Researching Lost Copy-texts

Supervisory Team:  Dr Daniel Starza Smith (King’s) and Dr Rory Loughnane (Kent)

Based at: King’s

KOM Theme: A – Technologies of Knowledge

Early modern literature – the dazzling and enormously influential writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries – has come down to us in a mixture of printed and manuscript sources. Yet these authors’ original manuscript documents, written in their own hand, have mostly been lost. Their work is preserved in transcripts made by others or in printed texts, each at least one step removed from the lost original manuscripts, and in many cases introducing all sorts of error and variety that make it hard for us to see what an author originally wrote. This doctoral project asks what we can learn by investigating these ‘lost’ documents – and what techniques we must employ to investigate them, since they no longer exist.

The project focuses on the prose letters of a major early modern English author, John Donne. Although we have a few copies of letters in Donne’s own hand, most are preserved in early scribal transcripts and early printed volumes. Donne’s personal letters were only collected in 1651, twenty years after his death, in a partial edition that created as many problems as it solved. Frequently lacking dates, addressed incorrectly, and containing glaring internal errors, Donne’s letters present so many textual issues that no-one has successfully edited them even 400 years after his death.

This project asks how we can try to understand what those missing manuscripts might have contained, using the evidence that has survived. Working on this project requires a detailed understanding of early modern handwriting, scribal habits, and networks of textual transmission (e.g. through friendship groups, patronage relationships, professional playhouse activity). The projects engage with research about authorship, attribution studies, and canon creation – that is, attempting to identify an author’s habitual practices of writing and determining what it is that they are most likely to have written. The doctoral project will contribute to research for an ongoing editorial projects, The Correspondence of John Donne, for Oxford University Press. The project will also develop in dialogue with a related project already under way, on the writings of Christopher Marlowe. It is expected that applicants will have a research background in early modern studies, and at least some working knowledge of early modern palaeography and print culture.