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“Lost,” “Authorized,” and “Pirated” Editions of John Denham's Coopers Hill
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Upon the basis of evidence never sufficiently examined, a number of statements concerning the seventeenth-century publication history of John Denham's Coopers Hill have acquired wide and authoritative circulation, and all the circumstantiality of established fact. Three chief of these statements, closely interrelated, are to be the subject of this discussion. The first of these is that all the editions of Coopers Hill prior to that of 1655 are “piracies.” The second, a corollary to the first, is that the edition of 1655 constitutes the “first authorized edition” of the poem. The third, somewhat independent of the other two, is to the effect that two editions of the poem—both “pirated”—have certainly been lost. Implicit in evidence equally cogent, however, is the assumption of a third lost edition, the authorization of which is never discussed. The purpose of this investigation is to scrutinize the evidence upon which these commonplace assertions are based, to show how far each is from being demonstrably true, and to advance arguments to prove that all three are false.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1964
References
1 For varying permutations of these three statements see, e.g., CBEL, i, 458: “Coopers Hill. 1642; 1643; 1650; 1655 (rev., 1st authorized edn); 1709”; Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century 1600–1660 (New York, 1945), p. 522: “the piratical first edition of Coopers Hill (1642) was reissued four times before the first authorized and enlarged text of 1655” (this implies two lost editions; the text of 1655 is not “enlarged” but exactly the same length—354 lines—as the earlier editions); and T. H. Banks, Jr., ed., The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham (New Haven, 1928), passim. Both CBEL and Bush cite Banks as the standard edition; Banks in his bibliography of editions of Coopers Hill refrains from labeling (Poetical Works, p. 353), but is otherwise free with the terms “lost,” “pirated,” and “authorized,” without, however, quite explaining his basis. The Wing Short Title Catalogue lists the editions of 1642,1643,1650, and 1655 (D993, 994, 995, 996), but labels the last the “sixth,” so implying two lost.
2 Even Banks, who might have been expected to print this note for its testimonial value, reproduces (inaccurately) only nine words: “all but meer repititions of the same false transcript,” and quotes indirectly another five (Poetical Works, p. 50; see fn. 7 below).
3 Coopers Hill. . . Now Printed from a perfect Copy (London, 1655), sig. A2r-A2v.
4 A fully-detailed analysis of J. B.'s note will be contained in a multiple-text edition of Coopers Hill now in preparation by the present writer.
5 A Register and Chronicle, p. 299. (This work was republished with the same text and pagination as An Historical Register and Chronicle of English Affairs [1745].) Banks cites this “lost” edition of Coopers Hill, with the reference to Kennet, in his bibliography (Poetical Works, p. 353).
6 This description is in fact a transcript of the listing of this edition in the British Museum Catalogue, modified to conform more closely to the typography of the actual title-page.
7 Banks reports that J. B. “states that there have been five previous impressions” (Poetical Works, p. 50). The word previous is of course Banks's own interpolation. By the same sort of license the words “in all” or “altogether” might have been inserted, to yield just the contrary sense.
8 W. W. Greg, in A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (London, 1959), iv, xcix, n., speaks of a presentation copy by Denham to William Rogers of the Poems and Translations (1668), but fails to indicate the whereabouts of that copy.
9 Mistranscribed in Banks's apparatus as “He, who needs not that Embleme which we paint,” (Poetical Works, p. 70).
10 The false catchword is repeated in the Poems and Translations editions of 1671 and 1684, to disappear only with the new page setting of 1703.
11 The point at which quantitative difference becomes qualitative will remain disputable, but the IBM 7090 computer used at U.C.L.A. to collate the texts of Dryden, when it fails to find correspondence among exemplars, searches 10 lines in either direction in the base text to be sure it has not come upon an omission, insertion, or transposition of lines (Vinton A. Dearing, Methods of Textual Editing, Los Angeles, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1962, p. 19). Such a machine, set to collating the “A” with J. B.'s “B” text of Coopers Hill, would be unable to distinguish between the 110 really incomparable lines of each text and 142 out of the 196 lines really “substantially identical,” for those 142 lines occur in groups from 12 to 36 lines apart in relative position between the respective texts. Since computers probably cannot recognize many “directly comparable,” verbally distinct lines, most of the 48 I have so classed would also swell to almost 300 out of 354 the total of lines for which the IBM 7090, unless suitably adjusted, presumably would report non-correspondence between the two texts of Coopers Hill.
12 The three MSS., though closely akin to the “A” text, embody two separate drafts of the poem; the forthcoming edition of Coopers Hill will demonstrate that both of these drafts antedate that printed in 1642, and so, by J. B.'s thesis, would have to represent still further “false transcription.”
Since this article went to press, two further Coopers Hill MSS. have come to my attention. Both embody the second pre-1642 draft, and confirm in every detail the testimony of the previously-known MSS.
13 On 6 August 1642 Thomas Walkeley entered in the Stationers' Register “two bookes vizt, A Tragedy called, The Sophy & a Poem called Coopers Hill, both of them by Mr John Denham ...” (This entry, incidentally, shows that Walkeley knew the author's name of both works, although each was published without ascription.) George Thomason's copy of Coopers Hill, now in the British Museum, is marked “Aug. 5.” Thomason is sometimes a few days off on his datings; the two dates, however, are sufficiently close together.
14 It is interesting that no charge of piracy has been levelled against Walkeley's 1642 edition of The Sophy, which stands in exactly the same position as Coopers Hill—the 1668 version also shows alterations from the first edition. The reason for its impunity of course, is that no J. B. ever attacked it.
15 Journals of the House of Commons, iii, 80 (11 May 1643).
16 Details of Denham's actions are provided by, aside from Aubrey and Wood, John Rushworth, Historical Collections of private passages of State: The Third Part (London, 1692), ii, 82; by John Vicars, Jehovah-Jirah (1642), p. 223; by Clarendon, History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (Oxford, 1707), ii, i, 83; and by Journals of the Commons, ii, 964 (9 February 1642/3). See also Victoria History of the County of Surrey, i (London, 1902), 406–410, ii (London, 1905), 603–604, and Henry Elliott Malden, “The Civil War in Surrey, 1642,” Surrey Archaeological Collections, xxii (1909), 106–114.
17 The “common Prisoners” taken at Farnham were released
on 3 December, others committed to Lambeth House on 23 December (Journals of Commons, II, 879, 904). No names are mentioned. Aubrey and Wood place the appearance of Coopers Hill (and Denham) at Oxford “after Edghill Fight” (23 October 1642)—but cannot mean immediately. Aubrey at the time was a gentleman-commoner at Trinity (Denham's old college), Wood a scholar at New-College school; each acquired a copy of Coopers Hill, both of which are now in the Bodleian. The Oxonian illusion that 1643 was the first edition of the poem, fostered by the Brief Lives and the Athenae, persisted through the eighteenth century. Pope and Spence used a copy of 1643 for their analysis of the revisions, and Johnson repeats the error. Watt's Bibliotheca Britannica (1824) is perhaps the first authority to recognize 1642 correctly as the first edition.
The evidence for the Oxford publication date can only be sketched here—so many experts have helped me toward a solution of the problem that it would be improper to discuss the matter in detail without full acknowledgments. In brief: nine copies of 1643 are known to survive—eight on a very poor grade of probably English-made paper (what Aubrey calls “a sort of browne paper, for then they could gett no better”), one on a very good grade of Norman pot. The “good” copy belonged to Thomas Barlow. The same “bad” paper can be found in several Oxford books of 1643; exactly the same “good” paper has not yet been found. A parallel situation, however, appears in Peter Heylyn's Theeves, Theeves (April 1643), of which all surviving copies but one are on the bad paper. A single copy on a good pot likewise belonged to Barlow. Coopers Hill and Theeves, Theeves also coincide in title-page ornament and lettering of the imprint. The ornament is rare, although it does occur on books issued in February and July; but the lettering of the imprint of Coopers Hill and Theeves, Theeves is exactly alike, suggesting both were printed from the same setting of type.
18 According to Falconer Madan (“The Oxford Press, 1650–75,” The Library, vi, 1925, 113–47), the two printers at Oxford (Henry Hall and Leonard Litchfield) had until 1655 no more than a single press each. During the prewar decade 1631–40 the average output of these presses had been only 25½ pieces annually; the war expanded their product to hundreds of titles.
19 Something of the strain on the Oxford press during the war is indicated by Madan's figures for the number of Oxford imprints which were actually produced by royalist printers in London: “Out of 191 Oxford imprints in 1642, no less than 58 are London counterfeits; in 1643, 41 out of 238; and in 1644, 24 out of 145” (Oxford Books, ii,x–xi). Some of these are duplicates, issued both at Oxford and London; the Oxford numbers may be compared with the 25 or 26 titles per annum before the war. The paper shortage at Oxford grew so acute that Mercurius Aulicus, the royalist newssheet, was obliged to fake sequence-numbers and folio-signatures to conceal the fact that some numbers could not be issued for want of paper. The situation was aggravated by a Parliamentary economic blockade, exemplified by an Order of Commons, 16 January 1642/3, prohibiting “Carriers, Waggoners, Carts or Waggons, or Horses laden ... to go from hence or elsewhere to Oxford.” (Rushworth, Historical Collections, 1692, ii,i,118).
20 Madan, Oxford Books (Oxford, 1912), ii,326.
21 Another tenuous, but suggestive, connection between the Oxford edition and Denham's “authorization” is the spelling idiosyncrasy of “bloud” and “floud.” Although these are not uncommon seventeenth-century spellings, they occur in Coopers Hill only in the Oxford edition and the authorized edition of 1668. “Bloud” occurs four times in the Oxford edition, five times in 1668; “Floud” occurs twice in each. Yet 1642, 1650, and J. B.'s edition of 1655 agree on “blood” and “flood.”
22 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series: Commonwealth and Protectorate, viii,204.
23 Joshua Poole's English Parnassus (1657) contains twelve quotations from Coopers Hill, demonstrably from the “A” text, and Robert Fage's St. Leonard's Hill (1666)—a close imitation of Coopers Hill—specifically imitates the “A” text.
24 In fact, as the forthcoming edition of the poem will show, as many as five distinct drafts or recensions of Coopers Hill may be distinguished. The discrimination between “A” and “B” texts remains nonetheless fundamental.