaphs, epic burlesque, travesties of the Pindaric ode, sub-Hudibrastic narratives, burlesque academic disputations such as those of the Oxford Terrae Filii, burlesque auction catalogues and parliamentary speeches (these usually in prose),  together with personal invectives, dramatic monologues and dialogues, poems reported to have been ‘posted’ in various public and private spaces, epistles to named individuals (including an exhilarating series addressed to the scribe Robert Julian), ‘ghost’ and ‘vision’ poems (a particularly prolific genre), expositions of Libertine philosophy, and accounts of low-life adventuring. Many of these sub-genres, all represented in the archive, would reward detailed investigation in their own right.

Lampoons on the theatres

The lampooners were responsible for a number of attacks on theatre professionals, both collectively (as in the ribald ’Satyr on the players’  (‘The censuring world perhaps may not esteem’) and Robert Gould’s The Playhouse) and singly as members of other target groups. The shared experience of playgoing also informs many matters of detail and procedure. Characters, scenic effects and events from popular plays are all grist to the lampooners’ mill. Dryden’s MacFlecknoe, written for manuscript circulation as a lampoon, abounds in theatre jokes. The names of actors may be used as type-names for satirical victims, as happened with James Nokes, whose specialism was portrayals of impassive stupidity. Nokes’s homosexuality subjected him to attacks of another kind. Less directly obvious but certainly influential was a habit of seeing nourished by the playhouses, which manifests itself when the victims of a lampoon are presented to the reader as personages on an imaginary stage or a satirical narrative is broken down into vivid scene-like episodes. Thus, Dryden sets the closing episode of MacFlecknoe in a theatre and disposes of his protagonist down a trapdoor. The popular ‘ghost’ and ‘vision’ lampoons often seem to invoke the effects used in theatrical apparition scenes. The lampoon tradition has never been systematically trawled by theatre historians for this material, which, in a period before newspaper reviews, has an obvious value for reception history.

Music and the lampoon

Most lampoons written in stanzas were designed to be sung and their authors usually have a specific melody in mind. This is sometimes mentioned in the title (e.g. ‘A Ballad to the Tune of Walton Town End’): in other instances it may be evident from the theme of the piece or the shape of its stanza. Popular lampoon tunes such as ‘Packington’s Pound’, ‘I am the Duke of Norfolk’ and ‘Lilliburlero’ reveal themselves at once in the latter way. Wilson’s Court Satires includes lampoons written to ‘An old Man with a Bedfull of Bones’, ‘A ballad to the Tune of Cheviot Chace, or Whenas King Henry Ruled this Land’, ‘Four able Physicians are lately Come Down’,’A Health to Betty’, ‘Taking of Snuff is the Mode at Court’, and ‘A Session of Poets’, along with others that are clearly meant for singing but do not specify a tune. Ditties such as ‘Amaryllis’ (a catchy theatre dance tune) and ‘Black Jack’ were used as the basis of communal improvisations, which might then be tidied up for manuscript circulation. The melodies cited all belong to what is loosely referred to as the ‘broadside ballad’ repertoire. Claude Simpson’s invaluable The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick: Rutgers U. P., 1966) gives an extensive record of these tunes and the many sets of words which were written to the more popular of them; however, Simpson, because he worked from contemporary printed sources and manuscripts containing melodies, is not a particularly helpful guide to the lampoon repertoire, whose sources were largely unknown to him. A sizeable supplement to Simpson’s record of alternative words could be assembled from a systematic study of the lampoon manuscripts here assembled. The significance of the tunes is usefully explored in Christopher Marsh, ‘The Sound of Print in Early Modern England: the Broadside Ballad as Song’ in Crick and Walsham, 171–90.

Lampoon authorship

For very good reasons the majority of lampoons appear without an author’s name attached.  When a name is given it need not be the right one: Rochester’s was added to numerous pieces in both manuscript and print of which he could never have been the author. (On this see David M. Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry: a Study of Rochester's Poems of 1680 (New Haven: Yale U.P., 1963) and my own edition.) The satire ‘Timon’ appears in some manuscripts with Rochester’s name and in others with that of his friend Sir Charles Sedley. In one instance Rochester’s name has been deleted and Sedley’s written in its place. The authorship of the political satires attributed to Marvell is still the subject of intense dispute. A name might be added as the result of pure guesswork by a reader, or in order to raise the price of a copy intended for sale, or even from misinterpretation of initials (‘Lord R.’ could be Radcliffe or Roscommon just as well as Rochester ­— all three being poets). It is natural to speculate about possible authors and there are certainly cases where external or internal evidence suggests an identification; yet, while the writing of lampoons was a widespread social practice, most of those that survive appear to have been the work of a relatively small coterie of London wits who were able to direct their compositions into channels of transmission that ensured they would be preserved— mainly the scribal anthologies reproduced in this archive. To put it another way, a lampoon that reached the hands of the scribal publisher Robert Julian or a well-placed court collector such as Sir William Haward (Bodleian MS  don b 8) was likely to survive to our own day, whereas one written for the amusement of holidaymakers at Tunbridge or in response to some private quarrel in the suburbs or the country might not be kept, even by its author, once it had ceased to be topical. (For Julian see Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes (Oxford: OUP,  1998), 20–30.) What evidence we have suggests that certain writers were publicly recognised as lampooners, even though it would have been difficult even then to attach their names to specific lampoons. In many cases, including those of Marvell, Rochester, the sixth Earl of Dorset, Sir George Etherege and Charles, Viscount Mordaunt, they were significant poets whose anonymously circulated work would be worth assembling if it could be identified. Luckily, lampooners had no compunction about spilling the beans on other lampooners. In Clandestine Satire, pp. 158–76 I discuss a number of lampoons which proffer detailed information about the authorship and circumstances of composition of other lampoons. When a piece is of sufficient length and a reasonably large body of authenticated work by the suspect exists for comparison, the powerful techniques used by computational stylistics can be applied. John Burrows’s ‘Andrew Marvell and the ‘Painter Satires’: A Computational Approach to their Authorship’, MLR 100 (2005), 281–97 is a masterly demonstration of this kind, which should be read by all intending attributionists. The wider challenges—and limitations—of attribution studies are reviewed in my Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (Cambridge: CUP, 2002 ).

A word of warning! Much evidence suggests that the writing of lampoons was often a collaborative process, or even, as mentioned earlier, one of group improvisation. Or possessors of scandalous gossip might approach a fluent writer to put their material into verse. Content might be added or subtracted as the poem passed from hand to hand. (Texts of ‘A Song on Danby’  (‘Zoons what ails the parliament’) vary in size from six to forty quatrains: sixty-nine survive over all sources.) In such cases our search will not be for a particular author but a site of origin, whether it be a court faction, a gossip’s tea table, a legal Inn, or a political coffee house.

Women and lampoons

The lampoon is primarily a male creation and frequently expresses the worst kind of misogyny. The court lampoon is merciless in its attacks on the royal mistresses and the town lampoon on the women of aristocratic families who were increasingly deserting their family estates in the country to spend their winters in London, where they  filled a life of unaccustomed idleness with interminable ‘visits’ and the pursuit of pleasure. London was also the primary site of the marriage market, a matter of great financial concern to landed families at a time of falling agricultural prices, and whose machinations were heavily influenced by women. A lampoon attack on a young woman of the class may conceivably have been engineered in order to lower her family’s matrimonial bargaining power. ‘Court’ and ‘town’ lampoons were also deeply implicated in the culture of gossip, which provided people of all classes with their primary form of entertainment. That culture was dominated by women, both in the sense that its acknowledged ‘stars’, such as Katherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, were female, and that upper-class gossip was transmitted primarily through the institution of the visit, which, as has been shown by Susan E. Whyman in Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural Worlds of the Verneys 1660–1720 (Oxford: OUP, 1999), was under female guidance. Men in cultivating the arts of conversation wished to be admired for wit and prompt replies; gossip, by contrast, is a narrative art in which women of the time seemed to excel. Moreoever, only a very small proportion of women were sufficiently educated to function as writers. Women seem to have been avid readers of lampoons and Sarah Cowper was a significant collector. (Her manuscript ‘Medley’ is available from the present publisher in another series.) A chapter in English Clandestine Satire (pp. 191–217) pursues the idea that gossip in the hands of expert practitioners was a kind of spoken lampoon and the lampoon a written distillation of gossip. Viewed from this perspective, the male-composed lampoon must often have transmitted gossip selected and communicated by women and intentionally or otherwise pursued agendas that had been set by women. There are also certain cases where the factional rivalries underlying lampoons appear to be female rather than male. The insistent attacks by Rochester and other lampooners on the maids of honour and ladies of the bedchamber of Catherine of Braganza have every appearance of reflecting the hostility that existed between these women and the mistresses of her husband and his brother.  A similar rationale is also to be suspected in ‘town’ lampoons arising from feuds between aristocratic families. This hardly excuses the genre’s inherent mysogony but suggests that lampoon culture may sometimes have been manipulated by powerful women for their own purposes. While the Duchesses of Cleveland and Portsmouth were the subject of numerous lampoons, their personal retinues were probably the origin of others directed at their rivals.

Comparative study of single poems

One does not need to be an editor to find interest in verbal variations between copies of the same poem from different manuscript sources. Often these result from the normal mechanical errors made by scribes or their attempts to repair the errors of other scribes; but sometimes they register changes in a reader’s understanding or application of a passage, or are of significance for marking attempts to modernise usage. Others are creative interventions in their own right which may significantly extend an original. The use of variants to establish the descent of sources is discussed below. A significant minority of lampoons employ complex modes of poetic discourse that reward critical examination. Some examples are considered in my chapter in Clandestine Satire on ‘A Poetics of the Lampoon’ (pp. 218–47).

Language and vocabulary

The archive offers a large, little studied record of colloquial, late seventeenth-century English and the changes that took place in the language over a span of forty years. It is particularly valuable for its record of bad language — obscenities and innumerable varieties of insult — much of which never found its way into printed sources. Any study of English sexual vocabulary would find it indispensable.

Studies of single whole manuscripts

Literary editing may involve searching through manuscript volumes for particular works with little proper consideration of the wholes from which they are extracted. A different kind of study, more familiar to mediaevalists than early-modern scholars, concerns itself with the whole manuscript as an object of interpretation in its own right.  The question to be asked in each case is ‘How did this particular collection of items come to be brought together at this time between this particular pair of covers?’  Where the volume is the personal miscellany of a collector, the timeframe may well extend over many years. We would expect it to be a register of the tastes and interests of the compiler, as is certainly the case with the Cambridge don and Suffolk vicar John Watson (British Library Add. MS 18220 ) and the Non-conformist baronet, Sir John Pye (Beinecke MS Osborn  b 52, vols 1 and 2). Keen collectors need not have restricted themselves to lampoons of a particular political tendency but may reveal their personal bias by the titles given to items (e.g. ‘A base poem’), as is done by both Sir William Haward and Pye. Some volumes have passed through the hands of more than one complier, each of whom left their individual stamp on its contents. In the case of a professionally written anthology, the timeframe is likely to be much narrower, reflecting what was likely to attract customers at a particular month or season, though most also incorporate retrospective material. Unexpectedly, the professional collections tend to be pretty even-handed in their politics, distributing their venom on whomever stands in range, irrespective of party. In some of the very large examples from around 1700, such as British Library Harleian 7319 and Österreichische Nationalbibliothek cod. 14090, this arises from an aspiration to present a ‘secret history’ of the Restoration decades in lampoon form, with poems dated and arranged in chronological order.

The communication of lampoon texts

The paths taken by lampoons in passing from individual to individual and from place to place are very often markers of intellectual, cultural and political alliances. Such dangerous pieces would only be directly transmitted to a trusted friend or collaborator. It was rare for collectors of lampoons to preserve any record of their sources, though the Watson and Pye miscellanies  just mentioned valuably do so. The first is discussed in Clandestine Satire, pp. 269–73 and the second at 273–82.  In the case of professionally compiled manuscripts, study of a single example requires us to consider the entire surviving production of the scriptorial agency responsible for it. Three principal ‘scriptoria’ have so far been recognized to which I have given the working titles ‘Hansen’, ‘Gyldenstolpe’, and ‘Cameron’. Examples of work from all three are included in this archive. The existence of other agencies is revealed whenever the same or a very similar compilation survives in more than one professionally written copy. None of the three enterprises mentioned can be identified with Robert Julian (but see Beal, In Praise of Scribes, on a manuscript volume purchased from him by the Earl of Derby) or with the booksellers Starkey and Collins who ran a covert scriptorium in the Strand, where manuscript copies of parliamentary papers and other political documents could be written to order. It is probable that the ‘Cameron’ scriptorium was directed by John Somerton, mentioned in contemporary sources as Julian’s successor. This busy, subversive and necessarily secretive branch of the booktrade would invites closer investigation. Some of the scholarly tools required are considered in the next section.

Navigating the archive

Users of this archive need to know how to find their way around it. The primary tool is the first-line index in English Clandestine Satire, pp. 307–414. This identifies the location or locations for each individual poem in the form of a siglum, specifying the manuscript, followed by a number indicating its position in the sequence of items that manuscript contains. (Please note this is not a page or folio number!) If more information about a particular manuscript is desired, a separate first-line index for each, which includes page/folio numbers, can be found on the English Department website at Monash University (http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/english/research/). The assistance of Meredith Sherlock and Felicity Henderson in preparing these indexes is gratefully acknowledged. The printed index includes references to a few manuscripts not included in the present collection. Students needing to examine all surviving sources of a given work will need to contact libraries directly for copies of these. They will also need to consult other first-line indexes, including those compiled by libraries themselves, now often available online. Those of the British Library (only available in the manuscript reading room), the Bodleian (published in two volumes by Margaret Crum), the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the Leeds and Nottingham University Libraries are the most important. An enormous amount can also be learned from Peter Beal’s invaluable two-part volume covering the period in the Index to English Literary Manuscripts (Volume 2 1625–1700 (London: Mansell, 1987-1993)), which in offering a complete record of the surviving manuscript sources for the work of a good range of significant authors also points to locations for others who are not covered. This work is currently being revised and extended at the Institute of English Studies, London University, for electronic republication. Other currently available first-line indexes to verse of the period are listed in James Woolley, ‘First-line Indexes of English Verse, 1650–80: A Checklist', East-Central Intelligencer, ns 17.3 (September 2003), 1–10 (online version at http://www.bibsocamer.org/BibSite/Woolley/) and Michael Londry, ‘On the Use of First-Line Indices for Researching English Poetry of the Long  Eighteenth Century, c. 1660–1830’, Library, 7th ser. 5 (2004), 12– 38. These are useful for hunting down printed as well as manuscript sources for any given work, as are the LION and ECCO databases. Almost all pre-1700 printed sources can be consulted directly via the Early English Books on Line database or its parent microfilm edition and many eighteenth-century ones via ECCO. Help can also be obtained from those scholarly editions of the writers of the period (sadly not all) which pay serious attention to the manuscript heritage. These include The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Oxford: O.U.P., 1999), edited by myself and a forthcoming edition of works attributed to the second Duke of Buckingham, edited by Robert D. Hume and myself, in which the poems, in Volume 2, illustrate some particularly knotty editorial problems. The 1704–7 Poems on Affairs of State volumes, mentioned above and digitally available on both LION and ECCO, while deficient in regard to their texts, are of great value as a finding list and have been included for this reason in the Clandestine Satire first-line index.

Basic codicology

If users of this collection are to have a full understanding of what they see before them it is helpful  to know something about manuscripts as physical objects and the ways in which they were compiled and manufactured. The following section offers some basic information. Late seventeenth-century manuscripts are inscribed on writing paper, which has a smoother surface than printing paper. Writing ink is water-based unlike printer’s ink, which is oil-based. For the technology of copying, see Michael Finlay, Western Writing Implements in the Age of the Quill Pen (Wetheral: Plains Books, 1990). Scribes of the period had largely abandoned the varied hands of a century earlier and employ either a late ‘mixed’ hand or an early version of modern round hand. The ‘mixed’ hand is so called because it preserves a number of letter forms from the older ‘secretary’ hand, among minuscules most commonly the retroflex ‘e’, the variously formed ‘c’, and the ‘h’ descending below the line. On first encounter these may prove confusing but the eye soon accommodates itself to them. Only the ‘e’ will be met with extensively. In cases where the manuscript was written by an experienced scribe for presentation or sale, a modern reader should not have any difficulty in following what is written. Users requiring palaeographical guidance should consult Anthony G. Petti,  English Literary Hands from Chaucer to Dryden (London: Arnold, 1977) or Jean F. Preston and Laetitia Yeandle,  English Handwriting, 1400-1650: An Introductory Manual (Asheville N.C., 1999), or log on to Early Handwriting 1500-1700 ¾ An Online Course (Cambridge English Renaissance Electronic Service). Samples of the hands of well-known writers of the period can be studied in Petti and in P. J. Croft, Autograph Poetry in the English Language, 2 vols (London: Cassell, 1973).  The spellings used in lampoon manuscripts should not be much of a problem once the most common variations from modern practice have been recognized; however, a gradient exists running from those used by professional scribes, which are usually close to those of printed texts of the period (which in turn are not far removed from modern practice), to those of compilers of personal miscellanies, who often preserve an earlier orthographical freedom.

The short texts that are our present concern usually began circulation as separates containing either a single work or a linked group of two or three related works. Linked groups manifest themselves, even when no original example survives, by occurring in different larger collections in the same or a very similar order. Separates might be written on a single leaf, a half-sheet bifolium, or a whole sheet folded as either a bifolium or quaternion, and have historically had a very low survival rate. They would frequently, however, be copied into the personal miscellanies of collectors which, being robust, bound volumes, had a much better chance of survival. Items regarded as commercially attractive would also be appropriated by professional scribes copying for sale, such as Robert Julian and John Somerton. As well as producing separates, some of these scribal entrepreneurs vended well-written bound volumes. One also encounters carelessly inscribed copies of professional volumes made by readers for their own use. Some copies in personal miscellanies may also derive from professional separates. The connections between these larger collections reveal themselves through comparisons of item order. The user of this archive will soon discover that versions of the same poem from different sources are likely to exhibit verbal variation, sometimes minor and sometimes quite dramatic. Titles are especially volatile. Separates and copies made from separates in personal miscellanies will show the strongest idiosyncrasies since they will normally be several or many transcriptions apart. Scriptorium copies derived from a common exemplar rarely vary much among themselves and will usually permit an accurate reconstruction of that exemplar. Printed versions, when they exist, will also need to be consulted. Most derive from fortuitously encountered separates and have no more authority than any other source. Note that it was common for scribally circulated texts to be censored and restyled by their publisher for presentation to the print public. A professional scribe such as Robert Julian might do the same in the interest of making his texts more saleable but by enhancing sensational aspects rather than suppressing them.

Generally lampoon authors seem to have felt little of the concern that, say, Donne, in an earlier generation, showed for the preservation of accurate texts of his poems in manuscript transmission. Lampoons were fugitive compositions written for the amusement of the author’s immediate circle and were not expected to pass beyond that circle.  That they did, and might be eagerly recopied up and down the land, must often have come as a surprise. It is unlikely that we possess more than a very small proportion of the copies once in circulation. For this reason it would be a mistake to assume that the common ancestor of the body of surviving copies would have been a perfect, authorial text of the work concerned. That would be to confuse the archetype with the author’s original MS; but even that may have been hurriedly written or spoken to an amansuensis and contain mistakes. In some cases whole traditions may have arisen from a seriously defective copy, making scribal modification a process of improvement rather than corruption, but improvement by hands other than the author’s. Thus the readings of a late copy may be polished and plausible without being those of the archetype, while a careless and possibly inaccurate copy from a personal source close to the author may be a guardian of elsewhere corrupted readings. There is no reason why an author who took the trouble to keep a master copy should not have made changes every time he or she put a new one into circulation. This would lead to a plurality of archetypes, and therefore traditions, for the same text. Or a scribe might mingle readings from two different exemplars, a process known as conflation. This semantic instability is inherent to the medium.

When the present archive makes multiple versions available the user will need to decide whether to compare all surviving copies, or a selection only, or to quote from a single copy taken at random. The choice made will depend on the purpose for which the quotation is to be used. For those wishing to edit texts from the archive using stemmatological reasoning, further suggestions will be found in my Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, pp. 313–56 and ‘The Work in Transmission and its Recovery’ in Shakespeare Studies, XXXII (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson U.P., 2004), 73–80, and in the document, ‘Basic Stemmatology for Students of Early Modern Scribal Anthologies’ on the Monash University English Department website. These should offer sufficient guidance for interrogating straightforward textual traditions. Those wishing to acquaint themselves with the methods used in analyzing exceptionally complex traditions of the period should begin with  my ‘A Restoration Lampoon in Transmission and Revision: Rochester's(?) ‘Signior Dildoe'’, Studies in Bibliography 46 (1993), 250-62 and the edited text and textual notes in Rochester, Works, 248–57, 658–62; ‘Rochester's ‘I' the 'isle of Britain': Decoding a Textual Tradition’ in English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700 6 (1997), pp. 175-223 and the edited text and textual notes in Rochester, Works, pp. 85–90, 596–9, and the text and discussion of  ‘A Song on Danby’ in the forthcoming Hume and Love edition of Buckingham. However, a full mastery of textual analysis requires acquaintance with the methods of editors of classical, Biblical and mediaeval texts. It is also helpful to understand how biologists investigate the historical descent of genetic material, though their methods will not always apply directly to the particular conditions of textual descent.

A word of warning. Textual analysis is not an exact science and will always call at crucial junctures on informed judgement. For this reason it is important that the reader of any published treatment is able to consult the primary evidence in the form of a complete record of substantive (verbal) variation.

The process of copying

One should never make limiting assumptions about the nature of the copying process that might have produced any given manuscript source. While some personal miscellanies may have been copied sheet by sheet, and only then bound up, most were entered into already bound white-paper volumes, and will often have unused blank leaves at the back. Such collections might be in the hand of the collector or of a secretary, or in a number of hands, sometimes belonging to family members or to successive owners. Scriptorium volumes, on the other hand, were usually written sheet by sheet and only then bound up into a whole. One should try to establish as much as can be inferred about the nature of the exemplar used in the act of copying. Often mistakes in a copy will suggest that a scribe was working from an original written in a particular hand that facilitated specific kinds of misreading. Mistakes in the order of text elements may be indicative of structural irregularities in the exemplar. One should ask whether the exemplar was a bound book, a body of loose leaves, or a collection of unbound sheets. In anthologies copied from a ‘rolling exemplar’, the exemplar existed as a series of separate leaves or sheets whose order might well change between copyings. Sometimes we can follow a process by which elements are progressively removed from such an exemplar and others added. We should not assume that scribes always carefully preserved their master copies. Copying might be performed seriatim with each copy becoming the exemplar for the next. This might occur because of a desire to preserve some innovation in presentation or styling or simply through pressure of demand. Note that this is also the practice of print production, with editions normally set from their immediate predecessor. When multiple copies were produced in a scriptorium, a form of ‘progressive copying’ could have been used, by which a primary copy of a sheet made by one scribe was passed on to others. Which of them got it first might depend on their individual speed as copyists. This could theoretically lead to a situation in which the textual descent of the resultant volumes changes sheet by sheet. Try to remain aware of such possibilities even if they might have been relatively rare.

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The above notes are unlikely to satisfy the needs of all users of this archive but they should indicate some of the many kinds of work that can be done with the sources now made available and some of the scholarly techniques necessary for performing that work. Beyond that, the uses to which these images might be put are limited only by the imagination and interests of the researcher.

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