Prompter and Puppet: Hervey's Collected Verse

This handsome volume is a fitting memorial to its principal editor Bill Overton, who died in 2012. Overton's work has been completed lovingly by Elaine Hobby and selflessly by James McLaverty, whose names do not so much as appear on the front cover. McLaverty is sole editor of the two most substantial (and hitherto unpublished) texts in the collection, Hervey's verse translation of part of Fénelon's Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699) and his unperformed verse tragedy "Agrippina." It is clear that in completing Overton's work, McLaverty and Hobby have tried to honor his editorial principles, realizing the originating editor's personality and enthusiasm wherever possible.

The labor involved in collecting the more than one hundred poems and poetic fragments as are amassed here must be apparent to every reader. Editorial predicaments occasioned by attribution, choice of copy-text, emendation of that copy-text for publication, and contextualizing annotation, are formidable, and the level of achievement here is impressive. Overton (one presumes, given his expertise in generic discrimination) decided to arrange the pieces not chronologically but according to genre: epistles, satires, elegies and epitaphs, epigrams, occasional verse, shorter translations, the two major works already mentioned, embedded original verse, and verses in Latin and French. Inevitably the categories sometimes overlap—"satires" and "satirical epistles" are not always easy to distinguish—and the reading experience is, in terms of Hervey's biography, more an eddy than a progress. Nevertheless, the arrangement is robust: it offers the reader a map of Hervey's output, an oeuvre within which it would be otherwise difficult to get one's bearings.

One category surprisingly not deployed is that of "poems of doubtful attribution." Although the attribution scholarship is full and conscientious, many items are difficult to ascribe to Hervey, while others cannot be ascribed to him alone. Poem 12, "An Epistle to a Lady," might serve to illustrate the volume's editorial protocols in their strengths and their singularities. This poem of seventy-two lines is printed from a manuscript found in a volume of Portland Papers archived at Longleat, but emended from two printed sources: the London Magazine for September 1733 and the 1748 edition of Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands. Typically of the volume, the editors here have preferred a manuscript copy-text, repairing its capitalization and punctuation from the print witnesses, importing only one substantive change from them. This editorial method is remarkably pragmatic, designed to provide the reader with what might be the best possible reading experience keeping contemporary and modern expectations in mind. It is not dominated by any oppressive theory or rationale of copy-text, but scholarly integrity is preserved by an exhaustive list of emendations and historical collations occupying some 150 pages. This is done "in order to enable readers to reconstruct the source manuscript" (620). Scholarly editions are clearly obliged to provide an apparatus for recording variants, even if it is difficult to conceive of readers to whom such reconstruction would be vital in the case of manuscript poems by Hervey.

Given that no source, manuscript or printed, identifies the poem as Hervey's, the case for authorship is not strong, being primarily internal and stylistic. Here, such formulations as "the forceful manner of its expression" (84) do not inspire confidence. Figures like antithesis, chiasmus, and asyndeton, and features such as the occasional alexandrine and triplet are so constitutive of period couplet verse that they cannot confidently be used to identify individual authorship. Having glanced at publishing activity in poetry around 1730, I share the editors' difficulty in thinking of "another poet . . . who could have produced [this epistle]" (85), another poet for whom the subject matter is a better fit. Nevertheless, I would have preferred to see it positioned, alongside several other poems in the volume, in a section of doubtful attributions.

Proceeding to the detailed editing of the poem, the reader finds that annotation is recorded not under the...