Thomas Carew

Autograph Manuscripts

Examples of Thomas Carew's hand are rare. Traditionally the most important is the autograph fair copy of Carew's ‘Ode on Ben Jonson’ among the State Papers (*CwT 1023). This survival, however, enables his handwriting to be identified in a more extensive scribal manuscript volume of 47 poems by Carew, now in the library of Robert Pirie. Some sixteen of these poems, in what may be called the ‘Gower MS’ (see CwT 1223.5, bear corrections, revisions and additions in Carew's own hand. As the only authorial manuscript of a collection of Carew's poems, which, among other things, identifies three poems as translations or imitations, this is a highly significant piece of textual evidence.

Otherwise Carew's hand is found notably in a small number of surviving letters by him, the majority written at the age of about 22 to his cousin by marriage, the diplomatist Sir Dudley Carleton. These are all given entries below (CwT 1292-1295), as are a few letters written by Carew as Carleton's secretary (*CwT 1291, CwT 1296-1297).

Elsewhere Carew's signature is currently found only in his youthful inscription in the Oxford subscription book, dated 10 June 1608 (*CwT 1298).

Other letters and inscriptions, as well as poems, written by Thomas Carews or Thomas Carys in this period prove to belong to other men of that name (for instance, the Thomas Carew who was Master of the Ordnance for Ireland, or Thomas Cary, gentleman of the bedchamber, who wrote the popular lyric “Farewell fair saint, may not the seas nor wind”). Neither can the manuscript copy of Carew's poem to George Sandys once owned by P.J. Dobell and described in Dunlap (pp. lxviii-lxix) as possibly autograph be accepted as such (see CwT 1111).

Contemporary Copies

Contemporary copies of Carew's poems, however, abound. Carew was evidently among the most popular poets of the 1620s-40s and his poems circulated widely in manuscript long before (and after) the posthumous edition of his Poems appeared in 1640 (a publication which, incidentally, was condemned in the 1640 Kent Petition against Episcopacy as one of the ‘lascivious, idle, and unprofitable bookes’ of the day). Dunlap records (and selectively collates) some 52 manuscripts containing poems by Carew, of which he notes that only one (the ‘Wyburd MS’: Bodleian, MS Don. b. 9) is devoted almost exclusively to his work. Dunlap concludes that none of the manuscript copies known to him is ‘authoritative’ and, but for a few additional poems, he bases his text on the edition of 1640, which was rushed through the press by Thomas Walkley immediately after Carew's death. The greater part of that edition (pp. 1-167), though probably derived from more than one source, he argues, provides a trustworthy and canonical text, albeit the poems on the remaining pages (pp. 168-206), which include compositions by other poets, were evidently derived from a variety of other less reliable sources and were added by the printer to fill out the edition.

To Dunlap's sources it is now possible to adduce many more manuscript witnesses to Carew's text. Besides the ‘Gower MS’ noted above, these include two major collections in the Rosenbach Museum & Library — one, the ‘Carey MS’: MS 1083/17, containing 85 poems by Carew; the other, MS 239/27, containing 45 poems by him (see CwT Δ 34 and CwT Δ 32 below) — which must clearly demand special attention by future editors. It may be noted that none of the manuscripts so far discovered corresponds to the collection of 65 poems which is represented only by a list of titles written at the end of the ‘Nutting MS’ at St John's College, Cambridge, MS S23 (see CwT Δ 35 below). This is discussed in Dunlap, pp. lxix-lxx.

For convenient reference, those manuscripts (besides the ‘Gower MS’) containing ten or more poems by Carew are briefly listed below, with the delta numbers originally supplied in IELM.

Various of these and other manuscripts containing poems by Carew, as well as the general dissemination of Carew's poems in manuscript, are discussed in Scott Nixon's articles ‘The Sources of Musical Settings of Thomas Carew's Poetry’, Review of English Studies, NS 49 (1998), 424-60; ‘“Aske me no more” and the Manuscript Verse Miscellany’, English literary Renaissance, 29/1 (Winter 1999), 97-130; ‘Henry Lawes's Hand in the Bridgewater Collection: New Light on Composer and Patron’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 62 (1999), 233-72; ‘The Manuscript Sources of Thomas Carew's Poetry’, English Manuscript Studies, 8 (2000), 186-224. Some aspects of manuscripts of Carew's poems are also touched on in John Kerrigan's Chatterton Lecture on Carew, in Proceedings of the British Academy, 74 (1988), 311-50.

An unlocated seventeenth-century miscellany which allegedly contains poems by Carew (as well as Corbett, Strode and others) is a 12mo compilation by Jeremie Baines (fl.1639-51) of Hampshire. This was formerly owned by the Rev. T. M. Webb of Hardwick Vicarage, Herefordshire, and is recorded in HMC, 7th report, Part I (1879), Appendix, p. 691.

There are also two extant lists of poems by Carew which seem to relate to at least two other untraced manuscripts. One is a list of the titles of 65 poems by Carew in the ‘Nutting MS’, St John's College, Cambridge, MS S. 23 (James 416), listed above. The other is a list of ‘verses lent to M^r Murhouse’, including at least three by Carew, dated 7 December 1632. This appears in a quarto miscellany associated with the Ruston family of Hayton, East Yorkshire, now in the Folger (MS X.d.580).

The Verse Canon

The verse canon accepted for present purposes is based on Dunlap, with the exception of the poem To a Friend (Dunlap, p. 130) which can confidently be assigned to William Strode (see StW 1065-1083). It is also quite likely that one of the best-known poems in the traditional Carew canon, the Song ‘Aske me no more whether doth stray’, is also by Strode, although entries for it are retained here (see CwT 722-764).

Included in a separate category (CwT 1239-89) are those poems Dunlap denotes as being of doubtful authorship, except again for certain poems which are here incorporated under other authors (and to which cross-references are given). Excluded here are those poems which Dunlap prints in his Appendix B (pp. 195-201) but positively rejects from the canon. The last two categories might be extended from manuscript sources: for instance, an epigram beginning ‘Here Brawn the quondam beggar lyes’ is headed ‘M^r Carew's Epitaph on Brawn the Irishman but Cornish Beggar’ in Durham Cathedral, Hunter MS 107 (it appears anonymously in other manuscripts). Some other poems found in miscellanies are direct parodies or satirical adaptations of Carew (see, for example, Dunlap, pp. 264-5, and CwT 729 and CwT 763 which were not originally recognised as parodies in IELM).

Dramatic Works

For documents relating to Carew's masque Coelum Britannicum, performed at Whitehall on 18 February 1633/4, see Dunlap, pp. 273 et seq., and Bentley, Jacobean & Caroline Stage, III (1956), 106-10. They include a contemporary two-page synopsis of the masque, evidently written by an eyewitness (though afterwards dated 1638), now in the British Library (Harley MS 4931, f. 28r-v). Various original designs for costumes and scenery in the masque are preserved among the collections of the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth House and are reproduced in Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols (Sotheby Parke Bernet, University of California Press, 1973), II, 566-98. A copy of a letter by the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Pembroke, to the Lord Keeper, inviting 120 gentlemen of the Inns of Court to attend the masque is in the Middle Temple Library, as also is a box of admission slips containing those of Carew.

Apart from a prologue, an epilogue, and some songs relating to royal entertainments and an untitled ‘play’ (CwT 11-14, CwT 198, CwT 305-313, CwT 436-9, CwT 594), the one dramatic work in manuscript given an entry here (CwT 1290) is a masque performed at the house of Carew's friend Sir John Croft, at Little Saxham, Suffolk, a house whose beauty Carew praised notably in his well-known poem To Saxham (Dunlap, pp. 27-9). The masque is anonymous but has been tentatively ascribed to Carew.

Miscellaneous

Letters by other members of Carew's family (most notably his father, Sir Matthew Carew) are preserved in the National Archives, Kew. Some papers by other distant branches of the Carew family can also be found in the Berkshire Record Office (D/ELI C1); at the University of Chicago (MS f261); in Phillipps manuscripts sold at Sotheby's on 14 June 1971, lots 1403-8; in the Devon Record Office, Exeter; in Dr Williams's Library (MSS 24-28); and in other archives.

For poems relating to the ‘war of the theatres’ which Carew sparked off with his poem To my worthy Friend, M. D'Avenant, Vpon his Excellent Play, The Iust Italian (Dunlap, pp. 95-6), see DaW 79.5, MsP 1, and MsP 7.

Peter Beal