AN ANALYSIS OF A NOTEBOOK OF JAMES ORCHARD HALLIWELL-PHILLIPPS THE SONNETS AND SHORTER POEMS by ELIZABETH PATRICIA PRACY A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts of The University of Birmingham for the degree of MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY The Shakespeare Institute Faculty of Arts The University of Birmingham March 1999 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. O t:O SYNOPSIS The thesis starts with an Introduction which explains that the subject of the work is an analysis of the Notebook of J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps dealing with the Sonnets and shorter poems of Shakespeare owned by the Shakespeare Centre Library, Stratford-upon- Avon. This is followed by an explanation of the material and methods used to examine the pages of the Notebook and a brief account of Halliwell-Phillipps and his collections as well as a description of his work on the life and background of Shakespeare. Each page of the Notebook is then dealt with in order and outlined, together with a photocopy of Halliwell-Phillipps1 entry. Entries are identified where possible, with an explanation and description of the work referred to. This is followed by a recognition and discussion of the word or phrase of the parallel noticed in the Shakespearean sonnet or poem, with a view to assessing the value of the comparison. Finally, there is a summary of the varying critical opinions of the analogies and other aspects of the poems by editors and commentators of Shakespeare, from Malone and Boswell to the present. Total number of words, 53, 000 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am most grateful to Mr. Roger Pringle, the Director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon Avon, for permission to reproduce the microfiches made from a volume of the Halliwell-Phillipps notebooks on Shakespeare's Sonnets and shorter Poems. In addition, my grateful thanks to the staff of the Library of the Birthplace Trust and to Jim Shaw and Kate Welch of the Library of the Shakespeare Institute for their unfailing help and kindness. E. P. P. CONTENTS 1. Synopsis 2. Acknowledgements 3. Table of Contents 4. References and Abbreviations 5. Introduction 6. Text and commentary 7. Bibliography REFERENCES AND ABBREVIATIONS Shakespeare's text, unless otherwise noted, is from The Complete Works (Wells and Taylor). Page numbers given in the text refer to the pages of the notebook Citation is by the Author-Date System. No individual references are given for works cited in A New Variorum edition of the The Sonnets (1944) or The Poems (1938), edited by H. E. Rollins. No author date references are given for citations in the following editions of Shakespeare which have been used repeatedly throughout: editions of the Sonnets and where it is included, A Lover's Complaint, edited by Seymour-Smith (1963) Ingram and Redpath (1964), Booth (1977), Kerrigan (1986), and Blakemore Evans (1996); editions of A Lover's Complaint, The Passionate Pilgrim, and The Phoenix and Turtle edited by Prince (1960), Evans (1989) and Roe (1992). References to editions of the Sonnets and Poems are not paginated when editorial comments are in the direct context of a line or lines of the textual commentary; when a comment appears in a Preface or an Appendix the necessary pagination is referred. It is regretted that the photo-copies taken from the microfiches made from the notebook are of poor quality. Abbreviations used. OED The Oxford English Dictionary DNB The Dictionary of National Biography STC A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland and of English Bookd Printed Abroad 1475-1640 N&Q Notes and Queries SBT Shakespeare Birthplace Trust INTRODUCTION The Notebooks The notebook on the Sonnets, A Lover's Complaint, The Passionate Pilgrim and The Phoenix and Turtle which is the subject of this thesis are taken from the collection of the bound notebooks of James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (1820-1889) that are in the Library of the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford-upon-Avon. There are 125 volumes covering all Shakespeare's plays, the two long poems and the Sonnets, together with three short poems. Plays which were collaborations, or at the time considered doubtful or unacknowledged to be Shakespeare's, are excluded. The number of volumes on each play varies from one to nine, except that there are twelve on Hamlet. Halliwell-Phillipps offered the volumes to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in 1872, as: 'unpublished annotations on the text of Shakespeare... by many thousands of authors from old black letter books as well as numerous engravings.' (SET TR2 1|1). The collection of between 200 and 300 volumes was accepted, and presented with the proviso that none were to be consulted during the donor's life time without his permission. The collection was to belong to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust absolutely on his death. The first volume on each play or poem is prefaced by a short foreword declaring the notes to be supplementary to those in the large edition of Halliwell-Phillipps' Works of Shakespeare (1853-1865). They are described in the Library catalogue as 'mounted scraps from sixteenth century and later books and manuscripts or extracts copied from the same to illustrate words and phrases in the plays and poems of Shakespeare'. The notes are not dated, but were probably collected from the years of Halliwell-Phillipps' researches for his edition of the Works (1853-65) until 1872. There are 123 entries in the volume on the Sonnets, twenty-four of which have been entered on verso pages. Each page has been numbered in the corner, generally at the top of the entry, and has been inscribed 'Sonnets', 'Poems', 'Sonnets & L. C.' or 'P.P.' as appropriate. The entries are printed extracts or handwritten and have been taken from a variety of writing in which Halliwell-Phillipps noticed a thought, a word or some form of expression he found in any way interesting or fruitful by being comparable, parallel, or analogous to passages in the Sonnets or poems. The printed excerpts have been ruthlessly removed from books which passed through his possession, roughly cut and pasted on the page. Most of the twenty-four verso pages were probably late additions and have been entered in handwriting; they seem to be written by Halliwell-Phillipps, but a number are printed extracts taken from The English Parnassus of 1677. The verso pages concerned with The Phoenix and Turtle belong to a group which appear to be signed by an unknown 'MS.Elwin1, or the 'M.S.' may refer to a manuscript named 'Elwin', but this has proved impossible to establish. The pages have been photographed on to a microfiche and the method of procedure has been to make photostat copies of the entries and put them in order under each page number and then to attempt to verify, or identify, each entry. Halliwell-Phillipps wrote a large number of notes and memoranda during a life-time of collecting materials relating to his work on the life and edited Works of Shakespeare. The notes for this notebook contain allusions to plays, prose, poetry, commentaries, dictionaries, glossaries, jest books and miscellaneous pieces from numberless writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries extending back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, on a wide variety of subjects. For the purposes of this thesis, an attempt was made to identify or verify the source of each entry, with the author of the work quoted and the edition cited, in order to relate the entries to the poem referred to. This was often difficult, as the information given in the notebook is frequently incomplete. It was necessary to consult a number of dictionaries, glossaries and catalogues. Searches included examinations of the catalogues of the British Library and the Bodleian Library, visits to the British Library, Birmingham Central Library, the library of the University of Edinburgh, the library of the Shakespeare Centre, the Shakespeare Institute and the Records Office of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon. Early material was traced through the catalogues and viewed on microfilm. Following identification in order to assess the significance of similarities noted, it was important to evaluate other editors of Shakespeare, from the earlier writings of the first commentators to modern critical opinion. Care has been taken to note if the parallel has been observed elsewhere, before or after Halliwell-Phillipps, whether the analogy was unique or important, or the connection tenuous with a loose general affinity. It has also been necessary to distinguish between the thoughts or parallels which have been taken from Shakespeare or other writers and those ideas which were commonplaces at the period. Some analogies occur in different contexts and some with different emphases. Few of the similarities or ideas in the notebook which have not already been commented on by Malone or Boswell, appear in the edited Works. Many of the entries seem to be simply reminders and bring no further illumination to the word or phrase in the related passage, but seem to have been hastily noted as an instant recognition or as an echoing thought to be referred to afterwards and dealt with, if appropriate. The Sonnets were chosen as the subject of this work as the lyric beauty of many of the poems appealed particularly and invited further study.