John Donne's 1622 Gunpowder Plot Sermon: A Parallel Text Edition ed. by Jeanne Shami (review)

HUMANITIES 203 retreated from its complexity into production gimmicks - gangsters, punk rock, insects crawling over stones - that bury the actors in spectacle and limit the meaning of the play. The Duchess ofMalfi has a much longer stage history, and has fared better in the twentieth century. It is, as Carnegie notes, no coincidence that the date of the breakthrough production (at the Haymarket in London) was 1945: the death camps had just been opened, and Webster's horrors acquired a new seriousness. This edition offers a clear, responsible text, a judicious presentation of the critical issues, and a suggestive treatment of the plays' theatrical life. It is an important contribution to Webster studies, and (particularly in the richness of its commentary) a model for other editions to follow. (ALEXANDER LEGGATT) Jeanne Shami, editor. John Donne's 1622 Gunpowder Plot Sermon: A Parallel Text Edition Duquesne University Press. Duquesne Studies. Language and Literature Series. Vol~e 22. xii, 200. $45.00 cloth, $21.50 paper In December of 1992, Jeanne Shami, associate professor of English at the University of Regina and one of the leading authorities on the sennons of Jolm Donne, identified British Library MS Royal 17.B.XX - previously catalogued as an anonymous work - as a scribal copy of Donne's 1622 Gunpowder Plot sermon corrected in Donne's own hand. Since only 16 ' contemporaneous manuscripts of Donne's extant 160 sermons are known to exist, and none of these are in his hand, Shami's discovery is of great significance to Donne studies. This newly identified 'manuscript of the Gunpowder Plot sermon provides the most immediate record of what Donne actually preached in November of 1622, it gives us insight into the way in which he produced his texts, and it allows us to see clearly the extent and nature of the revisions that he made later in the decade to prepare the sermon for eventual publication (in the posthumously issued Fifty Sermons of1649).Moreover, the political events that inform the sermon make Shami's discovery important to political and religious historians as well as to literary critics. Earlier in 1622, to mollify the Spanish in furtherance of the proposed' rnatch between Prince'Charles and the Infanta, King James had relaxed the enforcement of laws against the practice of Roman Catholicism, an act tmpopu1ar with many Englishmen, who saw Spain as the chief enemy to Protestantism and the Jacobean court as a nursery of Roman Catholicism. To forestall criticism from the pulpit, the king issued Directions to Preachers, in which he ordered that no discussion of his policies be included in sermons and, specifically, no attacks be made on Roman Catholicism. Dorme preached a famous sermon defending the king's Directions on 15 204 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 September 1622, and the king had liked it so well that he recommended that it be pr:inted. It is against this background that DOlU1e preached his Gunpowder Plot sermon on 5 November of the same year. The annual sermons of thanksgiving for the king's deliverance from the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 had often been used to attack Roman Catholicism (and sometimes the king's policies), and James probably wished to see Donne's sermon - about which he had received reports - in order to satisfy himself that the newly appointed dean of St Paul's was adhering closely to the prohibitions laid out in the Directions. Shami argues persuasively that the fair scribal copy of Donne's Gunpowder Plot sermon, corrected in his own hand, was made at the king's order, hence its preservation among the Royal manuscripts collection in the British Library. It is noteworthy that James did not recommend that the Gunpowder Plot sermon be printed, which may indicate his less than enthusiastic reception of it. To facilitate the comparison of the original version of the Gunpowder Plot sermon with the revised version eventually published in 1649 (the copy-text followed by George Potter and Evelyn Simpson in The Sermons of John Donne 4:235-63), Shami presents a photographic facsimile ofRoyal MS 17.B.XX with each page faced by a documentary transcription to which are footnoted the verbal variants and additions made by Dorme...