The Challenges of Editing Donne and Herbert

This article argues the case for single-author editions of the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert. It draws on hands-on editorial experience: Richard Todd is Assistant Textual Editor to the multi-volume Donne Variorum project and Helen Wilcox has edited the recent Cambridge Herbert edition. These two case studies contrast dramatically in that Donne’s poetry in manuscript survives today in a terminal moraine of multiple nonholograph manuscript witnesses, whereas Herbert’s manuscript and print history appears on the surface considerably more straightforward. Yet both corpora, raising different and provocative issues concerning the textual culture of the period, are presented so as to argue strongly the case for the single-author edition in the world of poetic miscellany, scribal community, and creative interaction in both manuscript and print.