Elizabethan Manuscript gift volumes

9Cambridge University Library Add. MS 8915 still preserves its original vellum binding. It is decorated with an oval gilt arabesque centrepiece and an asymmetrical stamped gilt frame containing a small crown, a leopard and the words “ELIZABETHA REGINA.” [1] Traces of its green silk laces are still visible. Its title, written on the spine, “Orationes et carmina Acadamiae Cantabrigensis Ad Elizabetham Reginam, 1564,” was most likely added later: it is inaccurate not only in its spelling of “academia” but also in the reference to “orationes.” This volume contains, in reality, a collection of poems in Greek, Hebrew, English, Aramaic, macaronic and Latin. Some folios present a very elegant mise en page, but one can find sections where the penmanship is far from spotless. This is the case, for example, of the English verses on fols. 91v-92 and the Latin couplets on fol. 153, both written in a rather cursive secretary hand, as well as of the poems entered by members of Pembroke College (fols. 121-30v). In the latter section, blottings, insertions, and very evident erasures can be seen on most pages; sometimes the scribe even struck through entire lines (cf. fols. 121, 122r-v, 125, 126r-v, 127, 128r-v, 129r-v and 130, all transcribed by the same hand). On the whole, the duct in this quire is more oblique than in the other sections; even the titles appear to have been penned rather carelessly.

10The binding and the contents of this volume suggest that it was connected to the Queen’s visit to Cambridge in 1564 (Goldring et al., I:373-437). This volume, however, is certainly not a highly refined product. It quite probably never made its way into the Royal collection now at the British Library. Was it ever presented to Elizabeth? Was it really intended for the Queen’s eyes? No analysis of the material features of this manuscript can lead to conclusive answers. The binding looks contemporary, yet it is definitely not what one may term a thing of beauty. It was not a book Elizabeth would have appreciated: it was known—at least to her courtiers—that the Queen disliked vellum and had a penchant for red velvet—one notable example is her copy of the English Bible now at the Folger Shakespeare Library (shelfmark: STC 2099, Copy 3; see also Knight, 27-29 and William Cecil’s letter to Richard Howland in Goldring et al., II:569). The Cambridge book, in short, does not fit the “typical” image of a presentation copy. Could the Cambridge manuscript be an ex-post collection of the verses written for Queen’s visit? Such collections, in fact, were typically exhibited in the streets of the city. They could have been collected in a memorandum book for the University (cf. Archer and Knight; Bajetta 2019).

11It is only by reading through the narrative of Elizabeth’s visit to Cambridge that one can make sense of the physical features of this volume. A detailed narration of “The Queen’s entertainment at Cambridge” can be found in a manuscript in the Cambridge University Archives, and is printed in Nichols’s Progresses. This narrative, and a note in another Cambridge manuscript, unequivocally identify this book as the one which, in 1564, was “delyvered vnto master Secretorye” (i.e., William Cecil, then Secretary of State and Chancellor of the University) and was carried by him “in his owne handes” while the Queen was making her progress around the colleges (Cambridge University Archives, Misc. Collect. 4, fol. 74v, also printed in Goldring et al., I:417-18). Cecil presumably kept it thereafter, since the manuscript was part of the Burghley sale of 1687 (Goldring et al., I:418, note 184).

12So, even if the Cambridge congratulatory verses did not reach the Queen’s library shelves, they were certainly intended as a gift for her. Once this is ascertained, one begins to make sense of some of the material features of this book. What, to use Beal’s terms above, this manuscript is “trying to tell us” is that it is a presentation copy—even if, at first glance, it may not look like one. What we may consider a rather poor binding was in fact one of the earliest Cambridge examples of the use of gold leaf: an effort was clearly made to produce something special (Goldring et al., 418, note 184). This book testifies to an important moment for the life of the University: the first Royal visit to the University in Elizabeth’s reign. The verses contained in the manuscript were in all likelihood composed and copied in the space of just three weeks, and many people penned their own compositions. The corrections visible throughout the volume, then, were intended to be an improvement (although not necessarily in terms of elegance). Each college seems to have appointed a corrector who revised its section and amended some faults (usually in metrical scanning and Greek accents; Leedham-Green iii) There is, ironically, a genuine touch of the academics’ obsession with their own effort and disdain for mundane formality: the Cambridge scholars seemed to have preferred a corrected copy, however inelegant, to a fine-looking book.

13As has been illustrated elsewhere, the evidence of the Cambridge manuscript, as well as of many other books from Westminster School, Oxford, and Eton, which sometimes present similar (though not always so evident) features, is certainly telling. One would often be tempted to consider an elegant binding and a formal mise en page as a clear sign of presentation, but this was not always the rule (see Bajetta 2001; Scott-Warren). Form, in other words, mattered much less than one may be inclined to think. This entails that, almost paradoxically, the very idea of a “presentation copy” was and should be linked to intention: this book is meant to be a gift. In a process akin, in a way, to linguistic aktualisace or “foregrounding” (cf. Procházka et al. 2010, 196, note 4), the gesture matters more than the object, or, as Jerome McGann has stated, this is one of those “bibliographical codes” which “lay bare their devices” and “announce that they are executing a ‘non-natural’ language system” (2014, 169).

14The Cambridge book, and its attempts at amelioration, can remind us of a crucial element. Apparatuses frequently try to be as concise as possible; cases such as that of the Cambridge manuscript, however, may call for the registering in extenso of errors and corrections, or at least for a detailed note on the mise en page of certain sections. The registering of specific variants, spellings and/or corrections, besides representing an editor’s obsession with detail, could be quite important for scholars working on, say, the state of Greek studies at the Universities. That much scholarship has been based on printed rather than manuscript texts, in fact, may also have been linked to the paucity of information in this respect—and, ultimately, to the scarce attention paleographers have devoted to a proper registering of the original emendations in these volumes (see Binns 1978; Bajetta 2019).

Hermeneutic gaps

15An accurate description of manuscripts, and even of specific textual loci can therefore be of paramount importance to scholars, and this even quite apart from the problem of emendation per se. Analysing the physical embodiment of the text is something that can provide important elements for the understanding of any literary piece. In this respect, much work has been done over the last three decades, especially on manuscript verse miscellanies—one needs only to recall the important books by Mary Hobbs, Henry Woudhuysen, Peter Beal, Harold Love, Steven May and Arthur Marotti. Many scholars have emphasised, among other things, the social dimension of textual production, and therefore the importance of not looking at texts in isolation. As they have argued—and as Joshua Eckhardt has recently done extensively in his Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love Poetry (2009)—looking at the collocation of one given set of verses in a miscellany can be very rewarding. One should bear in mind, however, how these volumes were produced. Jonathan Gibson has demonstrated that many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century miscellanies (such as, for example, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, MS V.b.198) were not assembled in the way one may think was natural for them to be:

Intellectual groups may not have been copied seriatim, or one after another in the sequence visible in the manuscript. Indeed, roughly contemporary texts can be widely separated in space across the manuscript, while texts spatially close in the manuscript may have been copied many years apart. In deciding whether or not groups of texts were copied in seriatim, it will be useful to know whether or not the manuscript was copied into a prebound book or loose sheets. If the miscellany was started in a prebound “paper book” (bound either by the compiler or bought from a stationer), its compiler is likely to have used what I have elsewhere called “blank casting off:” he or she or they will have started two or more sequences of texts in the manuscript, separated by blank pages (perhaps including sequences beginning at both ends of the manuscript). This was a popular way to collect texts of different kinds, such as secular and religious verse in the same manuscript […].

Editing non-English texts

16Sometimes, though, the foreign language texts one may want to reproduce can pose a real challenge, as witnessed by the following case. At the beginning of 1583, Don Antonio—the exiled King of Portugal, then in Paris—sent an extravagant Italian letter in his own hand to Queen Elizabeth I. The latter is addressed in the letter as “Serenissima Maesta,” but a second persona is added to the Royal image, that of a tender but also dangerously powerful woman patron. This was “la bella molinara,” the beautiful miller who could reduce a man’s soul to airy powder, and who could give Antonio power to fight against not only Philip II but the whole world. This is the text of Don Antonio’s holograph missive, dated “di paris 19 di ianaro” (Cecil Papers 185/130):

17

ringrazio il caso[,] la fortuna[,] bella amichevole molinara del mio core, chi mi ha cossi acomodato, a quella restaro obligatissimo á quella aficionatissimo, lei sola sara mio dolce amor, a lei si sacrificarano li miei pensieri, et vostra Maesta serenissima fachia quel che sarà sirvita. Solo con la mia amata e dulcissima molinara mi faro forte non solo contra il povero filipo ma contro il mundo tuto.

18The Italian may at first glance seem quite erratic, and one would be tempted to normalise the spelling and tidy up this text considerably. “Obligatissimo” and “aficionatissimo” look too similar to Spanish (“obligado” and “aficionado”) or Portuguese (“obrigado” and “afeiçoado”); “Filipo” is clearly influenced by “Felipe,” and “mundo” is just regular Spanish or Portuguese. Emending what one may consider as patent mistakes in this letter, however, would just obscure the curious, but powerfully suggestive and unique, Portuguese-Spanish-Italian language of this missive. To provide but an example, “obligatissimo,” is not necessarily influenced by Spanish or Portuguese. It is a very common spelling in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian, as witnessed by its occurrence, for example, in Vasari’s Vite (1550, p. 733, sig. z3) and in Galileo’s letters (32). When editing this missive, then, one should bear in mind that, like many other Renaissance men and women (including his addressee, Queen Elizabeth), Don Antonio had quite probably a very reasonable working knowledge of Italian. One should really sift all the existing evidence before emending what seems “wrong” in this text.

19A different case is that presented by a holograph Italian letter of Queen Elizabeth I, written to Alessandro Farnese (1545-1592), Prince and later Duke of Parma (now British Library, Cotton Charter IV.38[1]). Its incipit may seem rather confused (cf. Elizabeth I, 135-45; reproduced at 138-39).

20Here and elsewhere in the letter, one can observe a number of false starts, currente calamo corrections and later insertions. In the manuscript, in fact “Ca” appears slightly above the cancelled “Signor duca” as if Elizabeth had not quite made up her mind whether to keep “Caro” (“Dear”) or not for the new opening. Quite probably, after this, she went on with “Signor Duca” and wrote the first three lines—probably going back to review them shortly thereafter. Looking at “è parso molto strano,” in fact, one may note that “molto” and “e parso” were apparently inserted at separate moments, just like “Illustrissimo Cugino.”

21One may just imagine Elizabeth chewing her pen, trying to find a good Italian opening (“Caro,” “Carissimo,” “Illustrissimo”?), and not quite succeeding. Could this hesitation be considered as typical of a person writing a text in a foreign language? The analysis of the historical context proves that this is not the case. At about this time, notwithstanding Elizabeth’s attempts to avoid a direct conflict, there was a real and serious threat of open war with Spain. Parma had recently promised peace through at least three different sets of emissaries; the situation, however, was indeed quite intricate, and the English Queen, whose Italian was rather good (see Elizabeth I, 2017, 22-28), had at this time little idea of how to deal with such an offer (cf. Elizabeth I 2017, 135-37). Farnese, incidentally, was at this time both “Prince” and “Duke” (he had just inherited the title after the death of his father); for Elizabeth he may have been an “Illustrious Cousin” (as most European Princes), but probably not a very “Dear” one. Even if the Queen, in fact, had not realised that Farnese’s proposals for peace were just a delaying tactic, she might have known that while promising peace on one side, he was also in correspondence with Mary Queen of Scots (cf. The National Archives, Kew, State Papers, 53/15, fol. 2; Elizabeth I, 162 note 52).

22In sum, Elizabeth’s corrections and apparent hesitation at the start of her letter, are not a sign of linguistic inability. They point to something typical of Elizabeth: her notorious indecision when having to tackle an international crisis. Even quite apart from the significance of the multiple incipits, the draft copy and its various layers of correction may in this case provide much additional information. Printing only the final version, a copy of which is extant among the Spanish state papers (Archivo General de Simancas, Secretaría de Estado, Negociación de Flandes, 592/17), or merely providing a brief account of the draft in the apparatus criticus would just either obliterate or minimise the writing process, which, in this case, can be of interest to historians and literary scholars alike.

Missing letters and an author’s “voice”

23The example of Sir Walter Ralegh’s œuvre can perhaps be a good case in point to demonstrate how editing should always be based on case-by-case analysis rather than general considerations. This corpus is riddled with doubtful poems and spurious prose texts, and even the undoubtedly “genuine” works pose a number of problems. Some poems seem to owe much to some (mostly unidentified) continental sources, others may be the fruit of a collaboration with his cousin Sir Arthur Gorges (see Gibson 1999). In addition to this, critics are faced with some tracts, such as the one on the war (or “peace,” as we find in some contemporary witnesses; cf. e.g. British Library Add. MS 48062, fol. 370) with Spain “and the protection of the Netherlands,” which have come down to us in late manuscripts and printed volumes. These, it seems, were heavily edited by some of Ralegh’s late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century “admirers,” who sometimes appear to have inserted notes and translations to the original texts (cf. e.g. Ralegh 1829, 8:299-316, and British Library, Add. MS 48062, fols. 370-85; Cambridge University Library, MS Ee. 2.32, fols. 109r-27v.). His most famous book, the History of the World, presents a plethora of borrowings from biblical, classical and other sources, which are sometimes quite difficult to disentangle from the base text. Quite significantly, scholars such as Nicholas Popper have identified what has been termed the “collaboration between Ralegh and the sources he collected” as the distinctive trait of this work (Popper 33). To make matters worse, this book may not be the product of Ralegh alone: Ben Jonson once remarked that “the best wits” of England were employed in writing that book (see Popper 32-33 and ff. for a thorough discussion on this point).

24All this is something which the editors of the standard 1829 Oxford edition—the only “modern” edition to date—seem to have ignored. In order to disentangle borrowings from originals, imitation from innovation, in order even to understand what Ralegh wrote and what others wrote for him, one evidently needs a reliable language corpus which can help us to retrieve his “voice.” One may immediately suggest turning to Ralegh’s letters, which are frequently holograph, and pose little questions of authorship. The problem is: how representative of Ralegh’s language and ideology are these? It has been observed, in fact, that most of these letters are of a “business” nature, and that they are disappointingly dry when one thinks of a real “Renaissance man” such as Ralegh. Can we really use them when looking for any “authorial language”? What follows is a series of considerations deriving from the arrangement of the known missives—those included in Latham and Youings’s edition (Ralegh 1999), together with some later additions—in a database arranged by dates, places of writing, topics and the names of the repositories where these documents are currently located. [3]

25Examining and ordering evidence such as the names and number of the addressees, for example, one sees that Ralegh’s first and most important interlocutor, Sir Robert Cecil, stands out immediately among the recipients with about 90 items out of a total of 230. One may object that this is simply due to the good fortunes of the Cecil archives at Hatfield House. Letters to Cecil, though, while clearly very numerous at Hatfield, appear also in other repositories including the National Archives and the British Library (Fig. 1a & 1b). In addition to this, one should note that, as shown in Fig. 2a & 2b, the corpus of Ralegh’s correspondence described in the 1999 edition includes most of the predictable addressees (Edmund Spenser being a notable but explainable exception; cf. Hadfield, 1:172-73). In fact, we can find here several courtiers, men of state, friends and relatives, and practically all the people who are known, from other sources, to have frequented him (compare, e.g., the list in Fig. 2a & 2b with Wallace 1959; Williams 1988; Nicholls and Williams 2011; Gallay 2019; for an evaluation of recent biographies see Bajetta 2018).

Fig 1a

Ralegh’s letters – Repositories

Ralegh’s letters – Repositories

Fig 1b

Ralegh’s letters – Repositories

Ralegh’s letters – Repositories

Fig 2a

Ralegh’s letters – Addressees

Ralegh’s letters – Addressees

Fig 2b

Ralegh’s letters – Addressees

Ralegh’s letters – Addressees

26There are exceptions, of course: in 2009 Christie’s sold a holograph letter from Ralegh to the Countess of Shrewsbury, the formidable “Bess of Hardwick” (see Woudhuysen 2009). Most of Ralegh’s associates and acquaintances, however, are included in this corpus; and if, say, Lord Cobham (with 9 items) gets more letters than Lady Ralegh (with 6) this is hardly surprising. Ralegh certainly loved his wife, but their relationship, notwithstanding the fact that they were often separated, was unlikely to engender a large body of correspondence (cf. Beer 2004): he wrote on very special occasions—including, most sadly, the death of their son (Ralegh 1999, 353-56).

27We have only one letter to Queen Elizabeth, but this is, again, hardly surprising. Ralegh, we should remember, was very close to her for about twelve years. When he was away, he wanted her to feel he was away, and when he was sent away, he wrote to others so that they could let her majesty know. His most passionate narration of his misfortunes—the letter in which he described his despair at seeing Elizabeth riding past Durham House while he was on house arrest—was in fact sent to Robert Cecil, and was backed up by a missive penned by Sir Arthur Gorges who invited Cecil to pass on the message (Ralegh 1999, 70, no. 46).

28There is a limit to the misfortunes of archives. While Ralegh must have written to his wife or the Queen on other occasions, it is doubtful that a very large number of documents is missing. Ralegh was not Sir Christopher Hatton or the Earl of Essex, whose passionate letters to Elizabeth constituted a crucial part of their elaborate game of courting their sovereign. He probably preferred to write poetry to her (something which, with less success, Essex did as well; see Lacey; May 1980 and 1999), and he certainly knew very well which occasions were fit for writing and which were not.

29One feels that the “business” nature of Ralegh’s correspondence is, in fact, not a result of the nature of the archives where we find most of his signed and holograph missives. On the one hand their topic, all in all, could have caused most of these letters to be considered as “State Papers,” thus ending up in the archives of the Lord Secretary, among the State Papers proper, and in collections which are related to these, such as the Cotton and Lansdowne Manuscripts at the British Library. Certainly, though, the “business” orientation of Ralegh’s correspondence is quite evident. We can see that the busiest periods for his correspondence are not, as one would imagine, the dramatic years of 1592 (his first imprisonment in the Tower), 1603 (the start of his long incarceration after the accusations of treason) and 1618 (the year of Ralegh’s abortive voyage and of his execution), but 1594 and 1601 (see Fig. 3). The year 1594 was a very busy period in the organisation of the first Guiana expedition, while in 1601 (the year of the Essex rising, mentioned in one letter only), Ralegh was dealing with his lands in Ireland, the defence of the English coast, and the events surrounding the battle of Kinsale (Nichols and Williams 89-90; 169-70). One may note that these topics were not perceived as particularly interesting by contemporary and/or later collectors: no copies of these missives, in fact, appear to be extant (cf. Fig. 3). Guiana, Ireland: in a sense, it is Ralegh the coloniser whom we see emerging from his correspondence in these years—which is, quite intriguingly, one of the most distinctive features of Ralegh’s life, as Alan Gallay has recently argued.

Fig 3

Ralegh’s letters – peak years

Ralegh’s letters – peak years

30Interestingly, even a preliminary attempt at classifying the topics of Ralegh’s letters can evidence that the largest group of these is related to business, while the second most common topic among them is patronage. Again, we know that the latter was an important element of Ralegh’s career at court (Fig. 4). While patronage may indeed sound as a promising topic for someone interested in Ralegh’s literary output, given its relation with the world of art, one may be disappointed to find Sir Walter’s “business tone” in practically all of this section of the correspondence. As a matter of fact, Ralegh was frequently interceding for others—and this was a rather unpoetical activity: it was a game of money and power (cf. nos. 11, 14, 17, 21, 24, 32, 34, 35, 62, 64, 65, 67, 72-74, 76, 83, 84, 92, 94, 97, 99, 100, 116, 127, 163, 186 in Ralegh 1999).

Fig 4

Ralegh’s letters – topics

Ralegh’s letters – topics

31The data presented so far evidence that the missives which are now extant may represent a significant portion of what must have been the corpus of Ralegh’s correspondence. They also prove, however, that in most of his letters—though by no means in all of them—Sir Walter was showing just one side of his character. This, all in all, is unsurprising, and rather typical of public figures: Elizabeth—whose postscripts, however, could be very personal—and the two Cecils being notable contemporary examples (cf. Elizabeth I, 2000, 2017; Evans 2018; Alford 2008; Handover; Read. On Robert Cecil’s affectionate words to Bess Ralegh see Nicholls and Williams 168-69).

32The fact that the majority of Ralegh’s letters were written in a style that probably mirrored his desire to affirm his “public” self suggests that one should be wary of using this corpus as a highly reliable tool for attribution. While certainly very large and extremely useful in terms of grammar, lexis, recurring phrases, and ideology, the language of Ralegh’s correspondence is only in part comparable to the one he used in his creative works. The letters, thus, could constitute a “control group” of texts with a marked “voice” of their own, which, for attribution purposes, should be used at times separately and at times alongside the much more imaginative and varied use of language found in Ralegh’s holograph prose and poetry.