“Lost,” “Authorized,” and “Pirated” Editions of John Denham's Coopers Hill

Abstract

Upon the basis of evidence never sufficiently examined, a number of statements concerning the seventeenth-century publication history of John Denham's Coopers Hill have acquired wide and authoritative circulation, and all the circumstantiality of established fact. Three chief of these statements, closely interrelated, are to be the subject of this discussion. The first of these is that all the editions of Coopers Hill prior to that of 1655 are “piracies.” The second, a corollary to the first, is that the edition of 1655 constitutes the “first authorized edition” of the poem. The third, somewhat independent of the other two, is to the effect that two editions of the poem—both “pirated”—have certainly been lost. Implicit in evidence equally cogent, however, is the assumption of a third lost edition, the authorization of which is never discussed. The purpose of this investigation is to scrutinize the evidence upon which these commonplace assertions are based, to show how far each is from being demonstrably true, and to advance arguments to prove that all three are false.