Lady Bedford and the scribal publication of funerary verse

Thesis

In 1609, two kinswomen of Lucy Harington Russell, Countess of Bedford, died in Bedford’s home at Twickenham Park. Their deaths (and Bedford’s influence as a patron) prompted an outpouring of funerary verses by the likes of Donne, Jonson, Bedford, and others. Of the eleven known poems on these occasions, six were printed in the seventeenth century—all decades later—but all the poems were preserved in contemporary manuscripts, some texts in a single copy and others in dozens. Given the exceptional loss rates of early modern manuscripts, the survival of a staggering 221 witnesses of memorial verses on two minor courtiers suggests an impetus ( or several) for collecting in the period. This project studies the resulting modes and patterns of collection. It does so by drawing the poems together as a group unified across lines of author, gender, and class by their respective occasions, and those occasions linked by Bedford, one of the most culturally influential women in the early Stuart court. In part, this involves editing those texts which lack full, recent, or any editorial attention. But for all of the poems, it adapts the methods used in single-author critical editions, paired with bibliographical and biographical research, to study poems together, giving a clearer sense of how and whether their unity was preserved in circulation.

Authors: Kern, M

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-rbkyod2va
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Toby Matthew; epitaph; Wotton; John Hare; verse letter; John Donne; Elizabeth Sidney; manuscript; Anthony Tracy; Lady Bedford; manuscripts; grand tour; manuscript verse; Smyth; provenance; Countess of Rutland; Lucy Countess of Bedford; miscellany; circulation; coterie; manuscript transmission; Arundel; verse collectors; art agents; elegy; Inns of Court; verse collections; Court of Wards; Cherbury; patronage; Hollar; scribal publication; Ben Jonson; verse; Wenceslaus Hollar; Conway; recusant; Francis Beaumont; Nicholas Hare; early modern; Edward Herbert
• Subjects: English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--Bibliography--Catalogs; Manuscripts; English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700; Transmission of texts; Bibliography, Critical; English poetry--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism; Patron and client; Bibliography