Donne's Letters to Severall Persons of Honour

In a former life, or so it now seems, I was a fairly knowledgeable scholar of seventeenth-century English prose, especially the prose works of John Donne. Having left that life behind, after first abandoning Donne for Montaigne, and finally going off in various other directions, I now find myself returning with fresher eyes to something I left much less than half finished: a brief essay on Donne as a published author. What I've always found fascinating about Donne was that he left so much writing behind, not only the poetry, but also volumes of prose, including sermons, essays, and letters, and yet published very little in his own lifetime.

One of my friends recently pointed out a wonderful source for Donne scholarship on the Donne Variorum site, where they have put up a scan of an early (1654) printed edition of Donne's Letters to Severall Persons of Honour. This particular book was once owned by I.A. Shapiro, the legendary Donne scholar and editor. It's an amazing volume, worth hours of browsing, since it includes Shapiro's marginalia and interleaved notes on Donne's letters and the history of that particular book itself.

This serendipitous discovery, and the fact I've just finished a long biography of Patricia Highsmith, have determined me to make a detour in my reading of recent biographies of twentieth-century authors and return for a bit to re-read some of Donne's biographical writings: particularly his letters and his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. I may even pick up my abandoned effort to come to terms, if only for myself, with Donne as published author, especially his interest in getting some of his works in print.

Of course, one reason we have so much of Donne in early print editions is not that he saw very much of his own work through the presses. It is rather that his son saw an opportunity to raise some cash by publishing his famous father's poems and sermons and letters. Thus we have an early example of offspring getting a greater return on an author's work than the author himself.