Add MS 57732

JOHN WILMOT, 2ND EARL OF ROCHESTER: correspondence and papers of Henry Spencer Ashbee (d.1900) relating to Rochester's play 'Sodom'; circa 1865-1879, n.d. Partly copies, imperfect. Partly Latin, French and German. This obscene blank-verse drama, traditionally attributed wholly or in part to Rochester, is extant in two versions composed circa 1672-1673 and circa 1676-1677 respectively. Two of the eight known early manuscript texts contain an earlier three-act form of the play and the rest the later five-act version, two of these purporting to be transcribed from an octavo edition bearing an Antwerp imprint and the date 1684, of which no copy is now recorded. The present papers were used in compiling the account of the work that was published in Ashbee's Centuria Librorum Absconditorum (1879), pp. 326-341. For an annotated text of the play see Paddy Lyons (ed.), Rochester: Complete Poems and Plays, (Everyman, 1993), pp. [125]-154. For a bibliography and list of manuscripts see Peter Beal (ed.), Index of English Literary Manuscripts, Vol. II (1625-1700), Pt. 2, pp. 236-237 and 286-287. Transferred with Add. 57733 from the Ashbee Bequest in the Department of Printed Books, 10 Jan. 1914, and reserved from use until 1972.

Paper; ff. i+83. Largest size 260 x 205mm.

Contents:

1. ff. 1-25. Transcript of 'Sodom' from Hamburg University Library Cod. 115, sent to Ashbee by the German bibliophile Martin Meyer, circa 1865-1872, together with a report (ff. 29-32) on the manuscript, in German, by Meyer Isler, Secretary of the Hamburg Stadtbibliothek. The transcript is copied in a German hand on forty-nine quarto pages of wove paper paginated in Roman numerals, and is annotated throughout in pencil with Ashbee's emendations of its many small mis-renderings. Doubtful readings were underlined and marginal comments added by him in red ink. This version, allegedly copied from the 1684 edition, was printed as Rochester's Sodom, ed. by L. S. A. M. von Römer (Paris, 1904), and served as the basis for the text published in the Traveller's Companion Series, no. 48, (Paris: Olympia Press, [1957]).

2. ff. 40-83. Transcript of 'Sodom', now imperfect, entered in Ashbee's hand into two notebooks made up from paper countermarked 1865 and inscribed in pencil on the front covers (f. 40) 'Sodom 2' and (f. 65) 'Sodom 3'. The text, which comprises Acts II (here headed Act III, Scene 1) to V only of the later version, is copied on rectos and incorporates conjectural emendations and additions, with variant readings from an unspecified source added on the facing versos.

3. ff. 26-28, 33-39. Correspondence and extracts, partly in Latin and French, relating to the above and other texts.