Bajetta Carlo Maria

A key figure in English and American history and literature, as well as the epitome of the Renaissance man in popular culture, Sir Walter Ralegh (1554-1618) has been the object of some 2000 studies to date (see e.g. Armitage 1987; Mills 1986; Bajetta 2014).  It is somewhat surprising, though, that no complete edition of his writings – notwithstanding some attempts by Pierre Lefranc, and other scholars – has been published since the Oxford Works of 1829.

The (new) Oxford Sir Walter Ralegh will be the first edition to include all of his poems, prose and letters, edited by a multidisciplinary team of scholars from different parts of the world. While moving along the path marked by similar multi-volume projects sponsored by Oxford, such as the Oxford Francis Bacon or The Oxford James Shirley, the Ralegh edition will be unique in its bringing to the foreground the materiality of Ralegh’s texts (emphasising especially their manuscript circulation) at the same time as their literary quality and their historical context.

The 1829 Works reprinted, with a minimum of editorial polishing, the 1614 text of The History of the World, but the procedure followed for most of the other texts was less straightforward. Thomas Birch’s 1751 Works of Sir Walter Ralegh, Kt., Political, Commercial, and Philosophical served as copy-text for the other prose pieces and the letters, and was collated against some unspecified manuscript sources in order to produce a ‘corrected’ text. Similarly, the poems were taken from Samuel Egerton Brydges’s Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh (1813) and compared against what were defined as ‘early manuscript copies’, most of which from the Oxford libraries (Works 1829, I, 2–4; Gibson-Bajetta 2020).

A good number of the poems and some of the prose tracts which the editors of the Works reprinted or added to their collection were, unfortunately, not by Ralegh (see Bajetta 1998 and Bajetta 2014 for details). Subsequent ‘selected’ or single works editions, however, have not yet provided readers with a corpus of texts which can replace in toto this publication. Most of Ralegh’s prose (the first Guiana tracts being a notable exception, see Lorimer 2006) still awaits convincing editing; this includes his magnum opus, the History of the World – which may be the reason why this book appears to be frequently cited, but less frequently read in its entirety, by many historians and literary critics.  One should add that, while certainly a major contribution to our understanding of the man and of his writings, Rudick 1999 and Latham-Youings 1999, are in no way, nor were they intended to be, ‘definitive’ editions (Rudick 1999, xv). The existence of recently discovered manuscript witnesses and of unrecorded variants in printed volumes, a number of minor (and, sometimes, more substantial) errors in the transcriptions, the lack of a thorough analysis of the handwriting and practices of Ralegh’s scribes (cf. e.g. Latham and Youings 1999, lvix) clearly call for substantial revisions to the texts presented in these volumes.

Even where no new texts have been located, much could be done to contextualize Ralegh’s works. Quite obviously, a large number of new elements have emerged in the course of almost two centuries of Ralegh scholarship. One should note, however, that the last forty years have witnessed a significant amount of discoveries. New backgrounds, can be identified, for example, for famous texts such as The Report of the Truth of the fight about the Iles of Acores (first published anonymously in 1591), which was reprinted in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations and inspired Tennyson’s ‘Ballad of the Fleet’. When writing his work, Ralegh was not acting as a solitary historian trying to present his version of what was, all in all, a rather disastrous event for the English navy, nor was he merely trying to rescue the memory of his kinsman Sir Richard Grenville from infamy. Rather, he was evidently given access to Privy Council documents containing reports taken from Spanish captives, and his work was quite probably sponsored by none other than Lord Burghley (cf. e.g. May 1989, 39–40). The relationships of this text and that of a similar report by Ralegh’s cousin Sir Arthur Gorges should also be thoroughly investigated, as the two men are known to have collaborated on other occasions on literary projects. Similar examples can be provided for another naval tract, that related to the Cadiz raid of 1596 (which should, be seen in the light of a ‘battle of reports’ which followed the expedition) and many other texts.

So far Ralegh scholarship has seen limited collaboration between historians and literary scholars, as witnessed by the many quotations from non-canonical poems even in recent biographies (e.g., Trevelyan 2003). Much can be achieved by means of collaborative editing – especially in terms of contextualizing and providing reliable texts with annotations which reflect the developments of recent scholarship.