The Donne Variorum Project
The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, 8 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1995- ), is a research tool designed to present (1) a newly edited critical text based on exhaustive study and collation of all known manuscript sources and significant printed editions of Donne's poetry and (2) a complete synthesis of scholarly and critical commentary from Donne's time to the present. Organized in 1981, the project produced its first two volumes in 1995 (Volume 6: The Anniversaries and the Epicedes and Obsequies; Volume 8: The Epigrams, Epithalamions, Epitaphs, Inscriptions, and Miscellaneous Poems), and its third (Volume 2: The Elegies) in October of 2000; others, as explained below, are nearing completion. Forty-four scholars from the United States, Canada, England, Japan, and South Africa currently hold or have completed formal editorial assignments in the project, and numerous others have contributed to specific parts of the work. In 1986 the project began to receive funding through the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has enjoyed excellent support from the editors' home institutions as well.
Recent Progress
New grant
In September of 2005, we began to receive support from an eighth grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This grant will provide support through August of 2008.
Holy Sonnets volume
The 713-page volume 7.1, The Holy Sonnets, was published on December 1, 2006, and is now available from Indiana University Press. The commentary was prepared by Paul A. Parrish (Volume Commentary Editor), Helen B. Brooks (Contributing Editor), Robert T. Fallon (Contributing Editor), and P. G. Stanwood (Contributing Editor). The texts were edited by Gary A. Stringer, with assistance from Dennis Flynn, Ted-Larry Pebworth, Theodore J. Sherman, and Ernest W. Sullivan, II.
Progress on other volumes
At the recent meeting of editors in Baton Rouge on February 16, the commentary editors for our volume on the Satires (Jeff Johnson, Tom Hester, Dennis Flynn, Brian Blackley, Julie Yen, and Jeanne Shami) reported that they expect to finish a draft of the commentary by September 1; Ted-Larry Pebworth, the principal textual editor, and Donald R. Dickson,assistant textual editor, also expect to be finished with the texts by this time. We thus hope to be able to put this volume together and submit it to the press in the fall of this year, and we expect publication in the spring of 2007. Further, textual work is proceeding apace on the Songs and Sonnets (we now have work-ups on 21 of 56 poems for that volume) and on the Verse Letters. The work of assembling the commentary for these volumes is also well along. We hope to submit a volume of the Songs and Sonnets to the press before the current grant expires in the summer of 2008.
The Digital Donne project
We are making progress on our previously announced plans to mount on the web some of the textual materials upon which the edition draws. The first volume to appear will be the Henry White copy of the 1633 POEMS, housed in the Cushing Memorial Library at Texas A&M University. In addition to page images and facing-page transcriptions in a modern typeface, this on-line facsimile edition will include a concordance that will not only show key words in their linguistic contexts, but also allow users to view each occurrence of a word in its original physical context in 1633. An additional feature is the identification of press variants that have turned up in the process of collating multiple copies of 1633. A protype of this electronic edition will be unveiled at the upcoming Donne Symposium at Texas A&M on April 6-7, 2006, and the web site should be available for general use shortly thereafter.
Gary A. Stringer, General Editor
3/1/2006