A New Witness to Two Early Tudor Poems

Abstract

Abstract This article offers an account of a copy of two poems preserved in the binding of Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MSS 4.3.9, a printed Sammelband containing two works published by Johannes Prael in 1531. ‘To my myshap alas I fynd’ and ‘I wyll allthow I may not’ occur in all modern editions of the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt, although their attribution to Wyatt remains doubtful. In Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MSS 4.3.9, these poems are copied into the lower endpapers, joined together by five otherwise unattested ‘bridging’ stanzas. A cancelled inscription on the lower pastedown offers some evidence for the scribe’s identity and social milieu and suggests that the textual conversation performed by the poems is an imitation rather than an example of the ‘social textuality’ witnessed in other manuscripts of Wyatt’s verse including Dublin, Trinity College, MS D.2.7, the so-called Blage Manuscript, and London, British Library, Additional MS 17492, the Devonshire Manuscript. Analysing the palaeographic and orthographic features of the hand, the article suggests a mid-Tudor copying date, and by collating variants shows that the versions of ‘To my myshap’ and ‘I wyll allthow I may not’ preserved in Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MSS 4.3.9, may be earlier than those recorded in other known witnesses. Reading the new bridging stanzas alongside other poems by Wyatt, the article shows their indebtedness to well-known tropes and phrases in the Wyatt canon and concludes that the Cambridge MSS 4.3.9 poems function as a Wyattian assemblage that performs a version of the kind of courtly identity found in coterie manuscripts of courtly verse.