Plays, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings Associated with George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham (review)

Readers of The Library may well remember the prospectus set out for this edition by one of its editors, Robert D. Hume, in 2003. The title of his essay gave a brief and pungent sense of the problem he and his collaborator Harold Love faced in 'Editing a Nebulous Author', the author being George Villiers (1628–87), the second Duke of Buckingham. One section of the essay was called 'The Attribution Morass', and Hume summed up their joint editorial task in a succinct form: 'What, then, is an editor to do when there is no "authorized" and verifiable canon either in print or in manuscript?' Four years later and in two volumes of over 1,400 pages that they typeset themselves, Hume and Love have produced a magnificent answer to their question. The edition will be a source of enormous value to anyone interested in the courtier wits of the Restoration, but also to those concerned with editorial theory and practice. Editing without an author means that it is the work itself and its transmission rather than the person or people who wrote it that has to be the focus of critical attention. This places pressure on traditional ideas about choice of copy-texts, hence in their edition of Buckingham's most famous (perhaps his only famous) work, The Rehearsal, Hume and Love choose the first rather than the third quarto — the third supposedly containing Buckingham's final revisions in which, as they argue, he may well not have had a hand.

In the Preface to their first volume the editors neatly sum up the larger problem they face: 'Scrutiny of the Table of Contents of this edition might suggest that Buckingham was the sole or collaborative author of six plays, nine pamphlets, and squibs of various sorts, plus twenty-two poems, and compiler of a fairly massive commonplace book', but they then go on to say that 'The difficulty from an editorial point of view is that there is no way to determine exactly what he contributed to each of these works' (i, p. vii). This is because there is almost nothing that is definitely his; instead, what has come down to us is 'a mélange of disparate texts subsumed for commercial convenience in his own time under an iconic brand name' (i, p. ix), enshrined in the two volumes of the Miscellaneous Works of 1704–05. Something of the tone of the edition as a whole is revealed in Hume and Love's statement that the edition 'makes no claim to being a safety-first enterprise'; rather it is 'cheerfully inclusive' (i, p. viii). The cheerfulness that inspires the enterprise matches Buckingham's own: in exile with Charles II's court in the Low Countries, he was, according to Gilbert Burnet, 'wholly turned to mirth and pleasure' (i, p. xxix) and Sir John Reresby said that he 'could not be long serious or mind business', adding that he was 'wholly addicted to his plesures, and unsteady' (i, p. xxxi and n. 10). After spending so long in his company (some thirty years), his editors are still able to declare that 'while he lacked many desirable human attributes he had never for a moment been boring or, for very long, bored' (i, p. xlv). Buckingham was renowned for his conversation (Shadwell called it 'the most charming in the World') and this 'spoken wit', as Hume and Love term it (i, p. xlix), is reflected in the colloquial, improvised 'conversational wit' of the poems (i, p. lv) and the plays.

However, besides the deaths of Harold Love and of Don McKenzie, to whose memory the edition is dedicated, there is also something melancholy about the undertaking. It builds on Love's seminal Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (1993) and on his remarkable edition of Rochester...