Epigrams [manuscript], 1605.

Epigrams [manuscript], 1605.

1 v. : ill. (watercolor).

Consists of a fair copy of 406 epigrams in an italic scribal hand (probably Harington's "servant," the emblematist, Thomas Combe) with Harington's autograph revisions and punctuation in a darker ink. Consists of four "books," each of a hundred epigrams.

Modelled on the frame of Sir Thomas More's Epigrammata (1518), it includes a dedicatory epigram to James VI, indicating that another copy of the collection had been given to the King in January, 1602/3. At the end are two emblems: a watercolor of a lantern, described in "A newyeares guift to the King's Majesty of Scotland Anno 1602" (leaf 256), and a continental engraving of the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary, accompanied by "Fifteen several disicks" in Latin and English on each decade (leaves 260-263). Concludes with three elegies: gratulatory elegies to King James and to Queen Anne; and the author's "farewell to his Muse," retropectively dated 14 April 1603 (leaves 264-266).

Prepared for presentation to Henry, Prince of Wales, and dated in Harington's autograph "June 19, 1605" (James I's birthday). Other than the dedication there are no other marks of royal ownership.

Harington's autograph revision of the numbers brings the order of the poems in line with a companion manuscript, British Library Add. MS 12049, which Harington seems to have used as a draft, possibly as early as 1600, and continued to revised after 1605. The numerical revisions highlight the structure of forty theological poems, one on every "tenth Stanze" (III.94), which underpins the whole collection.

[4], 257, 256-266 p.

Poems listed in Folger index of first lines.

Seventeen of the poems printed in Alcilia in 1613 (STC 4275); 116 (with some false divisions and double numbering) printed by John Budge in 1615 (STC 12775) and 346 epigrams in four completely re-shuffled books in 1618 (STC 12776). The 1618 edition was followed by Budge in 1625 (STC 12777), George Miller in 1633 (STC 12778), bound with Orlando Furioso, 3rd ed., 1634 (STC 748), and by Norman Egbert McClure in 1930. Harington's original and deliberate structure, order, word-play and spelling are not represented in these editions. Kilroy's edition (2009) used Folger MS V.a.249 as copy text, restoring order and adding three politically subversive poems omitted from Book I (I, 86, 87 and 93), but included in British Library Add. MS 12049.

Paper: first eleven quires were manufactured by Hans Dürr (owned Upper Schliefe mill in St. Albantal, Basel, 1604-1635); last six quires came from the mill of Nicholas Lebé, Troyes.

Epigrams of Sir John Harington / [introduced and edited by] Gerard Kilroy. Aldershot, Hants, England ; Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2009.
"The pen's excellencie" : treasures from the manuscript collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library / compiled and edited by Heather Wolfe. Seattle : Distributed by University of Washington Press, 2002, p. 106.
Several epigrams printed for the first time in English Literary Renaissance, 14 (1984), 148. See also, Studies in Bibliography, 40 (1987), 101.

Bound, like Cambridge University Library Adv. b.8.1 (a presentation copy of 52 of the epigrams to Harington's wife and mother-in-law), by McDurnan Gospels Bindery (possibly John Bateman).

Washington, D.C., Folger Shakespeare Library, 2004. Voices for Tolerance in an Age of Persecution (catalog entry 74)
Washington, D.C., Folger Shakespeare Library, 2001-2002. The Reader Revealed (catalog entry 71)

Ricci, S. de. Census of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the United States and Canada (suppl.), 4455

Great Britain -- England.

V.a.249

4455