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~ Appendix 2 A NOTE ON IDENTIFYING AUTHORIAL REVISIONS AMONG MANUSCRIPT VARIANTS (Excerpted and adapted from Gary A. Stringer, "Discovering Authorial Inten... tion in the Manuscript Sequences of Donne's Holy Sonnets," Renaissance Papers 2002 [Southeastern Renaissance Conference: Camden House, 2003], pp. 127-44. Reprinted by permission.) Finding the needle of authorial revision in the haystack of variation that arose as Donne's poems passed from copyist to copyist in a manuscript culture is a tricky business, and the editor who claims to have succeeded in this task may well be re... garded with skepticism. Indeed, the very idea that such a needle exists is by no means commonplace among Donne scholars, not only because we lack the holograph arti... facts that might provide ocular proof, but also because in one of the more widely known references that he makes to his role as a poet-the letter to Henry Goodyere of 20 December 1614-Donne depicts himself as one who tended to write a poem, present it to the intended audience, and be done with it.I As I have suggested above with respect to the Holy Sonnets, however (and as we have shown with respect to other poems in previous volumes of the Variorum), abundant manuscript evidence counters this portrait of Donne as a neglectful custodian of his own work, revealing instead an artist who very much cared about his poems and who continued to fine... tune or revise individual items, sometimes in multiple stages, even after distributing the original versions. The question is, How do we discriminate such instances of change from those that are merely adventitious? In working with the Donne materials over the years, I have developed a set of four criteria in terms of which to evaluate a given variant's claim to authenticity. The questions to be asked are these: (a) Does the reading represent a "genuine alternative"?2 A positive answer to this question entails the judgment that the variant in question cannot be dis... lIn the letter Donne says he is "brought to a necessity of printing ... [his] Poems" and speaks of needing to retrieve copies of some of them from Goodyere's "old book," averring that it has "cost ... [him] more deligence to seek [his poems] ..., than it did to make them" (Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, ed. M. Thomas Hester [New York: Scholar's Facsimiles, 1977], PP' 196-97). zThe phrase is Gardner's (1958:124), used to describe certain powerfully appealing readings that she is not willing to set down as "revisions." III ~ Appendix 2 A NOTE ON IDENTIFYING AUTHORIAL REVISIONS AMONG MANUSCRIPT VARIANTS (Excerpted and adapted from Gary A. Stringer, "Discovering Authorial Intention in the Manuscript Sequences of Donne's Holy Sonnets," Renaissance Papers 2002 [Southeastern Renaissance Conference: Camden House, 2003], pp. 127-44. Reprinted by permission.) Finding the needle of authorial revision in the haystack of variation that arose as Donne's poems passed from copyist to copyist in a manuscript culture is a tricky business, and the editor who claims to have succeeded in this task may well be regarded with skepticism. Indeed, the very idea that such a needle exists is by no means commonplace among Donne scholars, not only because we lack the holograph artifacts that might provide ocular proof, but also because in one of the more widely known references that he makes to his role as a poet-the letter to Henry Goodyere of 20 December 1614-Donne depicts himself as one who tended to write a poem, present it to the intended audience, and be done with it. I As I have suggested above with respect to the Holy Sonnets, however (and as we have shown with respect to other poems in previous volumes of the Variorum), abundant manuscript evidence counters this portrait of Donne as a neglectful custodian of his own work, revealing instead an artist who very much cared about his poems and who continued to finetune or revise individual items, sometimes in multiple stages, even after distributing the original versions. The question is, How do we discriminate such instances of change from those that are merely adventitious? In working with the Donne materials over the years, I have developed a set of four criteria in terms of which to evaluate a given variant's claim to authenticity. The questions to be asked are these: (a) Does the reading represent a "genuine alternative"?2 A positive answer to this question entails the judgment that the variant in question...

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