JOSHUA ECKHARDT, Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love Poetry.

Abstract

IN his History of the World, Sir Walter Ralegh noted how ‘eloquent, just, and mightie Death’ can draw together ‘all the far stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man’, covering ‘it all over with these two narrow words, Hic iacet!’. A number of seventeenth-century readers, though, were apparently quite unwilling to let him rest in peace. In the eyes of some of these, his notorious pride and ambition made him the epitome of the haughty royal favourite who deserved an infamous death. For others, he was the last Elizabethan hero, the discoverer of Guyana and the enemy of Spain. For good or ill, Ralegh’s texts were one with his reputation, be it fama bona or not. It is thus fascinating to see that a number of seventeenth-century verse collectors associated his poems with libels on Robert Carr, first Earl of Somerset, on George Villers, Duke of Buckingham, and with poems by John Donne. Editors of both Donne and Ralegh have so far analysed many of these manuscripts, and duly registered their readings. Quite frequently, though, they have analysed their entries almost in vacuo, as if the poems could be considered independent from the page on which they appear. Placed alongside the libels, however, some of the poems by the late favourite of Queen Elizabeth I served in many cases as a kind of catalyser. Not only did they contextualize Donne’s poems, but gave them additional meanings, often linking these texts to an explicitly political frame of reference.