Paradoxes and Problemes. 1600

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Donne’s Paradoxes and Problemes are clever and entertaining trifles, which were probably written before 1600, during the more wanton period of their author’s life. Owing to their scurrilous nature they could not be published during his lifetime, but shortly after his death the greater part of them were licensed to be printed, the Imprimatur printed at the end both of the eleven Paradoxes and of the ten Problemes being signed by Sir Henry Herbert and dated October 25, 1632. The volume was published under the title of Juvenilia in 1633, but already on November 14, 1632, an order of inquiry had been delivered at the King’s command by the Bishop of London, calling upon Sir Henry Herbert to explain before the Board of the Star Chamber his reasons ‘why hee warrented the booke of D. Duns paradoxes to be printed’. Perhaps Herbert’s explanations were regarded as satisfactory, but, however this may have been, the King was not successful in suppressing the book. The volume is a thin quarto containing only thirty-two leaves, and was printed by Elizabeth Purslowe for Henry Seyle, to be sold at the sign of the Tyger’s Head in St. Paul’s Church-yard. The printer seems to have been 
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somewhat careless in imposing the licences, for, although most copies contain the two, copies occur from which one or both have been omitted. It is not known through what channels the publisher obtained possession of the text, but it is probable that the publication was quite unauthorized, and took place even without the knowledge of the younger Donne, who, when he reprinted the Juvenilia in 1652, made no reference to any previous issue.

The Juvenilia were at once in considerable demand, and seem to have been bought by many of the purchasers of the Poems, which were also first published in quarto in 1633. This is evident from the fact that the two books are so often found together in contemporary bindings, the lesser volume usually being relegated to the end. The first edition of the Juvenilia was thus soon exhausted and a second edition was published in the same year. So ineffectual did the Star Chamber inquiry prove to have been that in this edition the publisher not only omitted the Imprimaturs altogether and so abandoned all pretence of having any official sanction for the publication, but even added to the first Probleme, ‘Why have Bastards best Fortune?’, which was particularly offensive to the Court, twenty-three lines which had not appeared in the first edition. This edition, as before a quarto and with the same imprint, but containing only twenty-four leaves, is considerably rarer than its predecessor. It is unlikely, however, that this fact is to be 
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attributed to the King’s having had any greater success than before in suppressing it. More probably the demand for it was less, so that part of the edition remained unsold and was subsequently destroyed.

In 1652 the younger Donne, in the course of his exploitation of his father’s writings, prepared an authorized edition of the Juvenilia, which was printed by Thomas Newcomb for Humphrey Moseley. The number of the Paradoxes was now increased to twelve and of the Problemes to seventeen, the offensive passages in the first Probleme being allowed to remain. To these were added two ‘Characters’, ‘An Essay of Valour’, ‘A Sheaf of Miscellany Epigrams’, a reprint of Ignatius his Conclave, and, finally, the Essays in Divinity. The Epigrams purport to have been written by the elder Donne in Latin and to have been translated into English by Jasper Mayne, D.D. They may have been printed by the younger Donne in good faith, as it seems to be certain that his father’s Epigrammata mea Latina once existed; but the epigrams attributed to him in this volume are, as Mr. Gosse has shown (Life and Letters of Donne, i. 16), certainly spurious, and may well have been composed, as well as translated, by Mayne, who was an unprincipled, though witty, divine. The Essays in Divinity had been printed in 1651 for a different publisher, but they are very rarely found as a separate volume in a contemporary binding, for the younger Donne, as he made 
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clear in his preface, sought to temper the secularity of the Juvenilia by issuing them in company with the Essays in Divinity, and in this way to invest the volume with an altogether fictitious respectability.

Even in 1652 the Paradoxes and Problemes were not printed entire. Another Probleme concerning Sir Walter Raleigh has been preserved in the Bodleian Library (Tanner MSS. 299, f. 32), the copier stating that it ‘was so bitter that his son, Jack Donne, LL.D., thought fit not to print it with the rest’. Yet another has recently been discovered in a manuscript containing Donne’s poems.

The Juvenilia have not been reprinted since 1652. In the present edition the text follows that of the second edition of 1633, amplified from the third edition of 1652 and with the additional Probleme from the Bodleian manuscript, already printed by Mr. Edmund Gosse in his Life and Letters of Donne, 1899, ii. 52. The spurious epigrams have not been included.

GEOFFREY KEYNES