William Wycherley

Autograph Literary Manuscripts

Like most Restoration dramatists, William Wycherley has left no original manuscripts of any of his compositions. One notable — and little-known — literary autograph by him does survive, however, in the form of an annotated presentation exemplum of his somewhat bawdy poem Hero and Leander in Burlesque, written when he was a law student in the Middle Temple. For some reason, as is noted in his Posthumous Works (Volume II, 1729), the first edition of 1669 was printed ‘from a very faulty Copy, even with Blanks and Omissions of half Couplets in many Places, and Interpolations of strange Lines in others, without the Name of Author, Bookseller, or Printer’ (Summers, IV, 253). In the exemplum of the edition of 1669 now in the Dyce Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum, originally inscribed by Wycherley for presentation to his Middle Temple contemporary, the young politician Anthony Henley (1650-1711), Wycherley himself has filled in most (if not quite all) of the printer's lacunae (leaving untouched those on pages 14 and 64), supplying on eleven pages a total of thirteen (generally ribald) lines, as well as a number of other verbal alterations in his own hand (see *WyW 6). This annotated volume was unknown to Summers and thus no complete text of this early poem has yet been published. Its only commentator hitherto has been McCarthy, whose interpretation of the evidence (that, for instance, the autograph additions ‘indicate that the [printer's] copy was purposely faulty, not simply unfinished’ and that ‘the printer silenced some of the more blatant lines at his own discretion’) is probably not the last word on the subject.

Lost Papers

It seems characteristic that this volume should survive because it was a presentation item. What was described in 1700 as the ‘large Manuscript of his owne Collections which he designed for the press’ was eventually used (and therefore in all likelihood subsequently destroyed) by his printer in 1704. Alexander Pope may have retained some of the poetical manuscripts that Wycherley pressed upon him to ‘improve’ between 1706 and 1710 (specifically asking him not to deface the copy but to confine his marks to the margins), but these too, as well as Pope's own revised transcripts, have disappeared. The manuscripts Wycherley left on his deathbed to his second wife, Elizabeth Jackson, evidently lie at least in part (allegedly ‘one Moiety’ of them) behind the first volume of The Posthumous Works of William Wycherley Esq., edited by Lewis Theobald (London, 1728), if not also the second volume which Pope stepped in to edit (1729). These manuscripts appear to have been deceitfully acquired by Elizabeth Jackson's former lover and subsequent husband Captain Thomas Shrimpton (see Howard P. Vincent, ‘William Wycherley's “Posthumous works”’, N&Q, 185 (3 July 1943), 12-13, and McCarthy, chapter 6). It adds but little to our knowledge of those lost papers to read the publisher's notice that the manuscripts were so much ‘interlined, and in general…very difficult to be read by any Stranger’ that they were placed ‘under the care of some Gentleman who was well acquainted with his Hand Writing’: namely, Lewis Theobald (1688-1744). (This description of Wycherley's manuscripts is not, incidentally, supported by the extant examples of his hand, which are invariably very clear and legible, although none of them constitutes working drafts).

Manuscript Circulation

There is no evidence of any contemporary circulation in manuscript of any of Wycherley's plays. One exemplum of his The Plain Dealer (London, 1700), now in the Folger Shakespeare Library (Wing W 3756), contains a contemporary manuscript cast list: see Edward Langhans, ‘New Restoration Manuscript Casts’, Theatre Notebook, 27 (1972-3), 149-57.

Although some circulation of verse may have taken place within a very exclusive coterie of court wits, no more than a very few contemporary copies of poems by Wycherley can now be recorded. One of them, a text of An Epistle to Mr. Dryden (WyW 5), is of some interest in that it can now be identified as being in the hand of Pope, as well as belonging to the diplomat Sir William Trumbull, who was something of a friend and patron to Wycherley, as well as to Dryden and Pope.

Letters

The texts (or partial texts) of some 36 letters by Wycherley are known today, of which no more than five survive in the originals. The most substantial number is the twenty-five to Wycherley's young protégé, Alexander Pope, a series not least interesting by virtue of the characteristic changes made to the text by Pope himself (as also to his own replies) when he came to publish some of them in his correspondence several years after Wycherley's death. The extent of the changes (which, as most of Wycherley's editors and biographers have noted, do not throw an especially favourable light on Pope) might not have been known but for the survival among the Portland Papers at Longleat of a contemporary transcript of twelve of the letters made prior to Pope's editing, as also the apparently chance survival of just one of Wycherley's autograph letters to Pope (*WyW 25).

Those letters by Wycherley that survive either in the originals or in manuscript copies — or at least are recorded in modern times as surviving even if their present whereabouts is unknown — are given separate entries below (WyW 10-28). That leaves seventeen letters, the texts of which (or versions thereof) survive only in early printed sources. For convenient reference, these may be listed as follows:

Documents

One or two other documents are preserved bearing Wycherley's signature (WyW 30-31), including his last will and testament, signed by him only hours before his death (*WyW 32).

Presentation Exempla of ‘Miscellany Poems’ (London, 1704)

Yet other examples of Wycherley's handwriting lie in the numerous exempla of his printed Miscellany Poems (London, 1704) that bear the author's presentation inscriptions. This publication, generally described nowadays as a ‘pretentious folio’, was the most ambitious literary project of Wycherley's later years and caused him considerable and protracted difficulties, including a lawsuit in 1700 with the original intended publisher, Samuel Briscoe. (For related documentation on this, see Howard P. Vincent, ‘William Wycherley's Miscellany Poems’, Philological Quarterly, 16 (1937), 145-8). Originally advertised for subscription at the end of November 1696, the large volume was finally published by Charles Brome, John Taylor and Benjamin Tooke in 1704, when, however, it did little to restore either Wycherley's fortunes or his reputation, being by then somewhat outdated in the relatively genteel, post-Collier climate of the early eighteenth century. Nevertheless, Wycherley proudly inscribed and presented exempla of the volume to many of his influential friends and potential patrons. Besides the volumes that he presumably presented to such notable associates as Pope, Lord Halifax and John Caryll, but which are not known today, those inscribed presentation volumes that have been recorded in more recent times are given entries below (WyW 34-49). No doubt other exemples will come to light in due course.

Only one presentation exemplum of any other book by Wycherley is known: a London 1713 reprint of his Works inscribed by Wycherley to Sir George Browne (*WyW 50).

Miscellaneous

Other documentation of biographical relevance to Wycherley, to his father Daniel Wycherley, and to his family (in the National Archives, Kew, Wem Parish records, Shropshire Archives, and elsewhere) is cited notably in McCarthy (1979), in McCarthy's article in N&Q, 216 (July 1971), pp. 34-6, and in the earlier biographies by Connely (1930) and Charles Perromat (William Wycherley: Sa vie — son oeuvre (Paris, 1921)). See also, in addition to other articles cited above, W.G. Hargest, ‘Wycherley and the Countess of Drogheda’, TLS (21 November 1929), p. 960; Eleanore Boswell, ‘Wycherley and the Countess of Drogheda’, TLS (28 November 1929), pp. 1001-2; and Graham C. G. Thomas, ‘William Wycherley in Spain: Some New Evidence’, N&Q, 243 (March 1998), 53-4.

Six folio pages of genealogical notes on the Wycherley family of Shropshire (including a reference to the young dramatist as ‘aet: 21. ann:’), dated 22 August 1663 and apparently in the hand of Gregory King, Rouge Dragon Pursuivant, were offered in Pickering's sale catalogue ‘Literary & Historical Manuscripts List 59’ (1985), item 91.

Various anecdotes of Wycherley, largely acquired from conversation with Alexander Pope, were recorded by Joseph Spence (1699-1768). Most of Spence's manuscript collections, both autograph and scribal, were sold at Sotheby's on 16 February 1938 (sale of the Clumber Library of the seventh Duke of Newcastle), lots 1308-23, and are now in the Osborn Collection at Yale. These manuscripts, with a few other sources, are the primary texts edited by James M. Osborn as Joseph Spence's Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men collected from Conversation, 2 vols, (Oxford, 1966). The observations relating to Wycherley edited in Osborn, I, 32-41 (Nos 74-97) and 321-2 (No. 791) are found at Yale (Osb MSS 4, series IV, Box 4, folder 158); Osborn MS fc 113, c 413; Osborn Shelves Spence Box 11, passim, and in the Huntington Library (HM 1271). Two further Spence manuscripts (originally comprising one collection) which came to light too late for more than a passing reference in Osborn's edition were sold at Sotheby's on 2 May 1966, lots 230 and 231 (‘The Property of the late John Hayward, Esq., C.B.E.’). One (now in the Osborn Spence papers, Box 7) is Alexander Pope's autograph biographical account of Wycherley written for Spence on two octavo pages and partly used in Spence's subsequent anecdotes (a photocopy is in the British Library, RP 16). The other (now at Harvard, fMS Eng 1246) is Spence's unfinished autograph ‘Collections relating to the Lives of The Poets’, a compendium which also includes material on Wycherley. The former manuscript, Pope's autograph ‘Acc[oun]t of Wycherley’, as well as Spence's draft entry based on this in the Harvard manuscript (f. 42r), are edited and discussed in Margaret M. Smith, ‘Alexander Pope's Notes on William Wycherley’, Yale University Library Gazette, 66 (1991), 26-32.

Further notes on Wycherley are found in several sources. Some in correspondence in 1683 between Anthony Wood (1632-95) and Ralph Sheldon are in the Bodleian (MSS Tanner 41, f. 190r; Wood F. 45, f. 301r; Wood F. 44, ff. 199r-200r) [cited in McCarthy, p. 108], as are some observations on Wycherley by Dr Cox Macro (1683-1767) written in an exemplum of Wood's Athenae Oxonienses (London, 1721), II, 975 (MS Top. Oxon. b. 6, 7) [cited in McCarthy, p. 238]. Other comments by William Oldys (1696-1761) are written in his exemplum of Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691), now in the British Library (C.28.g.1, pp. 514-15). Yet others by the Rev. Joseph Hunter (1783-1861) appear in his Chorus Vatum Anglicanorum (Volume V), also in the British Library (Add. MS 24491, ff. 224r-5r). Comments on Wycherley in the autograph manuscript of ‘Remarks & Observations on the most celebrated Authors & Artists’ by the Rev. Philip Bliss (1787-1857), antiquary and book collector, were sold at Sotheby's, 15 December 1982, lot 117, to Quaritch, and are now in the Bodleian (MS Don. e. 132).

Peter Beal