Ruth Connolly – författare

This is the first edition for fifty years of one of the greatest of English lyric poets. Volume I concentrates on Herrick's large printed collection, Hesperides, published in 1648, and the product of nearly four decades of writing. The text is based on a collation of all fifty-seven known surviving copies of Hesperides. In addition it includes a much needed new biography, covering the suicide of his father, his apprenticeship as a goldsmith-banker, and his subsequent career in Cambridge, London, and Devon. It provides a survey of Herrick's fluctuating critical reputation-from 'the first in rank and station of English song-writers' to 'trivially charming'-and a detailed reconstruction of the original printing and publishing, just after the first Civil War, of a book which was the first 'Complete Works' to be published by an English poet. There is also a newly ordered sequence of Herrick's letters from Cambridge, his only surviving prose. An extensive commentary on Hesperides is placed in Volume II so that readers can use it side by side with the poems if they wish. The commentary gives new translations of Herrick's hundreds of classical allusions, and quotes his equally numerous Biblical ones, both of them far more extensive, and frequently far more playful, than has hitherto been realised. It also notes many parallels between Herrick's work and that of contemporaries, especially Jonson, Shakespeare, Burton, and John Fletcher, and his habit of echoing or quoting himself, a tendency which reinforces the strong sense of Herrick's persona dominating the collection. Full explanations are given of contemporary personal, political, and cultural references.

Robert Herrick has long been one of the best loved of English lyric poets. Known through the centuries as the author of 'Gather ye rosebuds', he also wrote, as this new edition shows, hundreds of songs, epigrams and longer poems equally worthy of attention. Volume I of this new edition of Herrick's work contains Hesperides, Herrick's only published collection. As well as the commentary on Hesperides, volume II contains the fifty-nine surviving manuscript poems which can be firmly attributed to Herrick, and on which his reputation was based before 1648. It is an ambitious and original attempt to recover for the first time the history of Herrick's corpus of manuscript poetry, and to identify how his poems circulated, and who his copyists and readers were. By establishing the type of sources to which they had access and the nature and quality of the poems these sources contained, and through the histories of transmission that accompany every poem, this volume offers a significant body of evidence that deepens our critical understanding not only of Herrick's poetry, but of the mechanics of scribal publication and the culture of reading, writing and performing poetry and music in early modern England. Where, as is often the case, a musical setting survives this is also printed, along with a commentary on the setting, in a form which is designed to encourage the performance of the lyrics.

'Lords of Wine and Oile' provides a long overdue book-length appraisal of the major seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick. The collection reads his poetry in the context of his literary, musical, political, and religious affiliations and looks at how he both presents and constructs ideals of community through his work. Herrick is best known for his poetry's grace, good humour, and tolerant inclusiveness, characteristics at odds with the publication of his work close to the end of the Civil Wars. This collection places Herrick's poetry in a much wider chronological context beginning with his early career as a manuscript poet in Jacobean London. Contributors present original research to situate Herrick within the coteries of Ben Jonson and Thomas Stanley, uncover the Royalism of Herrick's publishers, and identify the printer of Hesperides. Others examine how the context of publication in 1648 gives a political colouring to Herrick's imitations of Ovid and Anacreon and how Herrick, like Katherine Philips, uses the theme of friendship and the mode of print to construct an idea of the autonomous author. Two essays explore Herrick's musical collaborations with Henry Lawes, the first such work since 1976, and analyse the influence of musical settings and group performance on the interpretation of Herrick's lyrics. The collection also showcases an important debate on the challenges posed by Herrick's work, which consciously rejects competitive anxiety and narrative momentum, for historicist and postmodernist literary criticism. Contributors include Stella Achilleos, Line Cottegnies, John Creaser, Achsah Guibbory, Stacey Jocoy, Leah Marcus, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Nicholas McDowell, Michelle O'Callaghan, Graham Parry, Syrithe Pugh, and Richard Wistreich.