John Donne and Overbury’s ‘A Wife’ in the New Melford Hall Manuscript

Abstract

Abstract In 2018, a manuscript containing a large collection of John Donne’s poems was discovered at Melford Hall in Suffolk. This essay presents an initial assessment of that manuscript and, more specifically, places it within the wider universe of Donne manuscripts, which has been exhaustively charted in the recently completed Donne Variorum. The Melford Hall manuscript belongs squarely within what editors have come to call the traditional Group II manuscripts. Unlike the other important Group II manuscripts, however, the Melford Hall manuscript also contains numerous emendations. Some of these emendations may be in Donne’s hand; others link the Melford Hall manuscript in a unique way to other important Donne manuscripts. An unexpected highlight of the manuscript is its heavily glossed and annotated text of ‘A Wife’, the title poem in Thomas Overbury’s best-selling A Wife (1614). The Melford Hall manuscript’s text of ‘A Wife’ includes numerous unreported substantive variants that are shared by a few other Donne manuscripts. These textual variants reveal how much can be learned by dealing with non-Donne material in predominantly Donne manuscripts, and they support the proposition that the Melford Hall manuscript was produced at an earlier date than the one that editors have assigned to its closest Group II siblings.