Introduction xii

This practice combines practical and scholarly demands. For an edition of libels, it is by no means clear that the benefits of a “scholarly” edition would outweigh the extraordinary costs it would demand. Since many libels may be identified in over twenty different sources, the task of transcribing and comparing all these sources for all the poems identified for this edition would be immense. More importantly, since libels were typically circulated anonymously, and since there is very little evidence of readers concerning themselves with variant texts and questions of authorship, the argument that one version of a poem will necessarily be “better” than another is tenuous. Distinctions between “good” and “bad” versions would inevitably become subjective, while an editorial project that produced conflated texts from different versions would have the dubious consequence of creating poems that nobody in early modern England actually read. Instead, in its presentation of each poem this edition mirrors the activity of contemporary readers, by intervening in manuscript culture at one particular and identifiable moment. The edition follows those readers in not trying to differentiate between an original and an altered version, and seeks only to identify one legible, clear and coherent source.

The physical presentation of texts similarly balances demands of textual scholarship and legibility. Consequently, the selected manuscript source for any one poem is reproduced exactly—including original spelling, punctuation, and even apparent scribal errors—except for two concessions to the modern reader. Firstly, while the seventeenth-century writer tended to follow the Roman alphabet, using interchangeably “i” and “j” and also “u” and “v”, here these letters have been regularized in accordance with modern usage. Since there are no instances in which the process of regularization produces ambiguities, or asserts an editor’s interpretation of a text in the face of uncertainty, there can be few arguments against this practice, especially when one considers the enhanced clarity of the regularized text. Secondly, standard scribal abbreviations and contractions are routinely expanded. Hence, while readers of early modern manuscripts are familiar with annotations that indicate, for example, an extra letter or syllable, this edition simply adds those letters and syllables without comment. Scribes are almost always clear and consistent in their practice, which is designed merely to save on labour. Given the aims of this edition, there is no good reason either to replicate their practice, or to alert readers every time an obvious abbreviation is used.