Pièce 4 - Draft of a letter from R. B. McKerrow to Harold Williams

1 folded sheet

3 Adam Street, Adelphi, London, W.C.2.—Confirms that the passage in Nashe queried by McIlwraith is printed correctly in his own edition.

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Transcript

3 Adam Street, Adelphi, London, W.C.2
15 May 1922 {1}

Dear Mr Williams,

Your letter—or rather the enclosure from A. K. McIlwraith—perturbed & puzzled me, in case I had been idiotic enough to drop out ‘of Norwich’ from so well-known a passage as the one quoted. {2} So I went round to the British Museum this morning to make sure.

The facts are as follows:

1) McIlwraith is correct in saying that ‘of Norwich’ does not come in the passage (from Have with you to Saffron Walden) as printed in my ed. of Nashe.

2) This in its line {3} is here quite correct

In both B.M. copies {4} of the original edition of Nashe’s ‘Have with you’, 1596 {5} the reading is “euen as Thomas Deloney the Balletting Silke-weauer hath rime inough for all myracles . .”—no ‘of Norwich’ (and no comma).

Collier’s reprint of the book in 1870 and Grosart’s in 1883–4 agree with the above (but insert a comma, as they modernised the punctuation).

On the other hand the D.N.B. {6} quoting the passage in the article on Deloney inserts the words ‘of Norwich,’ without—so far as I can see—the ghost of a reason.

But evidently Mann {7} didn’t get his quotation from the D.N.B. as his spelling & capitals don’t follow it.

I can only suppose that what happened was something like this: Mann, before writing his Deloney introduction, would naturally read the D.N.B. article & would get the “ballatting† silk-weaver of Norwich’ {8} passage fixed in his mind. Some time later he transcribed the whole passage (without the mention of Norwich) from my text of Nashe. He would then at some later date either when revising the material for the introduction—or when it was in proof—read it through, say to himself ‘Hallo, I’ve left out ‘of Norwich’’ {9}—perhaps rectify the omission by a reference to D.N.B. and insert the words. It might easily be that he felt so sure of the words belonging there that it never occurred to verify their existence in my text.

It’s a queer little point—and of course this doesn’t settle how ‘of Norwich’ came into the D.N.B. article. I expect it started a good deal further back.

Yours very sincerely
R. B. McKerrow

P.S. I return McIlwraith’s letter.

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The paper is embossed with the monogram of Sidgwick & Jackson. This draft letter was formerly inserted between pp. 72 and 73 of McKerrow’s own copy of the Works of Nashe, vol. iii (Adv. c. 25. 74), though the passage discussed in it occurs elsewhere (see below).

{1} The first two figures of the year are printed.

{2} The passage in question, which is quoted by McKerrow slightly later, occurs in Nashe’s Have with You to Saffron Walden (Works of Nashe, iii. 84, lines 11–12). When Mann quoted it in his edition of Deloney’s Works (p. vii), referring to McKerrow’s edition, he added the words ‘of Norwich’. This discrepancy had previously been discussed by Hyder E. Rollins in Modern Language Notes (‘Notes on Thomas Deloney’, xxxii. 121–3), but none of the correspondents appears to have been aware of this. Williams seems to have had a particular interest in Deloney, and since he refers to his works approvingly in his review of Ernest A. Baker’s History of the English Novel: The Elizabethan Age and After (Review of English Studies, vi (1930), 360–2).

{3} ‘This in its line’ above ‘My ed. of Nashe’ struck through. The substituted words are rather less clear than the original ones.

{4} 96.b.16(5) and G.10453. See Works of Nashe, iii. 1–2.

{5}‘‘Have with you’, 1596.’ The original has: ‘‘Have with you’ to Saffron-Walden’, 1596 (in which the passage occurs)’, ‘to Saffron-’ and ‘(in which . . . occurs)’ being struck through. ‘Walden’ ought, of course, to have been struck through as well.

{6} The article was written by J. W. Ebsworth.

{7} F. O. Mann, the editor of Deloney’s Works (1912). The passage in question is quoted on p. vii.

{8} Philip Henderson, in his notes to the Everyman selection of Shorter Elizabethan and Jacobean Novels (1929) (p. xv), also cites this phrase, with a slightly different spelling: ‘the balletting silke-weaver of Northwich’.

{9} Final inverted comma supplied.