‘Lett none our Lombard author rudely blame for's righteous paine’: An Annotated Copy of Sir William Davenant's Gondibert (1651)

Abstract

The article focuses on hostile annotations on a copy of the 1651 quarto edition of Sir William Davenant’s epic poem ‘Gondibert’, now held at the National Library of Scotland. It describes the problems of interpreting the annotations; their likely date, social context, and political stance; the secondary reading used alongside ‘Gondibert’; and their literary-critical responses to the text. The annotations can be related to the satires on ‘Gondibert’ written by the circle around Sir John Denham; one of the annotators may indeed have been Denham himself. The annotators were employing traditional humanist collaborative reading practices in a manner designed to make nonsense of Davenant’s poem, objecting to Davenant’s departures from the humanist tradition.