Pope and Lady Mary

180 PATRICIA BRUCKMANN controversies surrounding his Phedre or his appointment as royal historiographer , his withdrawal from the theatre, his implication in the scandal of the death of the actress Du Pare, his friendship with Boileau, his financial affairs, or his last illness. In reading the thousands of extracts presented in this admirably organized volume one is filled with a deep sense of gratitude to the unselfish scholar who has thus placed at the disposal of all readers of Racine the documentation he himself unearthed and utilized in his own studies. Unfortunately, one cannot harbour the same feelings towards whoever prepared the Index nom;lI"'" of the Corpus, which fails to give ready access to the riches of the magnificent volume it concludes. Many surnames are entered without first names, page references are omitted or inaccurate, the alphabetical order is frequently defective, and cTOss-references are almost non-existent. Most irritating of all, there is no index by title of Racine's twelve plays, which makes the assembling of material about anyone of them a laborious search through dozens or hundreds of pages. Despite the inadequacy of its index, however, the Nouveau Corpus racinianu1n is a worthy monument to the scholarly career of ifs compiler, and an indispensable reference work, which the student of Racine or of his principal contemporaries will have occasion to consult almost daily. Pope and Lady Mary PATRICIA BRUCKMANN Court Eclogs Written in the Year, 1716. Alexander Pope's Autograph Manuscript of Poems by Lady Wortley MO tllagu Edited by Robert Halsband New York: New York Public Library '977. 69. 525.00 Robert Halsband's limited edition of Pope's manuscript of Lady Mary's Court Eclogs, a little disappointing in its cover, is a reminder of a relationship that was mOTe than romantic posing. Pope's beautifully clear script, needing, as Halsband observes, no transcription, faces a transcription from the Harrowby manuscript of Lady Mary's fair copy of these poems. As Isobel Grundy's notes indicate (in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Essays and Poems, edited by Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy, Oxford, 1977), these verses often echo and build their effects upon Pope's early poetry, not just the Pastorals, but also An Essay on Criticism, the Iliad, The Rape of the Lock, the Eloisa. The poet's own hand, copying and adding, as for his own Pastorals, occasional notes to Virgil, makes this relation attractively vivid. By the time that Lady Mary wrote her own eclogues, Pope and Gay were experienced both in formal pastoral and in the mock or satirical kind we see in the burlesque of the Shepherd's Week and Guardian 40 or those pastoral notes, mock POPE AND LADY MARY 181 and elegiacally serious, that we find in The Rape of the Lock, the beginning of whose second canto, itself a pointed echo of lines in the Iliad, is recalled at the opening of the Monday poem, 'Roxana, Or the Drawing-room.' The world of the five poems, from the prude turned from opera to 'run to filthy Plays' under pressures for a place at Court, to the Witwouds who chatter from light flirtation to libertine attack, to the lament of Flavia for beauty destroyed by smallpox, is far from the Chaucerian frolic of Gay's account of a week in the country. The female gamesters of 'The Bassette Table' fit more obviously into Moral Essays II than into the Ombre canto of The Rape, and even the deliberately trivialized conclusion of the 'Tete-a-THe,' with a semi-Swiftian Strephon creeping down a staircase, only plays against a central account of love that sounds at times not only like Pope's centre pastorals, but also like the Ovidian heights of Eloisa. This kind of book has no obligation to elaborate notes, especially when an edition was going forward simultaneously with apparatus of that kind. But a slightly denser introduction would have been useful, especially for a reader who does not have Essays and Poems at his elbow, for an account, say, of those sources not hinted at by Pope's Virgilian notes. Because even the Essays and Poems does not (and perhaps need not) give a larger discussion of...