The Donne variorum textual collation program

Abstract

At its organizational meeting in the fall of 1981, the Advisory Board of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne debated the merits of existing editions of Donne's poetry. Aware of approximately eighty-seven manuscript sources and nearly 400 seventeenth-century printings of individual Donne poems unknown to Donne's previous editors, we decided to make a newly edited text a part of the project. Responsibility for developing such a text was accepted by John T. Shawcross (University of Kentucky), Ted-Larry Pebworth (University of Michigan-Dearborn), and ErnestW. Sullivan, II (TexasTech University). Shortly afterward these scholars and the General Editor of the project began to investigate possibilities for computerizing this work, recognizing that such a procedure would not only increase the efficiency and accuracy of our transcription and collation, but also enable us to preserve the accumulated data in machine-readable form. Thus would be obviated (at least partially) the need for future Donne editors or scholars to retrace the path through this immense morass of manuscript and printed material. Our investigations eventually led to the convenient and relatively inexpensive microcomputer and to the integrated method of data entry and textual collation described below. 1 Editing Donne's poetry is an unusually complicated business because only one holograph poem survives and because only a handful of his 190-odd poems saw print in his lifetime. Like John