Wadham College, Oxford

MS 25

Copy of Psalms 17-150, here beginning ‘My sute is just, just Lord to my sute harke’, imperfect, lacking a title and the first sixteen Psalms. Early 17th century.

SiP 88: Sir Philip Sidney, The Psalms of David

Once owned by John, Baron Somers (1651-1716), Lord Chancellor, and by his brother-in-law Sir Joseph Jekyll (1662-1738), lawyer and politician (whose library was sold in 1759).

This MS described in Ringler, pp. 548-9.

Psalms 1-43 translated by Sidney. Psalms 44-150 translated by his sister, the Countess of Pembroke. First published complete in London, 1823, ed. S.W. Singer. Psalms 1-43, without the Countess of Pembroke's revisions, edited in Ringler, pp. 265-337. Psalms 1-150 in her revised form edited in The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, ed. J.C.A. Rathmell (New York, 1963). Psalms 44-150 also edited in The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert Countess of Pembroke (1988), Vol. II.

MS 26

Copy.

RaW 1055: Sir Walter Ralegh, The Cabinet-Council: containing the Chief Arts of Empire and Mysteries of State

A treatise beginning ‘A Commonwealth is a certain sovereign government of many families...’. First published, attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh in John Milton's preface ‘To the Reader’, as The Cabinet-Council [&c.] (London, 1658). Works (1829), VIII, 35-150.

Widely circulated in MSS as Observations Political and Civil. The various attributions include ‘T.B.’, for whom Thomas Bedingfield (early 1540s?-1613), translator of Machiavelli, is suggested in Ernest A. Strathmann, ‘A Note on the Ralegh Canon’, TLS (13 April 1956), p. 228, and in Lefranc (1968), p. 64.

MS 27

Copy, 128 folio leaves. 17th century.

CvG 47: George Cavendish, The Life of Cardinal Wolsey

Once owned by John, Baron Somers (1651-1716), Lord Chancellor; by his brother-in-law Sir Joseph Jekyll (1662-1738), lawyer and politician; and in 1738 by Richard Warner.

First published in George Cavendish, The Life of Cardinal Wolsey and Metrical Visions, ed. Samuel W. Singer, 2 vols (Chiswick, 1825). The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey by George Cavendish, ed. Richard S. Sylvester, EETS, orig. ser. 243 (London, New York and Toronto, 1959).

[unspecified shelfmark]

A printed and partly marked-up exemplum of Beaumont and Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies (London, 1647). c.1670.

Discussed in Gordon McMullan, ‘Some Late Seventeenth-Century Annotations in Wadham's Copy of the Beaumont and Fletcher First Folio’, N&Q, 233 (December 1988), 496-8.

The Spanish Curate

B&F 167.8: Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Spanish Curate

Marked up as a promptbook, with cuts and stage directions and with a cast-list in two hands. c.1670.

Beggars' Bush

B&F 1.5: Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Beggars' Bush

Marked up copiously as a promptbook, in an italic hand, with cuts and stage directions and with a cast list.

First published in Comedies and Tragedies (London, 1647). Dyce, IX, 1-104. Bullen, II, 339-453, ed. P.A. Daniel. Bowers, III (1976), 246-331, ed. Fredson Bowers.

Wit at Several Weapons

B&F 191.5: Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Wit at Several Weapons

Marked up possibly as a promptbook, with cuts and stage directions.

First published in Comedies and Tragedies (London, 1647). Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works, general editors Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford, 2007), pp. 983-1026. The play is now generally attributed to Thomas Middleton.