Thinking with Ferrar Papers 1422: A c. 1681 Verse Miscellany

Abstract

This article explores a late seventeenth-century manuscript verse miscellany held amongst the Ferrar Papers in Magdalene College, Cambridge, not previously discussed by critics. By attending to both the specific features of this manuscript miscellany (including poems by John Dryden, Katherine Philips. and others), and the larger Ferrar archive, the article considers broader questions about how to read and interpret manuscript miscellanies.

Introducing the manuscript

In this article I Describe a new—in the sense of the never-before discussed—late-seventeenth century manuscript verse miscellany containing nineteen poems both well-known and more obscure. By introducing this manuscript and reading it in terms of the contexts of its probable compiler and the larger archive in which it sits, I hope to answer both local questions about the nature and purpose of the miscellany, and, more broadly, to reflect on the kinds of questions we bring to such a text, particularly in the light of recent work on the manuscript transmission and compilation of poetry. That is to say, I hope to offer both a case study of a new manuscript and a consideration of (to misquote Raymond Carver) what we talk about when we talk about miscellanies.

The Ferrar Papers at Magdalene College, Cambridge, contain some 2,280 manuscripts, plus around 600 loose prints, relating to the history of the Ferrar family (1590-1790), particularly of Nicholas Ferrar (1592-1637), and of the Virginia Company of London and the Somers Isles Company, along with family correspondence and devotional prints. The archive arrived at Magdalene College in 1781 when Peter Peckard, who had inherited the collection in 1769 from his father-in-law, Edward Ferrar II, became the Master. Largely unused in the nineteenth century, the archive was catalogued in stages over more than fifty years by (among others) A. L. Maycock, by N. R. Malcolm, and most recently, and superbly, by David R. Ransome.

FP 1422 is described in Ransome's catalogue as ‘Verses from a commonplace book’, and is said to be composed after November 1678, and attributed, with a hovering question mark, to John Ferrar II (that is, to John Ferrar (1631—1720), son of John Ferrar (c. 1589—1657)).¹ These terms of definition seem broadly right, although I would refine the title to ‘Verses in a miscellany’, since most of the inclusions are not extracts but wholes, and date the compilation to around 1681. Through comparison with the handwriting of other manuscripts in the Ferrar Papers, I think John Ferrar II is the most likely scribe and compiler, but this is not certain, and the question mark deserves its place. Three William Habington verses (one whole poem, and two fragments) are catalogued separately as FP 2164. FP 2164 is a single sheet, folded once to produce four pages, three of which carry text; it appears to have once formed part of FP 1422 and has been included in the contents description below. Even with these additions, FP 1422 is clearly missing a number of pages.

FP 1422 has received no published discussion beyond the one-line record in Ransome's catalogue. Partly this is due to the sheer number of items in the Ferrar Papers: FP 1422 is lost amid the thousands of other manuscript and printed items. But disciplinary boundaries are also significant: historians of the Virginia Company, scholars of Nicholas Ferrar's Anglican community at Little Gidding (1625-1637), and art historians working on religious prints, have profitably mined the Ferrar Papers, but as a late, literary manuscript, FP 1422 has been overlooked.² One implication for anyone working on the transmission of manuscript poetry is that large non-literary archives are paradoxically good places to hunt for new literary texts.³

FP 1422 (including FP 2164) contains twenty items, listed in the table below: five poems that were once attached to plays, fourteen other poems, and one short prose medical recipe. The authors of these pieces are Thomas Shipman (2), John Dryden (2), John Bankes, John Wild, Henry Vaughan, Katherine Philips (3), John Cleveland (3), Edward Mico, John Tatham (2), and William Habington (3), although Thomas Shipman and ‘M^r. Dryden’ are the only cited authors. The author of the recipe is unknown—characte- ristically, for a genre that generally refuses any simple relationship to the idea of an author.

The verses are written on both sides of gathered but unbound leaves measuring 154 mm tall by 97 mm wide; there are twenty-three pages of text plus one blank page (including four pages of FP 2164). Pages are unnumbered. FP 1422 might be called a ‘manuscript book’ or fascicle, but since it is certainly a fragment of a larger, partly-lost whole, we can call it a miscellany.⁶ The hand is non-professional and appears to be the same throughout; the script is italic, with occasional use of the secretary ‘e’. Changes in ink tone and thickness suggest the poems were copied in more than one stint (although how wide the gap between stints is not clear).⁷ There are no holes suggesting stitching, and as a gathered but unbound booklet whose parts might easily be scattered, FP 1422 resembles other manuscripts amongst the Ferrar Papers, such as the loose but sequential gatherings of FP 2102, a collection of William Habington poems in the hand of John Ferrar III—of which more later. A fold line across the horizontal centre of FP 1422 suggests the manuscript was once folded in half; wear to the first item, ‘To y^e most Illustrious Prince James Duke of Monmouth’, suggests that this was the outward page. The paper shows no watermarks but vertical chain lines are visible. Mise-en-page is roughly consistent. A ruled line runs down the left-hand margin of each page, 3 mm in, and each item is separated by a horizontal ruling. Line distribution is inconstant; for pages with continual text, with no titles or breaks, lines per page are 32, 36, 32, 33, 29, 30, 32, and 32. There are no catchwords.

The pages are generally in reasonable and legible condition, although there is some wear to the bottom of some leaves obscuring the last line of text of some items. At a number of points in the manuscript, there are annotations in the margins, perhaps added some time after the transcription of the main text: pen trials in the margin to the right of Dryden's ‘Prologue to Caesar Borgia’; extensive pen trials and sentence fragments in the right margin at right angles to Thomas Shipman's ‘The Prologue intended and part spoken by Mr. Heart’; a partially effaced sentence in the right margin, at right angles to John Wild's ‘An Elegy on ye Earl of Essex his Fun’ral’ (‘some say the papist has a plot against’ can be read, but the rest is obscured); and the name ‘John Ferrar’ written, sideways, in the right-hand margin of Henry Vaughan's ‘The Charnel-house’. That page also features a number of ink drops.

Of the nineteen poems in FP 1422, six constitute new witnesses to poems recorded in Peter Beal's Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts (CELM), and can be added to this resource. These are (to use FP 1422's titles) John Cleveland's ‘To y^e state of Lover. Or, y^e Senses Festival’, ‘Mark Anthony’, and ‘The Authors mock song, To M. Anthony’; and Katherine Philips's ‘Upon ye double Murder of King Charles ye I In Answer to a libelous Copy of Rhimes by Vavasor Powel’, ‘On y^e numerous Access of y^e English to wait upon y^e King in Flanders’, and ‘On ye Fair weather just at ye coronation it having rain’d immediately before and after’. FP 1422 also offers five poems not in CELM by authors who are listed: Henry Vaughan's ‘The Charnel- house’; John Dryden's ‘Prologue to Caesar Borgia’, and the ‘Epilogue’ to Charles Saunders's Tamerlane; and William Habington's ‘To y^e Honourable my most honoured friend, W^m. E. Esquire’. FP 1422 also includes fragments of Habington's ‘An Apparition’ and ‘To the World. The Perfection of Love’: again, poems not in CELM by an author who is. FP 1422 also includes poems by five writers not included in CELM: Thomas Shipman; John Bankes; John Wild; Edward Mico; and John Tatham. Of the nineteen poems, versions of seven are also found in other manuscripts (poems by Katherine Philips (3), John Cleveland (3), and John Wild); or, to put that another way, twelve of the nineteen poems have no known wider manuscript circulation, at least according to CELM and the Folger Shakespeare Library's Union First Line Index (which itself incorporates indexes to eleven major repositories). By contrast, all of the nineteen poems have known print witnesses, and a study of the degree to textual intimacy between print and FP 1422 suggests that in many instances a printed text is likely to have been the direct source for the miscellany. This certainly appears true for the verses associated with plays by Thomas Shipman (2) and John Dryden (2); John Wild's ‘An Elegy on ye Earl of Essex his Fun’ral’; John Cleveland's ‘Mark Anthony’ and ‘The Authors mock song, to M. Anthony’; and Katherine Philips's three verses, all of which appear to have been drawn directly from her 1667 Poems.

Collectively these instances suggest less a compiler enmeshed in networks of manuscript verse transmission and more a reader-transcriber working his way through printed texts. But the textual condition of FP 1422 is more complicated than this: one feature of this manuscript is missing words and lines. Ignoring the John Tatham and William Habington texts, which appear to have manuscript pages missing, Henry Vaughan's ‘The Charnel- house’ omits the final eight lines, and John Cleveland's ‘To the State of Love, or, the Senses Festival’ ends at line thirty-nine, exactly half-way through the seventy-eight lines that appear in other printed and manuscript witnesses.⁸ Such omissions have significant consequences for the nature of poems: in Cleveland's case, after a first half description of a dream of a lover, the second thirty-nine lines, missing in FP 1422, describes a kiss (‘Now to the melting kiss that sips | The jelly’d Philtre of her lips’) and a final suggestion of orgasm. FP 1422's half-length text is a less erotic, less embodied verse. More puzzlingly still, several of the poems feature gaps where particular words or phrases within lines are missing. In ‘To y^e Honourable my most honoured friend, W^m. E. Esquire’ by William Habington, the manuscript includes the following (text from Habington's printed Castara (1635) on the right, with manuscript gaps indicated by square brackets and crux words underlined in bold):

In FP 1422's ‘Upon ye double Murder of King Charles ye I’, by Katherine Philips, line eight is similarly lacking, with ‘for merit would allow’ added in what appears to be a later ink (1667 print on the right):

I can find no precedents in extant printed or manuscript witnesses of Philips's poem for this gap. FP 1422's incomplete (and therefore untitled) rendering of John Tatham's ‘To his friend, advising him from Love’, printed in Fancies Theater (1640), also includes blanks:

Why might words be missing? Scribes normally leave gaps to indicate both that they don't know a word or words, and that they desire to fill in that gap at a later date—an intention that the gap records as unfulfilled. Missing words normally suggest a manuscript source that is temporarily illegible, or an oral source that is momentarily inaudible, or a portion of text that is too scandalous to transcribe, as happened with John Donne's ‘To his Mistress going to Bed’.

Strikingly, in the case of both Habington's ‘To y^e Honourable my most honoured friend, W^m. E. Esquire’, and Tatham's ‘To his friend, advising him from Love’, another version of each poem exists in the Ferrar Papers, and in both cases these blanks are retained. All of the gaps in FP 1422's rendering of Habington's ‘To y^e Honourable my most honoured friend, W^m. E. Esquire’ also appear in FP 2102 as number forty-three in a manuscript written by John Ferrar III of verses by Habington from Castara. FP 1422 has ‘43’ written to the right of this poem: since Habington's poems are not numbered in print, this appears to be a cross-reference to FP 2102. The consistent gaps and variants between the witnesses, in contrast to printed versions of the poem, suggest either that one of FP 1422 or FP 2102 was drawing on the other, or that they were drawing on a common source. (As Harold Love notes, it would be ‘a mistake to assume that the copy in a personal miscellany marks the terminus of a chain of acts of publication’.¹⁰)

That the ‘43’ was added, perhaps in a later hand, to FP 2102, indicates a later reader noticing the similarity.

We see something similar with Tatham's verse. FP 2107 offers nineteen pages of text in the hand John Ferrar III. In appearance and layout similar to FP 1422 (by size; unbound gatherings; a ruled line in the left margin), the manuscript offers text drawn (perhaps indirectly) from a 1657 printed text which it titles ‘Mirrour of fancies with a Tragicomedie Intituled, Love crown's the End, Acted by the Scholar's of Bingham Com. Nottingham, by John Tatham Gentlemen’. The manuscript contains the two Tatham excerpts that are in FP 1422.¹¹ Once more, the gaps and variants in FP 1422 are sustained in FP 2107, but not in the 1640/1657 printed texts, indicating that FP 1422 and FP 2107 are directly related, or are drawing on a common source, either a manuscript now lost (there are no known extant manuscript witnesses outside the Ferrar Papers), or a print edition unknown.

Whatever the precise nature of the relationship between these manuscripts, they point to a clear investment by the Ferrar family in poetry and literary writing more generally, across generations. Habington and Tatham—despite their marginal status today—seem to have been particular family favourites. Just as Little Gidding in the 1630s was a locus of cut-and- paste Biblical Harmony production, so in the later seventeenth century Little Gidding was teeming with literature. The late-seventeenth century sections of the Ferrar Papers contain numerous significant literary manuscripts. Alongside FP 1422, the Biblical Harmonies, the Story Books which recorded their moral debates, and texts, including poems, relating to the Virginia Company, the Ferrar Papers include university epitaphs on the death of family member Erasmus Ferrar (1609);¹² copies of poems, as both separates (individual short manuscripts) and booklets, by writers including John Quarles, Richard Fanshawe, Abraham Cowley, and Charles Cotton;¹³ political songs and ballads clustering around 1680;¹⁴ drinking songs by Thomas d’Urfey, Thomas Flatman, and Christopher Fishburn;¹⁵ fragments of plays by John Dryden;¹⁶ a large number of songs for amateur performance, many from Henry Playford's publications;¹⁷ notes extracted from books by Thomas Fuller and Francis Bacon;¹⁸ and poems composed by family members, including ‘poetry of Uncle TF's writing’, and six psalm translations.¹⁹ These items are beyond the scope of this present article, but what they collectively suggest is the Ferrar family's interest in circulating and collecting literary works, and the need to understand FP 1422 in the light of that context. One important methodological point that the Ferrar archive suggests is that individual items speak to, and need to be understood in relation to, other items in the collection. Indeed, studies of texts in larger archives, such as FP 1422, might prompt us to consider that the category ‘miscellany’ can encompass not just the single manuscript miscellany but also the wider collection in which it sits, and that ‘compiler’ can be understood in a familial as well as an individual way. One crucial component that is now regrettably missing—or scattered, awaiting reconstitution—is the Ferrar library of printed books. Five printed volumes, all annotated by John Ferrar I, have been identified, including copies of William Bullock's Virginia Impartially Examined (1649) and Mercator's Atlas (1635).²⁰ But, beyond this small sample, the larger library context is at present elusive.

Even beyond the confines of Little Gidding, the Ferrar family acted as a base for cultural activity. John's children Reverend Thomas (1663-1739), Basil (1668-1718), and Edward (1671-1730) established an amateur but regular and well-organized music society at Stamford, Lincolnshire, fifteen miles north of Little Gidding, between 1693 and 1700, composed of middle- class men (merchants, clergyman, professionals).²¹ Meetings of the ‘Cecilians’ or ‘Musical Friends’ featured vocal performances (including settings of ‘Saul and the Witch of Endor’, and the 100th psalm), and sonatas by the Italian Baroque composer Arcangelo Corelli. Their repertoire was evidently large—an alphabetical first-line index survives of 485 songs from printed sources, in Thomas's hand²² and, as Bryan White has noted, the Cecilians’ Stamford setting made them unusual at a time when musical clubs were growing in London and Oxford. Despite this provincial context, the society had access to new music. They played Corelli pieces often before those pieces had been printed in England, and letters describe individuals arriving with music from London, like the wealthy merchant Obadiah Sedgewick who ‘brought along with him Corellis 4th Opera of Sonata's’.²³

The Cecilians in fact sustained an investment in music made by the Ferrar family over several generations: Susannah Collett was a skilled lutenist; an organ was installed at Little Gidding in 1632; and one of the three schoolmasters who taught the children of the family, including John, was charged to ‘teach them to sing and play upon virginals, viol, and organ’.²⁴

How typical is FP 1422 of manuscript miscellanies of its time? As Harold Love wrote of seventeenth-century literary culture, ‘the most characteristic mode through which verse was circulated to its readers was the miscellany containing work by a number of writers, rather than the manuscript devoted to the work of a single poet’.²⁵ In this sense, FP 1422 is one more iteration of this form, although the fact that many of its inclusions had (as far as present knowledge suggests) no wider manuscript circulation makes this particular combination of items rather less representative. As a ‘newly discovered’ miscellany (the phrase is a little misleading, since Ransome's catalogue did record its existence), FP 1422 suggests the many as-yet- unknown manuscript miscellanies in archives (particularly archives less explored, or non-literary) awaiting their modern readers. In research published in 2016, Jennie Challinor describes a newly identified commonplace book, now in the Staffordshire Record Office, compiled by Robert Mathewes, a young man associated with Jesus College, Oxford.²⁶ In its inclusion of seven poems by Katherine Philips (including ‘Upon the double Murther of King Charles I’), its apparent reliance on print (probably Philips's 1667 Poems) as a source, and its 1680s date of compilation, this manuscript resembles FP 1422—and both manuscripts collectively suggest there are almost certainly further Philips manuscript witnesses to be found. As Challinor notes, most ‘extant copies of her poems are, however, found in only a small number of major collections, which can be traced back to members of Philips's literary community’: these new manuscripts, compiled by Robert Mathewes and John Ferrar II, provide a different kind of collection, and show how Philips's poetry might circulate in manuscript in new communities, beyond her Society of Friendship, crossing between manuscript and print.²⁷ The treatment of Katherine Philips in FP 1422 also supports Marie-Louise Coolahan's argument that Philips's texts only circulated widely in manuscript miscellanies after her death in 1664, and the publication of her Poems in 1664 and 1667: before that date, Philips's poems moved ‘via separates or manuscript collections of her work according to the single-author paradigm’.²⁸

Reading miscellanies for pattern, coherence, and meaning

Can FP 1422 be said to possess a particular character? If many of our critical terms (like genre, theme, author, date, meaning) seem premised on the study of single works, how well served is a miscellany by this critical lexicon? Can a miscellany ever be said to possess sufficient coherence to enable it to be legitimately discussed as a whole, or are we duty bound to return to the granularity of individual inclusions? In the dialectic between individual poem and collective whole, how does a manuscript miscellany generate a sense of literary personality? We might normally attempt to answer that by looking for certain patterns running across a number, or a majority, of the inclusions. These patterns might relate to practices and techniques of compilation: that is, to the manner in which the miscellany is assembled, and the inclusions transcribed. In noting that poems reached compilers of miscellanies in sequences, rather than as single texts, Arthur F. Marotti argues that the presence of particular clusters or ‘rolling archetypes’ sketch the ‘contours of a certain set of cultural concerns and socioliterary dynamics’.²⁹ Alternatively, these patterns might be thematic: the reappearance of certain topics across inclusions. But of course there are many legible refrains within a miscellany of nineteen poems. Certainly one can find a strand of the midcentury Cavalier aesthetic that is held to define so many manuscript miscellanies: indeed readings of miscellanies seem sometimes pre-coded to find such an interpretation. Thus there are poems on love and absence (John Tatham, ‘To his friend, advising him from Love’), and Katherine Philips's poems on Charles I and II reflect a clear post-regicide Royalism. If we want to make these inclusions stand taller than the others, then FP 1422 can be said to be a Cavalier text. But this requires the repression of other possibilities. FP 1422 is also concerned with individuals who signify more ambiguously: James, 1st Duke of Monmouth (1649-1685), and Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex (1591-1646). Monmouth, the eldest illegitimate son of Charles II, would acquire posthumous fame for his doomed leadership of the 1685 Monmouth Rebellion against his Catholic uncle, James II, but at the time of the compilation of FP 1422, Monmouth's stock was high, as a Protestant military leader of the Anglo-Dutch brigade, fighting for the United Provinces against the French, as a successful leader at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge in 1679, and even as a potential future king. In the words of FP 1422's first inclusion, ‘Who can resist Monmouth and victory?’ Essex had been a Parliamentarian who was, in the damning words of his biographer John Morrill, ‘an inverted Midas: all that was golden in his inheritance and circumstance he turned to dust’.³⁰ With the backing of funds from Parliament, Essex's death in 1646 was marked by a lavish performance of mourning at Westminster Abbey, and the poem in FP 1422 reflects what Morrill calls ‘the false bombast of his funeral’. Certainly, the verse on Essex's funeral complicates any straight-forward Royalism.

But if any attempt to find thematic coherence in a manuscript miscellany needs to recognize that forms of coherence can be diverse, and that broad labels like ‘Royalist’ are prone to unraveling when individual inclusions are read, one way to limit the range of possible significances, and to approach the question of a manuscript's nature, is to turn to the biography of the compiler.³¹ This is a hollow hope for most manuscript miscellanies since little or nothing is known about the vast majority of compilers: a name and a date is more information than many manuscripts present. But because FP 1422 sits in a larger archive of papers relating to the Ferrar family, it is possible to gain an unusually detailed sense of the probable compiler, John Ferrar II. As a result, certain usually unanswerable questions about the relationship between compiler and miscellany can be at least raised, particularly questions that relate to issues of intention and resonance: most fundamentally, why might the compiler have assembled these particular pieces at this particular moment, and what kind of aesthetic, political or social effects might the whole have created?

John Ferrar II (1631—1720, hereafter John) was the son of John Ferrar (c. 1589-1657) and his second wife, Bathsheba (nee Owen) (d. 1659). Like his three siblings, John grew up at Little Gidding and would have been old enough to remember the dominant charisma of his uncle Nicholas, with his blend of piety and urgent entrepreneurialism. Nicholas died in 1637; John's mother seems to have been one of the few capable of challenging her brother-in-law's regime, and ‘in greate passion and Violent words burst out’ at life at Little Gidding.³² John's father, by contrast, wrote Nicholas's biography with an almost abject sense of devotion. John travelled to the Low Countries with his father, sister, and Mary Collett Ferrar in the years 1643 to 1645. There is no record that John went to Cambridge University, as many of the men in his family did, but he developed strong literary interests: by 1650, when his sister Virginia was cultivating silkworms at Little Gidding it was he, according to his father in a letter to Samuel Hartlib, who turned reports from the colonists in Virginia into verse.³³ In 1657, John married Anne Brooke, daughter of the Leicestershire knight, Sir Thomas Brooke, and they had eight children, three of whom (Thomas, Basil, and Edward) were the significant amateur musicians noted above.

Extant archival letters, which describe the busy social life of Little Gidding, with frequent visitors, can help humanize this outline. Letters suggest John was a man of social eminence and ambition (his cousin Nicholas Collet, on 11 December 1673, reports on progress in making ‘a Seale w^th your Coate of Armes some what larger then ordinary … in Siluer’),³⁴ a figure actively involved in the promotion of his family interests. In 1680, about the time of the compilation of FP 1422, John is in discussion with his son's Cambridge University tutor Gascarth when it becomes apparent his son is ‘not inclining to the study of divinity’,³⁵ while, at the same time, negotiating to place another son, Nicholas, as a mercer's apprentice in Cheapside.³⁶ In 1682, John is involved in torturous and ultimately fruitless negotiations for a proposed wedding between his son and the daughter of Lady Thorold: relations strained over whether the £2,000 should be paid as one sum (as John demands) or split into two payments of £1,500 and, some time later, £5 00.³⁷ While the bride's party ‘is highly satisfied of your [John's] great worth & Integrity, & is much affected with your playne Dealing, the noblest Badge of an honest Gentleman’, the impression is of John's obduracy.³⁸ Later, John made some financial missteps: he unwisely guaranteed the local Land Tax collector in the 1690s, the collector defaulted, and it took over ten years for the family to escape the threat of bankruptcy.

Several letters concern financial dealings and vividly reveal that sense of early modern society as a network of interlocking credits and debts, as described by Craig Muldrew.³⁹ These financial exchanges—money lent, money recalled—follow and reinforce links of family and friends. Thus John Mapletoft, ‘[h]aving a design to make a small purchase, & occasion for all my little stock in order thereto, … desire[s] that I may receive that seventeen pounds for which I have your note as soon after Lady-day as you can’;⁴⁰ and thus, in a letter of 7 July 1672, Anne and John write to John's sister Virginia, concerning the delivery of a box in exchange for £5 sent ‘by Peter Falcaner the Carrier’. This letter begins in Anne's hand but, mid-way through, John takes over since ‘my Wife is fallen very ill soe that I am forced to finish what shee hath begun’.⁴¹ The apparent intimacy of John's marriage with Anne, and the fragility of Anne's health—perhaps in part a consequence of her frequent pregnancies⁴²—is apparent in a number of letters. ‘I got safe to my Journey and prasied bee God’, John writes in a letter to his sister Virginia on 23 May 1664, ‘and found all my family in health, save my Dearest, who is somewhat distempered with a Cold’.⁴³

Amid this broad and bustling context, two refrains might be useful for reading FP 1422. The first is John's desire for news and the allusions to a steady stream of texts arriving at Little Gidding, rather like that culture of news, transmitted often as separates discussed by Harold Love as a central feature of seventeenth-century manuscript culture.⁴⁴ The news discussed in correspondence is generally political in nature (‘His Mat^ie went this day from Windsor to Winchester to a great Horse match, & returns back on Saterday, & y^e next weeke comes to London’),⁴⁵ but given the number of literary works in the Ferrar Papers, there is at least the potential for literary texts to be moving along similar lines, too. On 25 June 1679, John's son John Ferrar III, studying at Cambridge University, writes in response to his father's ‘Command … [for] this o^r. Cambridge news’, and provides details of the trial and execution of Jesuits apparently implicated in the Oates Plot (he lists ‘Langhorn, Whitbread, ffenwick, Harcourt, Gawen, and Turner’, noting all but Langhorn were executed).⁴⁶ John's cousin Richard Ferrar II was a particularly important conduit for gathering and relaying texts, a man who promised ‘once a fortnight you shall not fayle to haue by the post a letter of the truest newes I can collect, for too many lyes are now in vogue’.⁴⁷ Whether ‘collect’ here means gathering spoken news or gathering material texts is not clear, although elsewhere Richard suggest he is passing on print. On 16 January 1673, this same source writes that ‘I haue here Enclosed all those Gazetts [i.e. printed news-sheets] I was in Arreares to you, which will satisfye you of what newes has lately passed. for now all the newes ^{^ is} of the French Armyes Action in Holland’.⁴⁸ At other points Richard is delivering his own written summaries of news and news-sheets: ‘I had wrote to you the last weeke’, Richard notes on 13 February 1673, ‘had his Ma^ties and the Lord Chancelours speeches come out the last Thursday, but they were not Printed till last saterday’, and he then provides an account of business from the House of Commons.⁴⁹

Within this broad culture of news, John is particularly concerned with the military actions of James Scott, the 1st Duke of Monmouth, around 1672: that is, at the outbreak of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, when a brigade of some 6,000 English and Scottish troops was despatched to serve as part of the French army, in return for money paid to King Charles. Monmouth was the triumphant commander of his despatch. In fact, John has a direct source of this information in the aforementioned Richard, who, at this point, is serving under Monmouth. On 31 October 1672, Richard writes that ‘I doe Beleiue your mare will be very serviceable to me’ given that ‘the Duke of Monmouth told me lately that the ^{A next} Muster would be Fryday come fortnight’.⁵⁰ A week later, Richard writes again of the imminence of muster day, of the Duke of Monmouth returning to France, and of intelligence arrived lately on the German and French armies.⁵¹

How, then, does this relatively rich sense of the probable compiler of FP 1422 help us read this miscellany? We might propose three scales of connection. First, there are specific points of alignment, when topics treated in the poems recur in the surrounding archive. While letters record John's interest in the Duke of Monmouth and his direct family connection via Richard, the miscellany opens with sixty-three lines ‘To y^e most Illustrious Prince James Duke of Monmouth’ from Thomas Shipman's Henry the Third of France which are unequivocal in their praise:

When wars were rumor’d, or great dangers near Mars then was sought his Temples crouded were.

From you great Sir & from y^r flaming blade,

Our Eden boasts her glory and her aid:

Not Eden only w^th y^r beams you guild,

But like y^e Sun shines upon every Field:

‘Tis Duty then our Lawrels we should bring,

As off rings to y^e Power y^t makes them spring. (lines 1—8)

This suggests an investment in poetry that speaks directly to John's family and political interests, and thus a dissolving of the distinction between letter and poem: they are both expressions of a similar concern. There is a further, albeit more tentative connection with Monmouth. BL Egerton 1527 is a duodecimo pocket book, ‘found’, according to a note by James II in the manuscript, ‘in the D[uke] of Monmouths pocket when he was taken [after the Battle of Sedgemoor in 1685] and is most of his owne hand writing’. The contents includes a remedy for the stone; instructions for making leather water-proof; ‘A charm for a purpose not easy to guess’; a recipe ‘Making hair grow black’; an itinerary of ‘The way that I took When I cam from England December the 10^th — 84’; and two loose adaptations of poems by Katherine Philips. Philips's ‘A Retir’d friendship, to Ardelia. 23d Augo 1651’, beginning ‘Come, my Ardelia, to this bowre’, is recast as an eighteen- line ‘Song’, beginning ‘With joie we do leave thee’, together with a musical score.⁵² Monmouth here converts Philips's poem of friendship into a poem of retirement, altering the verse to speak to his own experiences: next to the final line, ‘that Thus we happy liue’, Monmouth adds a marginal alternative: ‘or: did us | Teding=|=ton | giue’. The final leaf of the manuscript lists places en route from London to Teddington (‘from London to Hamsted, | from Hamsted to Henden, | from Henden to Edgeworth … and from dounstable to Tedington’). Monmouth then converts Philips's ‘A Countrey life’ (‘How sacred and how innocent’) into a twelve-line ‘Song’ on retirement, beginning ‘O how blest and how inocent’, once more with a musical setting.⁵³ These two instances suggest not only that Philips's poetry was circulating widely and entering personal manuscripts in the early 1680s alongside other kinds of inclusions, but also that Monmouth saw a particular potential in Philips's verse to speak to his contemporary moment. FP 1422 doesn't include these two poems, but it does combine Monmouth (the subject of the opening inclusion, and of several Ferrar letters) and three Philips poems, at the same moment as Monmouth was writing his Philips adaptations. There is thus an early 1680s Monmouth-Philips alignment in both collections: perhaps this features in other manuscripts, too.

If this first scale provides specific, local points of connection between inclusion and compiler, a second scale concerns broader cultural commonalities. Here we might propose the Ferrar family's Anglican Royalism as a context for understanding the appeal of some of the inclusions, including Katherine Philips's three poems of regicide lament and royalist celebration. We might also suggest the Ferrar family's investment in music and performance as a context for the appreciation of drama that the miscellany's first five inclusions imply.

Running across these scales of specific and general connection are two other variables: first, the miscellany's apparent close or direct connection with printed books as a source for texts; and second, the miscellany's relation to contemporaneous literary fashion. While FP 1422's poems associated with plays seem diverse in subject, celebrating the young author Charles Saunders, the poor state of stage verse, and the dangers of the audience identifying with satirized figures, it may be that a sense of the theatrical contemporary explains them: the first five items come from Thomas Shipman's Henry the Third of France, first performed in 1672 and revived in 1678; Charles Saunders's Tamerlane the Great, performed in 1681; and Nathaniel Lee's Caesar Borgia, performed in 167c!.⁵⁴ (Mico's ‘Epithalamium’, from a 1666 printed play, is an outlier.) If the source of these inclusions is indeed printed play books from 1678 to 1681, as appears to be the case, it is less theatrical than printed dramatic fashion that is at stake. More broadly, the relationship between FP 1422's dramatic inclusions and the original source play is variable: titles such as ‘Prologue to Caesar Borgia’ gesture back at an original performance or printed play text, although without great specificity; other titles suggest author (‘Epilogue by M^r. Dryden’) or speaker (‘The Prologue intended and part spoken by Mr. Heart’) or, if untitled, no immediately legible relationship at all. To varying degrees, then, these five texts exist somewhere between the categories of (to use the words of one recent study of prologues and epilogues) ‘independent works of art’ and ‘addenda to plays’.⁵⁵

Some poems are explicable through more than one frame of interest: Shipman's poem on Monmouth is a verse associated with performance, and a celebration of a particular individual, and a recent verse. Of course there will certainly be other forms of order and meaning that the compiler and his immediate circle would have discerned. The dramatic inclusions might indicate a particular fondness for the King's Company, who staged Henry the Third of France and Tamerlane the Great; and more broadly, it may be that what lies behind the selection of these and the other fourteen pieces is an aesthetic appeal, a delight in a certain kind of wit or perceived elegance of expression—in which case a reading for politics or theme is a false lead. In all these cases, as Marcy L. North has noted, the compilers’ process of selection would have been a compromise between the appeal of the poems (whatever the precise nature of that ‘appeal’) and the ‘limitations of time, labour, and materials’ inherent in ‘the hard work of hand copying’⁵⁶— although the length of many of the inclusions in FP 1422 compared to the shorter lyrics more typically assembled in miscellanies suggests John Ferrar II had time to invest in his manuscript.

The starkly axiomatic question lurking behind these speculations is how, exactly, we should read miscellanies—and scholarship has not yet provided a satisfactory answer. If by ‘read’ we mean discerning both the order in which we move through the manuscript, including where we start and stop, and the relations we discern between the parts, including the potential connections we observe but decline, then this remains an issue of contention today, playing out in the shifting approaches adopted by scholars towards these texts. Miscellanies have frequently interested critics as sites where new witnesses of canonical authors might be found, resulting in a criticism that excises threads of known poems from the tangle of wool that is each miscellany. The drawback to this approach is a neglect of those items by less known authors: and even CELM is structured around this logic, listing only inclusions by members of its (admittedly large) canon of writers, and thus providing manuscript descriptions punctured with holes. Another strand of work attempts to attend to miscellanies on their own terms, at the level of the whole manuscript, often through the production of editions,⁵⁷ or, in the work of Joshua Eckhardt, in what we might call a hermeneutics of compilation-effects: Eckhardt argues that the act of juxtaposing poems by compilers (rather than authors) creates new sequences whose effects need to be understood on their own terms, and not as disordered versions of prior (authorial) patterns.⁵⁸ The work of editors, with their commitment to the production of whole texts, has in turn recently been critiqued by Jonathan Gibson who, finding in such work a problematic emphasis on the synchronic whole at the expense of the diachronic process of production, calls on textual scholars to note the ‘discontinuous’ nature of many manuscripts, and to embrace the idea of ‘texts in process rather than … unified works of art’.⁵⁹

As Piers Brown puts it in his discussion of Donne's attitude to editing, ‘[a]t the root … is the question of how we conceive order in poetic collections’.⁶⁰ That is, central is the question of how we reconcile a sense of a manuscript as a coherent form, as a collection identifiable as itself, with the fact that the manuscript may be the product of non-sequential transcriptions, and may anticipate forms of non-linear consumption; how we relate the order of compilation, if known, to an idea of interpretative or aesthetic sequence (should we read as the manuscript was compiled?); how we recognize the movement of poems into, out of, and beyond the miscellany—the textual histories which precede and follow, that sense of process that Gibson emphasizes—while letting our critical gaze settle on the pages open before us.

Brown's advocacy of ‘rhapsody’ as an organizing term might be a helpful way of keeping these conflicting commitments simultaneously in play: ‘rhapsody’, from the Greek meaning ‘song-stitching’, originally described the process of selecting and joining pieces of Homeric poetry for performance. The term suggests the ‘patchwork logic’ of miscellanies that ‘poses an alternative to the modern poetics of coherence’.⁶¹ Rhapsody implies a pulling together of scraps and pieces, but a pulling together that isn't too close. Thus Donne to his friend Sir Henry Goodere in 1614, considering the gathering and printing of his poems: ‘I am made a Rhapsoder of mine own rags’.⁶² For Donne, a ‘Rhapsoder’ clutches at, but fails to harmonise, his poems: Donne uses the term also in Pseudo-martyr in 1610, when he writes disparagingly of ‘these Rhapsoders, and fragmentary compilers of [church] Canons, which have onely amass’d and hoveld together’.⁶³ Philemon Holland glosses the term in his translation of Plutarch's Moralia (1603) as ‘sowing together or conjoining of those Poems and verses … which before were loose and scattered’:⁶⁴ a combined attention to the joining, and to the prior textual lives. And while Donne and Holland may be working with somewhat different senses of the word—for Holland, ‘rhapsody’ seems more organic and concordant, in contrast to Donne's fragmentation—the collective sense of accumulation and dispersal is a useful dynamic to keep in mind when reading miscellanies.⁶⁵

One lesson of FP 1422 is that miscellanies that sit in larger archives can offer a particular way forward in terms of how to organize our interpretation of a manuscript, the surrounding letters and documents providing a potential means of limiting the interpretative superfluity that miscellanies convey. But if the location of FP 1422 within a larger family archive enables the alignment of miscellany inclusions with letters and other documents, the flip-side is that no amount of contextual or biographical information can fully explain the simple but also vertiginous process of copying poems into a personal manuscript. Why this poem, and not that one? How does this inclusion speak to that? Studying FP 1422—especially in the context of a large family archive—suggests not a paucity of possible significances but precisely an excess, and in so doing reminds us of how much we still have to learn about reading miscellanies.

Footnotes