A "fitter" Text of John Donne's "The Good Morrow"
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Date
2002-12-03
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Abstract
The purpose of this paper has been to explain the process by which I established the text of John Donne's "The Good Morrow." In order to construct the text I examined the forty manuscripts and seven seventeenth-century editions that contain part or all of the poem, and I transcribed the poem from each source. Then I collated the transcriptions using a computer software program called the Donne Variorum Collation Program. I filiated the manuscripts based on verbal variants and, through investigation and comparison, created a schema of the poem's transmissional history. I deduced that Donne made minor revisions to the original "The Good Morrow," and I conservatively emended the version of "The Good Morrow" in the Dolau Cothi manuscript, the closest manuscript to Donne's Lost Revised Holograph, and presented that copy-text for "The Good Morrow." I presented a modernized version of the text also. In addition to a detailed explanation of this process, I also included a complete listing of variants, the transmissional schema of the poem, and an explanation of how this work fits into the context of contemporary Donne studies and modern editorial practices.
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Keywords
Renaissance, editing, manuscript, John Donne
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Degree
MA
Discipline
English
