Leaves from a verse miscellany of court poetry : Miscellany c. 1580-c. 1595.

Format:

Book

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sonnet.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Summary:

The manuscript was originally compiled by two hands in the late sixteenth century. Anne Cornwallis owned the manuscript ca. 1600. Samuel Lysons acquired the manuscript ca. 1790-1800, at which point he mounted its pages into another manuscript volume, he annotated the miscellany, and added poetry to it.

Notes:

AMDigital Reference:MS V.a.89

Charles Barrell (see bibliography) has suggested that the manuscript may have been compiled at Fisher's Folly, London, the estate owned by Anne Cornwallis's father. Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.a.89 is a manuscript consisting of eighteen leaves from a late sixteenth-century verse miscellany. It has been signed on the verso of the first folio, "Anne Cornwaleys her booke". It not possible to match this sprawling italic signature with either of the two main hands of the volume. The main hands both write in secretary script, though several of the poems are subscribed in italic, making it at least conceivable that Anne Cornwallis annotated some of the poems after they were transcribed. The manuscript is in an unusual format, an oblong quarto, wider than it is tall. The manuscript in its current form was bound near the turn of the nineteenth century by the antiquarian Samuel Lysons (1763-1819), who owned the manuscript in 1790 and who has annotated it. The original leaves, some with damage, have been interleaved with blank pages. W.H. Bond claims that the paper yields no clues for dating, but I have found the watermark (two tiny upper case D's divided by a flower) in Briquet, providing a date of 1569, which raises the possibility of an earlier date for the manuscript than has formerly been posited (I, no. 9374). The poems seem to date from the 1570s to the early 1590s.Pages 1 to 5 contain seven poems all attributed to John Bentley and written in a hasty secretary hand. There was an actor by that name who died in 1585 and who was praised as a skilled poet by Thomas Dekker in A Knight's Conjuring of 1607 (see msItem 2). Barrell and Bond have determined that Bentley's hand does not match that of the first hand in the miscellany. Page 6 is blank. The twenty-seven pages that follow (pp. 7-33) are written in a different hand, a neat but small secretary script. There are several pen changes with this hand (i.e. at pp. 16, 19, 24, and 32), and corrections in a lighter pen have been made by this same hand in at least one poem (p. 7). This section contains twenty-six poems with an occasional attribution. Samuel Lysons has added marginal notes to several of the poems in this section. This poetry is followed by a note by an owner of the volume in 1740, a further note by Lysons, and finally a transcription by Lysons of the seven Bentley poems (copied from those at the beginning of the manuscript) on one inserted leaf, folded to make four pages. This manuscript has generated some discussion because of its collection of Elizabethan courtly verse linked with the circle of the Earl of Oxford (see bibliography). Poems by Sir Edward Dyer, Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, among others, are included. An anonymous poem which was printed in The Passionate Pilgrim is assumed by Lysons to have been written by Shakespeare (pp. 25-26). Two poems paired with those by Oxford are attributed to "vavaser" (pp. 8-9 and 13). This is Anne Vavasour, the mother of Oxford's illegitimate son, and one of the Queen's Gentlewomen of the Bedchamber, whom he abandoned in 1581 in a well-known scandal. Ilona Bell has convincingly argued that the poem, "Sitting alone upon my thought in melancholy mood" (p. 13) was written instead by Sir Henry Lee, clandestinely expressing his love for Vavasour, and that "Though I seem strange sweet friend be thou not so" (pp. 8-9) was Vavasour's equally coded avowal of her devotion to him after Oxford's betrayal (Bell, pp. 75-99). Queen Elizabeth may be the author of "When I was fair and young then favour graced me" (p.12), which is attributed to Oxford in the Cornwallis miscellany. The poem is attributed to "Elysabethe regina" in Bodleian Library MS Rawl. poet. 85, a manuscript which shares a number of courtly poems with the Cornwallis miscellany (May p. 84, Anderson, Marotti). Barrell explains a link between John Bentley, the Earl of Oxford, and Anne Cornwallis's father: Bentley was an actor in one of Oxford's companies, and Sir William Cornwallis of Brome, Suffolk, in addition to being Oxford's distant relative, bought the estate called Fisher's Folly in London from Oxford in 1588. At Fisher's Folly, Oxford patronized a number of writers. Barrell suggests that when the Cornwallises took over the house in 1588 they could easily have obtained the poems that were to be transcribed in the Folger manuscript (Barrell, p. 25-26). The first five pages of the Cornwallis manuscript are not very polished at all, but the poems are well spaced and each has been attributed to a J or John Bentley. Later pages are very neatly written and carefully attributed to various poets. In spite of its current damaged state, the miscellany was most likely a fair copy of courtly verse, perhaps transcribed expressly for Anne Cornwallis. For important discussions of the manuscript see Arthur Marotti's article and Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare's Poems in Early Modern Englandpp. 183-189.