Scribal and Print Publication: The Case of George Herbert's English Poems

Scribal and Print Publication: The Case of George Herbert's English Poems by Greg Miller The title page of the first printed edition (1633) describes George Herbert's The Temple as "Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations."1 Conceived "privately" for his God, Herbert's poems therefore could be read as what we might call "genuine," achieving what Cristina Malcolmson has termed "the sincerity-effect."2 According to John Ferrar, Nicholas Ferrar was asked by Herbert first to judge the poems' spiritual usefulness or danger to others and then, on the basis of his assessment, either to circulate or burn the poems.3 By implication, Herbert imagined only tentatively a larger posthumous readership. Recent scholarship, however, has considered Herbert's initial audience, exploring the likelihood that during his lifetime Herbert performed and circulated his English poems. Cristina Malcolmson, for example, has focused on the coterie circle of the Herbert family, which prided itself on a Protestant poetic heritage that included Philip and Mary Sidney, and which may have been a key part of the intended audience of Herbert's poems.4 I would like to consider evidence supporting the possibility that Herbert assembled the Williams manuscript (W) for another coterie audience, a small circle of readers at Little Gidding, and that W is an example of what we might now call manuscript or scribal publication .5 W is the sole manuscript over which the poet is thought to have exercised direct control. We have reason to believe that Herbert intended his manuscript for a small, intimate group of readers whom he trusted not to circulate the poems more widely, a chosen audience with whom he sought to "nourish a shared set of values and to enrich personal allegiances."6 Lillian Myers has made a strong case for the structural and visual integrity of the Williams manuscript, an integrity lost, in her assessment, in both the Bodleian manuscript (B) and the 1633 text.7 1 would like to add to this assessment the observation that when one compares W, B, and 1633, one finds evidence that 1633 made use of a manuscript now lost and that W is our best evidence of how that manuscript may have appeared. W gives us evidence of Herbert's probable final intentions for his poems in his social context, evidence not to be found in either the Bodleian Scribal and Print Publication15 manuscript or the 1633 printed text alone, and gives us indications of the initial form in which readers in Herbert's coterie circles are likely to have read his poems. The fact that W includes visual signs not easily or consistently translated into print lends further credence to the idea that Herbert engaged in manuscript publication. Amy M. Charles considered the possibility that Wwas compiled for a printer: "If at one time he [Herbert] intended this volume as a fair copy for the printer, he apparently decided that in this form at that time it was not ready for publication."8 If this understanding of W is accurate, the poet decided against making a fair copy of this corrected, early manuscript, choosing instead to revise and expand the collection before later presenting it for print publication, !^includes a transcription by an amanuensis, corrected in the poet's hand, and preserved by members of the religious community at Little Gidding.9 W binds Herbert's English poems with the only extant copies of the Latin poems Lucus and Passio Discerpta, both neatly written in the poet's hand. Margaret Crum's examination of the manuscript when it was unbound indicated that the manuscript had not been bound more than once.10 Herbert, we may reasonably conjecture, compiled the manuscript as a whole. If Herbert rejected Was "incomplete" and private, he had little reason to preserve it and in fact had reason to reject it in favor of the revised, final copy left to Ferrar.11 If Herbert had not intended to share W with an audience, it might well have been destroyed at his widow's house during the fire that consumed what Walton described as "private Writings."12 Even if members of Little Gidding did not receive the manuscript until after Herbert's death...